Ah, but you can dress warmly enough to shut out the extreme cold. Not so with heat, when you're a primitive people.
The Arctic peoples mastered the technology of protecting themselves from their environment thousands of years ago. I don't think the Arab peoples' technology was nearly as effective in protecting them from the extreme heat of their environment.
Peoples - not just Arabs - have been living along the Sahara and in hot desert climates foe eons. Certainly the hotter regions are, and have been, more densely populated than the colder regions. I’m not sure how you are classifying “primitive people,” but desert and hot-climate dwellers have also used clothing to modify body temperature and conserve fluids from time immemorial. (That’s what all those robes are about.)
Humans have been remarkably resourceful in adapting to harsh environments all over the globe for tens of thousands of years. While it’s true that human agricultural communities leave more fixed habitations and artifacts, nomadic human communities have also flourished over the same time periods.
The Sahara and the Sahel have seen major civilizations ever since the Neolithic period. For instance, the people of Phoenicia, who flourished between 1200-800 BC, created a confederation of kingdoms across the entire Sahara to Egypt. Reading about the ancient civilizations of these regions should be of tremendous interest to any of the GGG subscribers.
Your original statement was this:
“My theory is that the people of the Middle East have had their brains baked to death for so many centuries, that it’s permanently damaged their DNA. ...I just think that humans . Exposure to that sort of extreme temperature over millenia has simply got to damage the gene pool in some way.... Humans just have not thrived in those desert areas. “
A theory is only as good as the evidence to support it. Perhaps you could reexamine or modify your theory in the light of archaeological facts. Humans actually *have* thrived in these areas. What you may call the “damaging of DNA” would be called “survival of the fittest for the environment” - if such genetic changes due to temperature are indeed fact. (Is there any scientific evidence for temperature “altering” DNA in living humans?)
My original response was that if humans “weren’t designed to withstand 130 summers indefinitely,” then neither are they “designed” to withstand temperatures below the freezing point of water indefinitely. Yet they manage to live in both environments. It is a testimony to the surprising endurance and pertinacity of the human.