All Your Ethiopia News Here

This is an Ethiopia-friendly blog, so we take note of Ethiopia-related HBD news. Here’s Gregory Cochran:

There are three major high-altitude regions inhabited by humans: highland Ethiopia, Tibet, and the Andean altiplano. In each of these three cases, the locals have adapted in various ways to high altitude – physiological adaptations, as well as cultural. To make it even clearer, those physiological changes are, to a large extent,  a consequence of natural selection,  rather than individual acclimatization.

There are several recent papers on the genetic basis of human adaptation to high altitude-, and they clearly show that natural selection has taken a different path in each of these populations.

Dienekes’ has details on one of the papers.

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Skarphedin asks: why is Ethiopia so poor?

Ethiopia once had an impressive civilization… – far more impressive than Great Zimbabwe (a ‘pile of loose rocks’ in Steve Sailer’s words). Ethiopian civilization even produced philosophers (two, anyways). At the turn of the 19th century it was busily building itself an empire in Africa, just as Europeans were.

But now…

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If you don’t know anything about Ethiopia, you should be ashamed of yourself. Then you should go read Paul B. Henze’s Layers of Time.

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Here’s some reggae music from Ethiopia (H/T World Music). It’s not particularly representative of Ethiopian music (most Ethiopians think Rastafarians are pretty eccentric), but it’s pretty good.

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