National Geographic 4/2018: 'Sea Nomads' Are First Known Humans Genetically Adapted to Diving claims:
But a group of people called the Bajau takes free diving to the extreme, staying underwater for as long as 13 minutes at depths of around 200 feet.
I've read/heard this claim repeated many times, without substantiation.
However, Wikipedia states the static apnea record without using pure oxygen is below 12 minutes.
Can the Bajau people stay underwater for as long as 13 minutes?
I will say 'no'.
According to the study Underwater working times in two groups of traditional apnea divers in Asia: The Ama and the Bajau, Bajau divers dive for 28 seconds with an standard deviation of 9 seconds.
They have a beneficial genetic mutations which give them a larger spleen and hence more hemoglobin, allowing them to spend more time in total underwater than on the surface (so 28 seconds underwater, and only 18 seconds on the surface, repeated over the length of a full day).
Physiological and Genetic Adaptations to Diving in Sea Nomads
This article says they can spend several minutes underwater, with three minutes being filmed:
How Asia's Super Divers Evolved for a Life At Sea
There does not seem to be evidence that the sort of extreme ultra-breath-holding is something that they would even try to do, because their goal is to take things from the sea, not conserve breath at all costs in an effort to break records. By spending long periods of the day under water they can earn more money than people who are incapable of such feats, but nothing suggests that they would be doing anything other than retrieving things, bringing them to the surface, and then repeating the process, as many times as possible.
The answer is no, but I think I see where these oft-repeated 70 m deep and the related 13 minute long dive claims come from.
The Ilardo et al. 2018 Cell genetics paper makes this claim in the introduction:
They are renowned for their extraordinary abilities, diving to depths of over 70 m with nothing more than a set of weights and a pair of wooden goggles (Schagatay, 2014)
They cite Schagatay 2014 'Human breath-hold diving ability and the underlying physiology', but that study doesn't claim the Bajau dives to 70 m. They do mention the Ama dive to 20-30 m. They do discuss the Bajau in that paper along with other traditional diving foragers, but in the same paper discuss competitive freediving practices and physiology. Table 1 includes the current records for freediving disciples at the time of publishing , including:
| Discipline | Method | Record Male/Female |
|---|---|---|
| Constant weight without fins (CNF) | Vertical swimming without fins | 101/69 m |
So it appears the authors of the Cell paper took the female competitive vertical no-fins freediving record of 69 m to be a feat of the Bajau. This isn't the case for the breathhold though, as in the table the static apnea (that's face submerged but not moving, so will be longer than if the athlete is diving as well) records are 11:35/9:02
This one appears to come from a 2018 NPR article on the Cell study that quotes the lead author:
"I was told by one diver that in his youth he could dive for 13 minutes," Ilardo says. And the Bajau have been observed to go 229 feet deep.
So it is an anecdote relayed to the Cell paper author during the course of the research, of what they could do back in the day, and that article repeats the 70 m (229 ft = 69.7 m) deep claim as well.
