Word: andes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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After centuries of living 2½ miles or so above sea level, says Dr. Monge, the Andean native has become "a climato-physiological variety of the human race." To cope with the low oxygen supply in the air he breathes, the typical inhabitant of the high Central Andes (including parts of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador) has developed a barrel chest with extra lung capacity. He carries about two quarts more blood than the coastal Peruvian, about half again as much hemoglobin (the blood's oxygen-carrying component). His heart rate is slow and steady. "An ideal heart...
...performance is all the more sensational when his diet is taken into account. He eats two meals a day-potatoes, corn, quinoa (all first domesticated by Andean Indians) and, very rarely, guinea pig. Andes men seldom get enough to eat; many chew coca leaves to help dull their hunger...
Puny on the Plain. Four centuries after the Spanish conquest, perhaps four out of seven million Peruvians still live in the Andes, speak the Quechua and Aymara of the Incas, play their mournful five-noted pipes of Pan and on festive occasions get falling drunk on tinka, a poisonous potion of cane alcohol, nicotine and cocaine. But the pressure for land has increased, and the ancient farming ayllus (communes) are disappearing. More & more, Andean man has hired out to haciendas or mines, or moved to coastal cities. When he descends to the Pacific, it becomes his turn to undergo...
...sleepy old town of Moyobamba, in the foothills of the Peruvian Andes, men, women & children turned out to cheer; with 17 soldiers and four civilians, Lieut. Colonel Juan Heysen was setting out to find the fabled Angayza mountain. To Peruvians familiar with the legends of Angayza, this was "Operation El Dorado...
...land of the Indian king, El Dorado, a man so fabulously rich that he daily powdered himself from head to foot with gold dust. Legend also held that the land of El Dorado lay close to Angayza and that the mountain, which rises where the spurs of the eastern Andes reach the Amazonian jungle, was solid gold. In 1541, Gonzalo Pizarro, brother of Peru's conqueror, led several thousand men on a fruitless hunt for El Dorado...