Why don't people from east asia have longer noses to humidify and warm the air if they evolved in Siberia?

Question

It would seem as though they would, like european peoples do. But i was thinking that it might be due to the proposition that they evolved in a snowy climate, which is why the skin is a little darker, the epicanthic eye folds for protection from the reflected light of the snow. What do you think?

Answer 1

Long noses don't serve to warm and humidify air. As an earlier person said, that occurs deep within the nasal sinuses and turbinates.

Large noses serve the dual purpose of cooling the blood and retaining moisture. Because they are hanging out in the breeze large noses are an excellent aid to cooling, and because they are invariably cooler then the core temperature large noses also allow water from the lungs to recondense befor being lost to the body.

As a result we expect to see large noses not in people from cold regions, but in people form hot and dry regions, and this is almost exactly what we do see. The only East Asian population that is noted for having large noses are the people from the Gobi desert region since that is the only large area of "warm" desert in East Asia. Of course even these people only have large noses in comparison with "Typical" East Asian populations.

Answer 2

Nose morphology was a tiny fraction of what any particular group of humans needed to survive. Other things were more important, noses are byproducts of chance variation.

Humans have known about the scarf to keep out the cold, the heat and sand since the dawn of humanity.

Human sexual and social attraction has more to do with who breeds and who doesn't. That in turn determines the traits that make it into the gene pool. It is less about physical survival traits.

One random group of people way back was influenced by a particular group of successful breeders. Maybe they were smarter, quicker or stronger or more enduring.

That is why humans are so very close in size, nutritional requirements, intelligence and physical capacities.

By the way, Asia people lived on the warm coastal areas long before they migrated into the cold tundra of Siberia.

Answer 3

The main job of warming and humidifying the air takes place deeper in; past and around the turbinates in the nasopharynx AFAICR. The comments about frostbite of the nose tip are probably correct too; a longer nose would bring disadvantages, and AFAIK few advantages, if any.

Answer 4

Because evolution takes a long time. Humans, in their present form, haven't been around long enough for any really significant physiological changes to take place.

Answer 5

Longer noses are exposed to more air and get cold faster.

Answer 6

For the same reason Inuits have small noses. The bigger it is, the more likely it is to get frozen off.

Answer 7

That's because evolution on the microgenetic mutation level is bogus. That's why