Could the fact that America has been a melting pot of immigrants moving in from various parts of the world affected the average American height? I am from Southeast Asia, where average heights are less than European or Americans'. And my impression is more people like me have settled in America in recent years than say several decades ago, causing the average American height to go down. In which case, nutrition and healthcare may not be the (sole) cause.
I would be more interested in a 'door height' study. In lots of rural areas you have doors that are clearly built with the expectation that nobody taller than 5'6" would darken the doorway. I believe hats were more prevalent in these pre-motorcar times so there was even less height consideration made.
Doors tell their own story, big cities have been redeveloped (and bombed) whereas rural areas or places that have not got much of a look in since the early days of the industrial revolution have not.
Given that there is no theory that fully holds water on why we grow tall (I personally blame the Green Revolution), you could probably blur correlation/causation in a 'door and mattress size' study to conclude that 'if we make the doors bigger then people grow to fill them'.
This article is a fantastic example of un-science presented as narrative. Conflicting hypotheses about what causes height increase are presented as fact with no citations and little attention paid to the paradox. This reminds me of virtually every article I've read on population trends for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, gun violence ... and what frustrates me is I think the authors and editors don't realize what complete nonsense this is.
Small dogs live longer than big dogs. It's the same in all mammals. Within a species the smaller individuals tend to have a higher metabolic rate, weight adjusted, and live longer.
They may be, but you won't see them influence per country average length much, as there are no countries where the fraction of Maasai in the population is large.
Yeah, this reminds me of a somewhat chilling moment when a chinese teenager asked me what I was reading about (regression to the mean).
By way of introducing the concept, I asked "if someone is very tall, are their parents probably taller or shorter than they are?" "Shorter". So far so good.
"If someone is very short, are their parents taller or shorter?" "Shorter".
Apparently, to the current generation, no matter how short you are, your parents are shorter. Long live the CCP :/
As people get older, their height gets shorter. It's not entirely wrong to believe that your parents will be shorter than you, no matter what your height is.
This process has limits. Older chinese aren't short because they're old, they're short because of nutritional stress.
Also, shrinking isn't a linear process. You spend most of your life only shrinking a small amount; most of it happens toward the very end:
> For both sexes, height loss began at about age 30 years and accelerated with increasing age. Cumulative height loss from age 30 to 70 years averaged about 3 cm for men and 5 cm for women; by age 80 years, it increased to 5 cm for men and 8 cm for women.
It's a bit odd. Instead of just saying "Until the 1940s, average European men were shorter than today's average American girl", the author tried to spice it up with a historical reference. Surprised the editor didn't demand it be changed.
I'm seeing the usual comments about life expectancy and IQ here, so I had better respond to both issues.
First of all, and I encourage readers to follow the links for more details, today we have longer life expectancies at birth, at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages than ever before.[1] Whatever it is that we are eating these days, so far our diets aren't undermining the steady long-term trend of increasing life expectancy at ALL ages all over the developed world. An article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here’s why"[2] tells the story of the steady improvements in prevention and treatment that have reduced all-cause mortality and morbidity for Americans and for most people in the developed countries. I have been stunned to realize I now have several aunts and uncles who are past the age of 90 and still living independently and in reasonably good health. A couple years ago I was shopping for a birthday present for my own mother, now more than 80 years old, and I found multiple birthday cards for 80th and 90th birthday cards for sale at the bookstore where I was shopping. Lots of people are living a long time now.
But don't just take my anecdotes as evidence. Check what professional demographers write about the issue in peer-reviewed journal articles and say about the issue in press interviews. Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,[3] originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Vaupel is one of the leading scholars on the demography of aging and how to adjust for time trends in life expectancy. His striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."[4]
There are also comments here about human brain size and human cognitive ability. First of all, it is entirely clear that human cognitive ability as gauged by "g-loaded" IQ tests has been rising for the last century.[5] That's over a time span that doesn't include any noteworthy increase in brain size and is surely a result of environmental factors. The general trend of hominin evolution over millions of years is a general increase in brain size and a general rise in signs of intelligent behavior like skillfully made tools and visual art, but there is not a completely linear relationship between brain size found in fossils (which are a very limited sample of early hominin specimens) and signs of cultural advancement.[6] Cultural innovation can now be transmitted culturally all over the world, so that a small number of innovators can change the material resources and improve the lifestyles of most of humankind. You may not need to be smart enough to invent anything, because you are already smart enough to use most new inventions, wherever they come from.
> John Komlos, an economic historian who has studied height extensively, thinks we Americans lost our height advantage because of poorer overall healthcare and nutrition compared to Europe. Our social shortcomings, he believes, are literally making us come up short.
"lost our height advantage". These kinds of articles always seem to boil down to "why has America fallen from grace/stopped being #1?".
With an added hammer pounding for European-style healthcare, which is mentioned three or four times while considering American immigration influx from "shorter" populations is a throwaway word at the end of the article.
There certainly seems to a popular opinion/belief that tallness is inherently good; describing a person as tall seems to often be a compliment (at least for men). But I'm not sure that is the case for this article. It seems to be saying that overall tallness in a general population might indicate that the people of the population have had a good childhood, on average, with regards to nutrition and such. But, if you have two people from the same population (in this case, countries), one being tall and the other one short, their stature is probably more attributable to their genes. You can't really say that one has had a healthier upbringing; they might have had an equally healthy upbringing, but they have different genes, which is (according to them) the biggest deciding factor for adult stature. If one of them is 5% taller, how can you know, without any more information, that that 5% isn't all because of genes? In fact, maybe the shorter person has had a healthy upbringing and, so to speak, achieved his full stature potential, while the taller person has had a relatively bad childhood and not really met his tallness potential with regards to his genetic make-up.
It's taking a symptom and turning to it as a goal.
Not everything that makes you taller is healthy. Eating a lot of poultry that had been stuffed in growth hormones has been proven to increase growth. We can theoretically push growth at all means, doing things that we know are unhealthy. There's no proof that a diet that will make you the tallest will necessarily be the healthiest for you.
Talking about "stature potential" is a bit misleading too. It implies that the more height you manage to get, the better. There's absolutely no scientific evidence to this. It's true that malnourishment will impede your growth, but that's just an extreme case.
Seems like current Japan - for instance - is very healthy, has the longest life expectancy, but they are on the short side compared to Europe or North America.
I'm much taller than average and I'm quite sure that this isn't an advantage at all, except for specific tasks or sports. A lot more often it's a problem and I don't feel one bit superior to shorter people. There's a lot of bias towards "taller is better" regardless of any other consideration. It stops just short of eugenics to achieve taller people.
> Talking about "stature potential" is a bit misleading too. It implies that the more height you manage to get, the better.
You're right. I didn't intend to imply that. Just because someone has achieved their "potential", ie. have grown as tall as one might expect them to based on their genes, does not necessarily mean that it was good that they did so. Maybe they would have been better off health-wise if they grew shorter than that; what height would be optimal (or: what percentage of their """""height potential""""") would be hard to guess, I reckon.
You still seem to imply that there is a maximum height potential, and getting closer to it, is better.
This just seems to be a very inaccurate model.
All accounts point to the fact that there is a whole range of heights that you can achieve while living a perfectly healthy lifestyle and nutrition, and that you can fail to reach this range, or exceed it, by excess or defect of some elements in your lifestyle and nutrition. You can even stay within this range while being unhealthy because height is by no means a perfect or even a good measure of health. It's a very loose measure only in rather extreme situations, and a decent measure for whole populations under some circumstances. It is a proven fact that you can unhealthily push someone's growth during childhood.
Completeness of nutrition is mostly a non-factor across the Western World when it comes to height. Exercise is a bigger factor as many kids slow down their metabolism by lack of exercise. Migration of Mexicans and Asians into the US is a bigger factor too. These people are healthy, they are just typically shorter. There is no problem at all with that in itself.
Albert Einstein was average Ashkenazi jewish at 5 ft 8~9. Nikola Tesla was your typical tall Balkan man (some accounts measured him at up to 6 ft 6). Does it matter? Should we be trying to push up the height of the jewish by eugenics? The whole "worry" is silly.
Malnourishment also leads to lower weight. Do we try to maximise weight? no, right? because we realise it's stupid and it's quite evident that excess of weight is not good, and it doesn't even look good in most cultures currently. In fact there's a cultural trend about being unnaturally "lean". People need to immediately stop mixing up their personal aesthetic preferences, however common, with real issues like science and health.
> You still seem to imply that there is a maximum height potential, and getting closer to it, is better.
Oh please. I spent that entire post explaining that that is not my intention. The problem is probably my use of the word "potential", which has positive connotations, generally. I intend it to mean just possibility. Clearly, there are a lot of cases where this potential can manifest themselves as opposite extremes, and where there is no clear objective goodness of falling on either end of the extremes. In other cases, it may be totally subjective. In other cases, yet, it may not matter. I think, given extreme circumstances, people in general have the potential in them for great evil. But clearly, that is not good or desirable. I should have clarified from the beginning my use of the word desirable. But it is you who chose to cling to it (if I'm right in that being the problematic word).
Stop projecting the issues# you have with the tallness-worship of our/some cultures onto me!
#by which I mean protests, intellectual arguments against the practice, etc. I don't mean to imply that you have some emotional issue with this kind of thing. See? I ran out of accurate words so I had to resort to a word with too much semantic baggage.
> I don't think you have read my post completely. I didn't imply anything from the usage of the word potential.
I meant my use of that word. I edited my post to make that clear. Or maybe you mean that you mentioning the my use of the word "potential" had no such interpretation (positive) of the "potential", in which case... my head hurts now.
> You still seem to miss the fact that someone can be taller as the direct result of unhealthy elements. Even illness.
By what criteria have I missed this fact? By not mentioning it, or by trying to contradict it? I said, and I quote myself since you don't seem to trust me: "Just because someone has achieved their "potential" [...], does not necessarily mean that it was good that they did so.". In that context, "bad" meant that the tallness was due to some unhealthy habits, since we were on the topic of nutrition and health and so on. Or that them being that tall was not good for them in their adult life, or both.
I am used to people assuming dishonesty in online debates. But not when I agree with them to begin with. If what you intend to do is to find some wording that betrays a (subconscious) bias towards tall people, please give it a rest and find someone else to take it out on.
Yeah, I dislike comments like the parent comment. The statement is clearly based on his/her own intuitive understanding based on anecdotal experience; something that can be useful in forming-opinions/developing-understanding , but shouldn't be asserted as fact.
It's particularly annoying because a statement like that isn't easily refuted; I mean, after all, a child who literally doesn't move at all has no physical activity and therefore doesn't grow(dies pretty quick actually), whereas a child who exercises regularly does grow, so the MUST be a correlation between exercise and height right? Ultimately, yes, there obviously is _some_ correlation, how much of a correlation and exactly how exercise reflects on a humans development are left unanswered though.
We still haven't reached the average height we were 40000 years ago[1]. Agriculture allowed us to feed many more people, but it came at a terrible price on human health.
And the fact that the article says we are taller now than we have ever been in history, which is patently not true, casts a serious level of doubt on the article.
It was because agriculture contributed so mightily to human health and well-being that we survived and flourished to cover the surface of the earth and travel into space.
Even if some of our ancestors were bigger, it doesn't mean that they were "more healthy".
Cultures didn't flourish because they were in good health. They likely flourished because agriculture supported a lot of people within that culture, which let them dominate other cultures.
"doesn't make sense" is not a good way to evaluate statements if you don't have knowledge in the domain
I have a great deal of knowledge in the domain of the English language. "Health" can mean a lot of different things. Support of the survival and dominance of a species is a great indicator that the diet is "healthy".
flourished because agriculture supported a lot of people
All you have to do is to refer to modern organizations like the WHO to know that supporting life for a lot of people is a great deal of the meaning of "health".
This is not about some value-laden speculation whether the humankind "should" have stayed hunter-gatherers or not (as if that sort of a question makes any sense whatsoever). It's about a simple question of facts: Were individual subsistence farmers on average less healthful than hunter-gatherers? The evidence seems to indicate that yes, they were.
I read the above-linked article. I saw a lot of assumption based upon weak links and correlation with assumed causation.
For example, height decreased post agriculture. Did that mean that agriculture didn't allow people to grow as tall, or did agriculture decrease selective pressure on being big?
Anthropology is not as rigorous as math, physics, chemistry, or even economics. Anyone talking condescendingly about things that are "well accepted within anthropology" from 10k or 100k years ago are way overselling the discipline.
> We still haven't reached the average height we were 40000 years ago[1]
Yes we do, there are a number of countries where the average height is close to 183 cm (average in your article, though there are no citations given for that fact): The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Serbia, ... In the Dinaric Alps, it even reach 186 cm, so in fact we ARE taller today[1].
But another article[2] with actual sources point to an 176.2 cm average, much smaller than today.
Comparing a world wide average with a relatively tiny sub population is hardly reasonable. Otherwise we could just look at the average height of NBA players and say that's a reasonable proxy for the US average height.
Edit: Perhaps if you wanted to compare the average for all of Europe to estimates of European Early Modern Humans that might be reasonable, however that's not what you did.
"The term "Cro-Magnon" soon came to be used in a general sense to describe the oldest modern people in Europe. ... However, analyses based on more current data[8] concerning the migrations of early humans have contributed to a refined definition of this expression. Current scientific literature prefers the term "European Early Modern Humans" (or EEMH), instead of "Cro-Magnon". The oldest definitely dated EEMH specimen is the Grotta del Cavallo tooth dated in 2011 to at least 43,000 years old."
Note: "the term 'Cro-Magnon,' which has no formal taxonomic status" current evidence suggests they where effectively genetically identical to modern humans. Their diet was simply better leading to larger growth vs any significant DNA differences.
The article is mostly based on a work by "Tim Hatton, an economist at the University of Essex in the U.K.". That the author took license calling a moment in man's history 'most of human history' doesn't imply the rest of the article isn't worth anything. Also, I don't know living longer, or living without hunger is that terrible of a price to pay. More souls, after all.
>"We are now generally shorter, lighter and smaller boned than our ancestors were 100,000 years ago. The decrease has been gradual but has been most noticeable in the last 10,000 years. However, there has been some slight reversal to this trend in the last few centuries as the average height has started to increase."
Interesting, thanks for sharing.
Another very interesting fact - brain gets smaller in volume and unlike height, this trend is still not reversed (not sure about weight, though).
Early 20th century was also 30 years. Ancient Rome was 20-30.
These expectancies were low chiefly because of high infant mortality. A life expectancy of "two days" really drags down your average.
Average life expectancy is not a good measure for everyday arguments. Paleolithic average life expectancy was actually quite high relative to the historical periods that followed.
According to your article, the size of our brains has also decreased over the years. I would assume that this would also decrease our processing power and overall brain function. Interesting.
