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[Purushrottam]

Yeah, Zuckerberg was a bad one given the recent context. But give me a young Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or any super successful shorter than average guy... I'll pick that over a homeless 6'2 dude.

Going back to original subject of the thread, though: one the reasons I theorized for the stagnation in height in India was the prevalence of vegetarian diets. However, look at Pakistani men 100 years later! It was possibly the country with no gains in height, and they're Muslims there, with much less qualms about consuming meat - I'd also guess access to meat only became easier in the last 100 years. Pakistanis and Indians are generally very close genetically, so maybe meat consumption isn't that important to make one group significantly taller than another. Genetics and healthcare still seem play the major role.

Too bad our Indian posters aren't as active anymore, though... I'd like to ask them if Indian Muslims are generally taller than Indian Hindus.

I'm back. Historically, Afghans and Pakistanis were taller than Indians. This might have more to do with population density than meat consumptions (75% of Indians consume meat, but sparingly due to high costs.. like really meat is still too expensive for most non vegetarians).

Before modern medicine, high population density meant higher disease incidence, thus more childhood stunting. When the Europeans came to America, they noted how tall the Native Americans were (6ft, etc) while the European explorers were 5'5 - 5'7". This is also why Netherlands used to be the shortest country in Europe (high density).

Now, over the past 100 years, population densities in Afghanistan and Pakistan rose faster than they did in India. As a result the avg heights may have gone down (or not gone up as quickly).

[myloginacct]

I'm back. Historically, Afghans and Pakistanis were taller than Indians. This might have more to do with population density than meat consumptions (75% of Indians consume meat, but sparingly due to high costs.. like really meat is still too expensive for most non vegetarians).

Before modern medicine, high population density meant higher disease incidence, thus more childhood stunting. When the Europeans came to America, they noted how tall the Native Americans were (6ft, etc) while the European explorers were 5'5 - 5'7". This is also why Netherlands used to be the shortest country in Europe (high density).

Now, over the past 100 years, population densities in Afghanistan and Pakistan rose faster than they did in India. As a result the avg heights may have gone down (or not gone up as quickly).

Thinking about your population density point and correlating it to our healthcare findings: you seem to be right on the money.

Imagine: all Paleo-Americans (generally called Paleo-Indians, but it's weird to use this in a post to an actual Indian) descend from eastern Siberian populations that crossed the ice bridge in the Bering Strait, during two distinct migration waves. However, despite the shared origin, we have those anecdotes from the European settlers of North America about the taller height of some of the peoples in the north of the Americas. Yet, go further south, to the epicenter of the Aztec, Mayan and Incan/Andean civilizations, and you have some of the shortest people in the world. Those were also the places with the highest population density in the Americas, pre-European arrival. Guatemala, one of the centers of Mayan civilization, has the shortest women on the planet to this day. Bolivians, much further south, but near the ancient centers of Andean civilizations, are also very short. This is all despite the shared origin of all native Americans in the eastern Siberian populations.

 

[Purushrottam]

That's an interesting point about Mayan heights. I guess the population density thing reinforces that.

Here's the source article I was referring to:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010529071125.htm

[myloginacct]

The average adult male Plains Indian stood 172.6 centimeters tall -- about 5 feet 8 inches. The next tallest people in the world at that time were Australian men, who averaged 172 centimeters. European American men of the time averaged 171 centimeters tall, and men living in European countries were typically several centimeters shorter.

Those manlets!

Anyway. Thank you very much for the article, Puru. Very interesting.

[myloginacct]

In developing countries, children with infectious disease who experience arrested growth are concomitantly malnourished (8, 9). Nutritional deficiency increases susceptibility to infections and, conversely, episodes of infectious illness cause nutritional deficits by reducing intake, impairing nutrient metabolism and increasing energy expenditure (8, 10, 11). These mutual interactions are most likely responsible for dramatic changes in mean height that have occurred with periods of economic transition (12, 13).

From a study I'm investigating about growth stunting. Related quote to the changes in the last century.

Important note so I don't trigger any more neuroses in this forum, though:

In addition, attempts to examine the question in a population in a nutritionally abundant setting must contend with the overwhelming influence of genetic determination. Ideally, assessment of the role of childhood infection on adult height requires a means of controlling both genetic and nutritional determinants.

This is why a height plateau for genetically similar populations exist. When you control disease and proper nutrition through most of one's life, that person will reach their individual genetic height potential. So will most of the rest of the population, who are in similar conditions, both environmentally and genetically.



I wonder if the plateau has always been genetically determined since long ago, though? We were postulating that as people were better fed and better taken care of, both sxxes got taller, then married one another and produced taller offspring, granted the favorable conditions continued. Then, the cycle repeated itself and the average became even higher. And that'd be why the Dutch, for example, got so tall. But maybe even when their men were averaging 168cm, their average maximum genetic potential has always been around 180cm~184cm? Maybe the steady climb in height merely represented the steady improvement of nutrition and healthcare across all wealth groups. I don't know. I'm just proposing some questions in the hopes future researchers can get to the bottom of this. The only way to investigate this question right now would be discovering if rich, well fed, and extremely healthy Dutchmen of the past reached, on average, heights such as the ones we see today in their present population, but at a time when the majority of their country's males averaged 168cm.

However, height is indeed a highly heritable trait. This is known. So people in favorable conditions getting taller and producing even taller offspring (by marrying one another) makes sense. But then why would developed nations like Japan hit a plateau? Why would the height increase not only come to a major halt due to a biomechanical cap? The plateaus are different in different populations. The reason should be in genetics, but I wouldn't understand its logic.

[myloginacct]

I'm not good at estimating height from pictures, but I thought the easiest category of "well-fed and healthy" Dutchmen from over a century ago that I would be able to find would be that of Olympic athletes.

I managed to find this one of the 1900's Paris' Olympics. This was the Dutch shooting team (in Switzerland):



The one featured is Henrik Sillem.


More interestingly, I found some pics of the Netherland's first solo gold medalist, Maurice Peeters (1882-1957). Born in Belgium; Flemish, though - born in Antwerp, but raised at the Hague.







Definitely much shorter than the current Dutchmen.

However, in two of the pics you can see some people who look close to height of modern Dutchmen. Maybe it's just that those guys' descendants are all over 190cm nowadays, rather than a rough genetic maximum height (that doesn't change as generations improve their living standards) having always existed in homogeneous, genetically similar groups of people, and that it only incrementally increased as living standards rose because those only increased incrementally. I mean, if we could reproduce modern nutrition and health for a single Dutch individual over a century ago, his result shouldn't differ much from that of the modern average. But it seems it does.

So height seems to increase across generations of better fed, better taken care of, healthier people, but for some reason the process does not seem to keep going forever in a given population. The limit doesn't seem to be in biomechanics, either, as the Japanese stopped their upwards ascent in average height at 170~173cm. Which is much shorter than close to gigantism levels (200cm+), where biomechanical and health problems would start kicking in. Some of the most developed European countries haven't had any significant average height increase in decades too (i.e. the plateau).

[myloginacct]

Kenkichi Yoshizawa (1874-1965; d. 90yo) and Henrik Kauffmann (1888-1963; d. 74yo). Photo circa 1932.

Japanese diplomat and former foreign minister, and the Danish ambassador to the United States during WWII, respectively.

[myloginacct]

Also found out that one of Yoshizawa's descendants, Atsushi Ogata, is a modern movie director.

Son of Sadako Ogata, academic, diplomat, and former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), among other positions, and her husband, Taketora Ogata, who's the son of a former executive director of the Bank of Japan, and was the former vice-president of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper himself.














So definitely not someone who'd have had a problem with nutrition or healthcare. He looks about the modern Japanese average of 170~173cm.

There's nothing much that could be taken from this post, as he is still a few generations behind the most of the posters here, but the study I analyzed in the OP did mention "The impressive rise in height in Japan stopped in people born after the early 1960s (Figure 6)". So, I think, with ideal healthcare and nutrition, and assuming men and women won't choose to only have children, on average, with the tallest among their peers that they can 'get', average height levels should remain rather flat in developed, homogeneous, first-world nations - given a well-off, normal family. The height discrepancy among men and women didn't change in 100 years, despite the total gains in height, after all. Unless a strong sxxual selection starts happening for height in both sxxes, I think the nutritional and health gains have to hit a cap, on an average level for the population. Thus, the flattening of the rise in height.