I’ve read that East Asians developed slanted eyes or Epicanthic Folds as a way to adapt to snow blindness in the more snowy and colder regions of Asia, and I was wondering why Northern Europeans, specifically Germanic and Nordic people that lived in the colder regions of Northern Europe, didn’t develop the same genetic trait or at least something similar to it.
In: 973
Finer points of evolution aside, Europe has relatively mild weather and was heavily forested, so snow blindness wouldn’t really be an issue the way it would be in Mongolia. There’s also always been a lot of intermixing throughout the continent, so you wouldn’t expect to find a lot of unique traits in the north vs. south. For unique evolutionary traits to develop you need some kind of isolation from other populations. The Ural mountains and the Sahara are two of the biggest continental barriers which explains why people on either side of each look so different from one another.
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