1. Environmental stress can be described as any force or event in human or natural environment that may cause a person to experience stress. There are many different stressors that we as humans in our environment experience one of them being heat. Temperatures can rise to over 100 degrees in the summer time and cause many people stress that is physiological in nature. As humans our bodies maintain a normal state of homeostasis which is the condition of balance or stability within our biological system and is maintained by the interaction of physiological mechanisms that compensate for changes both external which would be the heat and internal. Excessive environmental heat can take its toll on a humans body and a person can exhibit symptoms of headache, nausea, dizziness, and even heat stroke which can ultimately result in death. Excessive heat disturbs the homeostasis of the body by causing excessive sweating.
2. An example of short term adaptation would be sweating which is the bodies attempt at thermo-regulation. When a person's body temperature rises secondary to external heat the body responds by sweating liquid through the pores. Sweating helps with cooling the person down and the evaporation of sweat from the skin decreases surface temperature.-A facultative adaptation is vasodilatation. Vasodilatation is the widening of blood vessels from the relaxation of the smooth muscles within the blood vessels walls. When vasodilatation occurs in response to excessive heat the capillaries closet to the skins surface dilate and allow for sweating which allows for the body to get rid of hot fluid within the body and excrete it through to the skin in an attempt to regulate temperature.
-A developmental adaptation to heat or a hot environment would be body size, amount of hair on the body or the pigmentation of the skin. People who tend to live in hotter regions tend to be taller and thinner. The lighter the person less heat will be absorbed.
-Cultural adaptations to heat that humans use. There are different types of clothing which are lighter and cooler to wear, there are fans, air conditioning, cold liquids, pools and staying indoors to prevent the body from exposure to excessive heat. Different cultures have different kind of head wears, although they are more likely to be related to cultural expression, they are also protection against the heat, for example in India people wear turbans and during the summer it gets excessively hot the turbans therefore protect the person's heat from the heat.3.Understanding how a group of people adapt to live in even unfortunate environmental stresses (as every population does so in some way) is beneficial to understand why groups of people living in the same region share many traits. Looking at this information through an Anthropological point of view, we don't group these people as races but rather a group of people who have managed to survive and adapt even in these environmental stresses and we see what biological/physical/behavioral changes they have made to do so.
4. Although we wouldn't be able to change these environmental stresses, we gain insight on how humans have strive to survive and successfully done so, without regards to what their "race" is. If we sort people by their physical adaptations to environmental stresses, then we call them a race, a collective amount of people who have adapted similarly. Again, it is better to understand the scientific explanations of these changes in humans rather than categorize these physical/biological/cultural changes by classifying them all in one race. With constant evolutionary changes in populations, we cannot pinpoint one specific race that has surpassed an environmental stress and not had to adjust their being in any way.
