Adaptation is a genetically fixed condition of a species or subspecies or of a specific group of organism, which favours survival in a particular environment. ... On the other hand acclimatisation is a temporary biological response to environmental stress, and the response is withdrawn once the stress is removed.

1. PSHYCOLOGY OF
SPATIAL RELATIONSHIPS
AP- 230
ASSIGNMENT 2 BY – SHUBHAM RAI, B.ARCH 2ND YEAR (A)
1.

2. TOPICS COVERED
 Cultural Adaptations Due To
Environmental Stresses
 CULTURAL RESPONSE TO HOT
CLIMATE STRESS
 Example 1 – Nomads Of The Sahara
Desert
 Example 2 - Bedouin Tribe
 Example 3- The Tuaregs
 Example 4 – The Bejas
2.
 CULTURAL RESPONSE TO COLD CLIMATE
STRESS
 Example 1- Inuit
 Example 2 – Eskimos
 Example 3 – Naukan People
 CULTURAL RESPONSE TO HIGH ALTITUDES
STRESS
 Example 1 – Tibetans
 Example 2 - Sherpa People
 Example 3 – People Of Andes
 Example 4 – Ethiopians

3. CULTURAL ADAPTATIONS DUE TO
ENVIRONMENTAL STRESSES
FEW ENVIRONMENTAL STRESSES INVOLVES
 ARCTIC ZONES – Cold, Low temperatures, Low biological productivity
 HIGH ALTITUTES – Mountains, Hypoxia, High neonate mortality
 ARID LANDS – Deserts, Low Rainfall, Low biological productivity
 GRASSLANDS – Plains, Dry seasons, Cyclic drought
 HUMID TROPICS – Forests, Great diversity of species, High rainfall, Solar
radiations
THESE ENVIRONMENTAL STRESSES ARE SOLVED BY BRINGING CULTURAL
CHANGES. EG- USE OF COAT TO AVOID COLD.
3.

4. CULTURAL RESPONSE TO HOT
CLIMATE STRESS
 Heat stress refers to heat in excess of what the body can tolerate without
suffering physiological impairment. It generally occurs at temperatures above
35°C, in high humidity
4.

5. CULTURAL RESPONSE TO HOT
CLIMATE STRESS
 HOT CLIMATE – It pertains to the creation and maintenance of favourable
environmental conditions near the individual – microclimate, different from those
in general areas.
The Ideal microclimates involves
 Lowered skin temperatures
 A vapour pressure gradient favouring evaporative heat loss,
 Protection from conductive and radiation heat gain.
5.

6. Example 1 – Nomads Of The Sahara
Desert
 Nomads, which means that they live in one place for a short amount of time and
then move around in search of more productive land.
 Many of the people in the Sahara keep cattle and form little farms where they
grow as much food as they can to feed themselves and their family. This farming
is called subsistence farming. The land is very dry so it is difficult for people to
grow food, but they do manage and people have been living this way for
thousands of years.
 They constructed a system of fine nets above their houses. These nets capture
moisture when the fog from the mountains passes over the desert. They
condense (produce water droplets) on the net and these droplets drip
downwards into large containers and through drains, which feed the village.
People here can now have showers, cook food and grow crops
6.

7. Example 2 - Bedouin Tribe
 They live in desert areas in the Middle East. Their traditional lifestyle
has adapted to these extremely arid conditions.
 Their tents are built to allow air to circulate within them, keeping them
cool. Animal hair is used to insulate them, to keep the tent cool during
the day and warmer at night.
 Loose fit white and high permeability of the clothing fabrics to water
vapour offer a compromise between two functions i.e. keeping heat
out without locking water vapours. Natural fibres such as cotton and
wool are more permeable to water vapour than most synthetic fabrics.
7.

8. Example 3- The Tuaregs
 The epitome of life in the desert are the Tuaregs, who for centuries have
spent their lives riding their dromedaries along the Saharan tracks.
 Water is carried in scooped-out and sun-dried pumpkins, whose decorated
surfaces hint at the groups who produced them.
 Most tuareg men wear protective amulets that contain verses from the
koran. Tuareg men begin wearing a veil at age 25, which conceals their
entire face excluding their eyes. It is believed that men began wearing the
veil to protect their faces from the Sahara sands
8.

9. Example 4 - The Bejas
 The Bejas have always inhabited the large expanses of the Nubian
desert. Most Bejas (approximately 1.5 million overall) live in the north-
east of Sudan. They are called “Fuzzy-Wuzzies” because of their frizzy
hair
 The desert-adapted person can sweat freely but must deal with the water
loss involved; hence, he is usually thin but not tall.
 This adaptation minimizes both water needs and water loss.
 Skin pigmentation is moderate since extreme pigmentation is good
protection from the sun but allows absorption of heat, which must be lost
by sweating.
 Adaptation to night cold is also common in desert-adapted people.
9.

10. CULTURAL RESPONSE TO COLD
CLIMATE STRESS
 Cold stress occurs by driving down the skin temperature, and eventually the
internal body temperature. When the body is unable to warm itself, serious cold-
related illnesses and injuries may occur, and permanent tissue damage and death
may result.
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11. CULTURAL RESPONSE TO COLD
CLIMATE STRESS
 Human physiological responses to cold combine factors that increase heat
retention with those that enhance heat production.
 Fat layer provides an insulator layer throughout the body.
 Himalayan populations of India wear several layers of cloth to combat cold, but
extremities remain of cold stress.
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12. Example 1- Inuit
 The Inuit people live in the far northern areas of Alaska, Canada, Siberia,
and Greenland.
 The typical materials for making homes such as wood and mud are hard to
find in the frozen tundra of the Arctic. The Inuit learned to make warm
homes out of snow and ice for the winter. During the summer they would
make homes from animal skin stretched over a frame made from driftwood
or whalebones. The Inuit word for home is "igloo".
 The Inuit needed thick and warm clothing to survive the cold weather. They
used animal skins and furs to stay warm. They made shirts, pants, boots,
hats, and big jackets called anoraks from caribou and seal skin. They would
line their clothes with furs from animals like polar bears, rabbits, and foxes.
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13. Example 2 – Eskimos
 Laminar armour from hardened leather reinforced by wood and bones worn
by native Siberians and Eskimos
 To survive the cold weather the Eskimos needed to wear warm clothing.
Some of this clothing were big furry boots with tunics and trousers over
them. They wore caribou skin with stockings and parkas and other animal
skins like oxen, polar bear, and birds. In summer they wore seal skin mostly.
 They used a shelter called an igloo. An igloo is a round looking house made
of ice blocks and snow. All igloos had to have a little hole in the roof to let
the smoke from the fire get out of the igloo. Inside the igloo they had many
interesting things. For instance, they sat and slept on a platform made of
snow that was covered with animal skins. They had racks for hanging
things, and lamps hung from the ceiling for heat and light. To make the
lamps, they burned oil from blubber of seals and other sea mammals
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14. Example 3 – Naukan People
 The Naukan, also known as the Naukanski, are a Siberian Yupik people and
an indigenous people of Siberia. They live in the Chukotka Autonomous
Region of eastern Russia.
 Their food sources primarily relied on seals, whales, whale blubber, walrus,
and fish, all of which they hunted using harpoons on the ice.
 Clothing consisted of robes made of wolfskin and reindeer skin to acclimate to
the low temperatures.
 People living in colder regions drink more alcohol, drinking is known to
increase feelings of warmth because alcohol increases the flow of blood to the
skin.
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15. Example 4 - Aborigines
 Indigenous Australians are people who are descended from groups
that lived in Australia and surrounding islands before British
colonisation. They include the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
peoples of Australia
 Aborigines were observed to rely more heavily upon energy-efficient
vasomotor changes, appearing to defend body temperature primarily
by increasing peripheral tissue insulation.
 People with this genotype have a propensity to store fat, using it during
periods of famine. It is possible that protracted geographic isolation, in
combination with lifestyle and a unique envi-ronment, may have
resulted in the natural selection of those possessing a metabolically
effi cient genotype, and a less intense shivering response.
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16. CULTURAL RESPONSE TO HIGH
ALTITUDES STRESS
 Altitude stress, also known as an acute mountain sickness (AMS), is caused by
acute exposure to low oxygen level at high altitude which is defined as elevations
at or above 1,200 m and AMS commonly occurs above 2,500 m. Altitude stress
with various symptoms including insomnia can also be experienced in airplane.
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17. CULTURAL RESPONSE TO HIGH
ALTITUDES STRESS
A high altitude environment exerts multiple stresses on human which include
 Hypoxia,
 More intense solar radiation,
 Cold,
 Low Humidity,
 Wind,
 A reduced nutritional base,
 Rough terrain
Of these, hypoxia exerts greater degree of stress on physiological functions.
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18. Example 1 – Tibetans
 At high altitudes, there is less air for people to breath and more
ultraviolet radiation, two factors that make living in such places rather
difficult.
 Indigenous highlanders living in the Tibetan Plateau in Asia, have
evolved three distinctly different biological adaptations for surviving in the
oxygen-thin air found at high altitude.
 Tibetans compensate for low oxygen content much differently. They
increase their oxygen intake by taking more breaths per minute than
people who live at sea level.
 The yak is the most important domesticated animal for Tibet highlanders
in Qinghai Province of China, as the primary source of milk, meat and
fertilizer.
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19. Example 2 - Sherpa People
 Sherpa is one of the ethnic groups native to the most mountainous
regions of Nepal and the Himalayas.
 Men wear long-sleeved robes called kitycow, which fall to slightly below
the knee. Chhuba is tied at the waist with a cloth sash called kara,
creating a pouch-like space called tolung which can be used for storing
and carrying small items. Traditionally, chhuba were made from thick
home-spun wool, or a variant called lokpa made from sheepskin. Chhuba
are worn over raatuk, a blouse (traditionally made out of bure, white raw
silk), trousers called kanam, and an outer jacket called tetung. Women
traditionally wear long-sleeved floor-length dresses of thick wool called
tongkok.
 The house style depends on the lay of the land: old river terraces, former
lake beds or mountain slopes. There are stone single-story, ​1 1⁄2-story
(on a slope), and the two-story houses, with ample room for animals.
Many well-to-do families will have an annex shrine room for sacred
statues, scriptures and ritual objects. The roof is sloping and is made
from local natural materials, or imported metal. There's space in the roof
to allow for fire smoke to escape. There may be an internal or external
outhouse for making compost.
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20. Example 3 – People Of Andes
 High altitudes experience long, cold winters. The higher the altitude, the
longer and colder the winters will be and the more house heating is
required. Stone or adobe constructions are used.
 The people of the Andes maintain what John Victor Murra calls "vertical
control", in which groups of people use kinship and other arrangements
to access the resources of a range of ecological zones at different
elevations, and thus to access a variety of crops and animals. This
gives more security than dependence on a single resource.
 Hypoxia exerts greater degree of stress on physiological functions. At
high altitudes we see rather slow paced activities to avoid high oxygen
requirement.
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21. Example 4 – Ethiopians
 More than 140 million people worldwide are estimated to live at an
elevation higher than 2,500 metres (8,200 ft) above sea level, of
which 13 million are in Ethiopia.
 People of Ethiopia, have been living at these high altitudes for
generations and are protected from hypoxia as a consequence of
genetic adaptation.
 Highland Ethiopians exhibit elevated haemoglobin levels, like
Andeans and lowlander peoples at high altitudes, but do not exhibit
the Andean’s increased in oxygen-content of haemoglobin.
 The Ethiopian highlanders are immune to the extreme dangers
posed by high-altitude environment, and their pattern of adaptation
is definitely unique from that of other highland peoples.
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