2 interesting takeaways:
Yet, after years of documenting the Turkana people’s lifestyle and studying blood and urine samples to assess their health, researchers found that, although the community consumes too much purine, which should lead to gout, the condition rarely appears among the Turkana.
Second:
However, as more members of the Turkana community move to towns and cities, the same adaptations that once protected them may now increase risks of chronic lifestyle diseases, a phenomenon known as “
evolutionary mismatch”. This occurs when adaptations shaped by one environment become liabilities in another, highlighting how rapid lifestyle changes interact with deep evolutionary history.
When the researchers compared biomarkers and gene expression – the process by which information encoded in a gene is turned into a function
– in the genomes of city-dwelling Turkana people with their kin still living in the villages, they found an imbalance of gene expression that may predispose them to chronic diseases such as hypertension or obesity, which are more common in urban settings where diets, water availability and activity patterns are radically different.
I think the second point has some pertinence to Somalis.