Get Small Or Die

This is one of my research pieces that I have up on my Academia website.

Why are Pygmies (a tiny Negroid people living in Central Africa) so small? Same reason folks living in tropical rainforests all over the world tend to be small. In that environment, it’s get small or die. Real simple. A tropical rainforest is an unusual place. It’s not 115 in the shade like the deserts of the Middle East. It’s more like 80-90 all year round. While it’s not extremely hot, it does have very high humidity – close to 100%. That creates a serious problem with cooling off. At lesser humidity, you sweat like a pig, and the lesser humidity allows the sweat to evaporate. As it evaporates, the sweat cools. That’s how you cool off. A similar cooling by evaporation mechanism is used to cool off your refrigerator.

When the humidity gets near 100%, your sweat stops evaporating. You can sweat all day and night, and it doesn’t do much good. Our body temperature of 98.6 runs the risk of rising, even past the survival point of 107-108. It’s true that Pygmies sweat a lot, but not enough to save their hides. First, the surface area of a small body is greater in relation to its volume. It is a mathematical fact: if cube A in Fig. 1.4 is 1 centimeter long each side and cube B is 2 centimeters, then A’s surface area is one-quarter that of B, but its volume is eight times smaller. Heat is produced in the mass of the body, particularly in the liver and muscles, and is lost through the surface; if the latter is larger relative to body mass because a person is small, heat loss is easier and cooling more efficient. In a warm and humid environment, it is best to be small.

Next, Pygmies expend less effort because they are smaller. If you need to use lots of energy, it’s better to be smaller, because you need to utilize less energy to keep moving if you are smaller. Marathoners tend to be short. It takes less effort to move a smaller body around than it takes to move a big body around, which is why smaller cars get better mileage than bigger ones. If you are transporting small loads, a pony is a better way to do it. You need a horse for a large load, just like you need an 18 wheeler for big hauls. The fact that a pony is better for the small stuff is why it was used in the Pony Express. They produce more energy per food unit consumed, the same way a Honda gets more energy miles per unit of food gas than a Hummer does.

Pygmies are excellent at dissipating heat and expertly adapted to living in the jungle where there is low carbohydrate and protein reserve. They’re sort of the human Priuses of the jungle. No one knows how long Pygmies have been evolving. Some say that tropical rainforests have only been around for 5,000 years or less. I disagree. Some gene studies show that Pygmies and other Africans may have split as far back as 70,000 years before present (YBP). The main problem here is a lack of fossils in the rainforest. Things decay so fast there that we hardly find the bones of anything there. However, there have been skulls found around Central African Republic and north into the Sahel. Here Negroids (modern Blacks) evolved over the past 6-12,000 years. Prior to that, Africans looked like either Khoisan types or Pygmy types.

Pygmies are very athletic and graceful. A Pygmy can shimmy up a tree 100 feet with striking agility. Pygmies are not necessarily stupid, though some IQ researchers think that their IQ’s are quite low; there has been only one study, done in 1910. Richard Lynn, a racist but generally a good researcher, feels that the Pygmy IQ may be lower even than the African Black average of 67.

Pygmy heads are about as big as ours. Nevertheless, the relationship between head size and IQ is weak. Vietnamese have some of the smallest heads on Earth, and their IQ is 99.5. Pygmies have the widest noses in the world. A small nose is only useful in cold weather. With a small nose, the air inhaled has time to heat up before it reaches the lungs. Air is already warm in the rainforest, so there is no need to heat it up with a nose filter, so a wider nose is better. The wide noses of other Africans may have a similar evolutionary explanation. Racists such as White nationalists like to attack races for being short. There are short people everywhere there are tropical forests. Examples are the peoples of southern India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Central American and Amazonian Indians. But the Pygmies are the smallest of all.

I believe that the kinky or woolly hair of Negritos and Africans is a heat adaptation. It acts as a deep and spongy later that traps sun rays before they hit the scalp, thereby protecting the head and the brain from overheating. It also lessens the need to sweat in hot climates. Dark skin protects against the sun by acting as a barrier by capturing sun rays at the skin level and not allowing them to penetrate lower where they can damage cells. It also reduces the chance of sunburns and skin cancer much later on and it prevents UV light from destroying folate in the body. However, dark skinned people can still get sun cancer.