Best Article on Human Height Over the Years

Another one for you, man isn't living any longer either than they did years ago.

 

Lennox Lewis wouldn't stand a change against these giants , what 8 foot tall, 105 inch reach fighter did Lennox ever defeat........

 

A few years ago I saw temporary exhibit of artifacts from the 79 A.D. mount Vesuvius disaster on loan at the LA County Museum of Art, and this included plaster casts of the "fossilized" bodies. They were definitely not noticeably smaller than the living moderns attending the exhibit. Then again, Pompeii was a wealthy resort town, kind of like the Monte Carlo of the ancient world, so the residents would have been very well fed.

 

There is a suit of armor in the British royal armory that belonged to a guy who was at least 6'8". The personal armor of Henry VIII indicates that he was about 6'1" and very impressively built when he was young.

 

Not at the extremes, no, but on average we certainly are. Although it's highly misleading to say that Europeans in the Middle ages had a life expectancy of under forty. A very large part of this was due to infant mortality and childhood disease, but if you survived your childhood you had quite a good chance of making it to sixty or beyond.

 

Couple observations:

They did not define how many data points they had for Chart 1.2. I downloaded the spreadsheet and the
data points weren't there. The data points (skeletons) they did find many be very small in number which therefore skewed the data and.....

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This is incredibly important! In modern society, especially in the West, we try exceedingly hard to find medicines/treatments for every kind of illness/deformity. This means very bad medical conditions are continued for future generations; the children that have these issues are allowed to live and not left on a hillside. Proving that
Natural Selection is no longer operative. For proof, visit any 18th century cemetery....it's filled with children dying before their 5th birthday. In fact, in the Five Points section of Manhattan, in the middle 1800's the child mortality rate was 50%.

Upper Paleolithic heights greater than from 8000-4000BC can be explained by 1) lack of organized large scale military activity and 2) isolated human habitation and therefore less spread of viral diseases.

Finally...it's amazing but the average Union soldier in the Civil Was was 5'7' and weighed 160 pounds.

 

There is surviving documentation from the 2nd Century AD that noted the minimum height requirement for entry in the Roman army was 5'8". People were in Europe were very well fed in the latter stages of the Roman Empire, and the ensuing "Dark Ages" agricultural product distribution fell apart due to lack of organized order and the effects of hundreds of thousands of nomadic Germanic tribes on the move from Eastern Europe to North Africa.

 

That's what it is, the average is higher because less people die in childhood. We are not really living any longer though. Go and take a walk through a graveyard, it's surprising how old many of the deceased are from hundreds of years ago.

 

The average height in 19th century London, was lower than in many Saxon settlements.

The average height in South Korea, is a lot greater than the average height in North Korea.

Nutrition seems to be a key factor.

 

By the 2nd C AD, they were employing a lot of the larger Gauls and even larger Germanic tribes. Romans, themselves, were on the wee side.

 

That's true, but the Romans weren't on the wee side, they were just smaller than the Germans. Don't think that
the Roman army was a mess of midgets; they were well fed and decent sized, but yes, all the historical
documents describe the Germans as being taller. And hairier. And smellier.

 

In his account of the Gallic Wars, Caesar had a time convincing his legions that they could take Gauls and a much harder time convincing them they were a match for those across the Rhine given the greater size of both. I wonder what skeletal evidence says.

 

Awesome link and great article.

Never expected that sort of subject or article on a boxing forum, thanks!

 

Not Germans but a ship full of Viking remains have recently been found on an island off the coast of Lithuania. I'd assume they were ancestral Swedes since the Danes and Norwegians went west and south. Anyway, the average height of the men was 5'10"....not bad for the 10th century. Read about it in Archeology magazine.