April 04, 2004
The Height Gap: Why Europeans are getting taller and taller
This fascinating article seems to be just the tip of the ice-berg for uses of the height to understand history and health. [via A&L Daily]
The example of height as an indicator of health that I am most familiar with is the furor in Britain when it was found that many of the recruits for the Boer War and World War I were not tall or fit enough to serve in active duty, thus calling attention to the poor health of the British working classes, and its potential effect on national security (not just a recent obsession). (The best coverage of this I've read is in J.M. Winter's The Great War and the British People.) But I am amazed to read about what heights may reveal about the health of a population today that other measures don't seem to reveal. Is it true that inequality is resposible for stagnant American heights? If so, then why are even those whose parents have higher degrees also shorter on average than other developed countries? And, in a silly digression - Web height and health.
-
Interesting article. Steckel has found that Americans lose the most height to Northern Europeans in infancy and adolescence, which implicates pre- and post-natal care and teen-age eating habits.
-
Height has been rocketing up some time: one might be surprised to learn that the height of a Roman legionaire was something like 5'4" on average, while the giant Germanic tribes appear to have been around 5'8". I find it amusing to contemplate how my own 6'1" would have gone down. Given my eyesight, I could have stood in as a Cyclops...
-
But interestingly, the article suggests that heights went down again - early medieval heights may have been much higher than those around 1800 in Europe, presumably due to nutrition and health.
-
Not surprising in many ways. Even at the end of the so-called Dark Ages, things were pretty good for a lot of people. Through the Medievel period, you've got the widespread introduction of serfdom and the centralisation of land ownership, accelerated deforestation (wolves and bears being exterminated, for example), and many game species being declared the property of the aristocracy, to name a few trends that would lead to poor nutrition for most people. So you've got 11th century monks whose skeletons show signs of disorders resulting from too much protein, but the average peasant could be executed for hunting game, and works a plot that provides a bare minimum of subsistance. On top of that warfare, with associated pillage and disruption to farming age men, is extremely common, especially in the high middle ages. Society doesn't, on the whole, change much until the mercantile age of the 17th/18th centuries starts driving major changes from agrarian society to the urban one of the 19th century. Something that would be interesting would be to see if the brief upswings in living standards after the likes of the Black Death (when peasants were able to claim more wages) has noticable effects on average height. It's interesting that having come to the conclusion that the height disparities are the result of (comparatively) greater inequality in the US, the author segues into what is effect a "Yay! USA!" non-sequiter to finish the article.
-
Do you mean this bit? "As Komlos headed for the subway, I watched the crowd sweep over him until only the top of his head was visible, bobbing contentedly beneath the tide. I remembered a joke he
-
jb: I was thinking of the para or two before it, when he's using phrases like: "But, if you look at the Turks in Germany or the Algerians in France, there aren’t that many who can advance up the social ladder." He shrugged. "America is still a land of opportunity." One reason you'll see a downturn from Dark ages to Middle ages is your comment about gathering food - that's the point I was making with the loss of common hunting areas. The Medieval diet was very poor in protien except for the rich, or people in coastal areas.
-
Epigenetic inheritance may have had strange effects on the height of some Dutch people.
-
Anyone know who the biologist was that thought that humans rarely exceed 7 ft because that is the height at which a human skull will crack when dropped?
-
well hell's bells... i was not allowed any junk food at all as a child and teen. fresh fruit, no candy. nuts and cheeses instead of potato chps etc, my family was obsessed with everything being fresh, live, healthy, full of nutrients. i went along with it because it suited being a ballet student and school athelete, and later an actor & singer. yet i only managed 61 inches of height, 3 inches shorter than my own mother. right, ok, i was allergic to milk as a baby, that must have been it. i had to live on BANANAS and soy for a year. it's the goddamned bananas' fault. well, ook ook.
-
That'll be why monkeys are so short then, t r a c y. :)
-
I find this fascinating. My grandparents, the children of poor Russian Empire Jews but raised in Leeds (UK) were both around 5 feet tall, as were their brothers and sisters. My mother, and her sister were both around 5 feet also. My Dad, raised poor in NZ through the depression and the war, is five foot ten. I made it to just over five eight, my ex-wife was five seven. Our daughter is already past the 75th percentile height for children a year older. Who knows what contributed to what? I hear that in Ireland average height increased two inches in the generation after the introduction of the bicycle, which increased the pool of marriage partners from those in the next village. I can say for sure that I know a lot of Jews in this generation who are gigantic compared to their grandparents, and I'm sure nutrition and exogamy are the cause. I was well disappointed to not even make my father's height. Why did he have to marry someone a foot shorter, damnit? It's amazing how many people overestimate my height though. I attribute this to an upright posture and a confident manner. Or self-delusion :)