Population Heights and its Relationship with Ethnicity

In the famous castle of Ambras, a favorite residence there is the armour of a legendary tall man - he was over 220 cm, 7'2'' at least...

IMHO there is a strong genetic influence. Certain groups of people have had ancestors which were fed well and gained from their height, thus adapting to their environment. Add that to a good protein-rich diet and you get taller people.

A sidenote about the big Frankish Knights - it was just part of the european population at that time and got compared to all the population living in the middle east...

In any case I felt like a giant while travelling for some months in India. Note that I'm short of 190 (6'2'') so I'm not exactly small but Indians really are, expect the Sikh.

Cheers
OA

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Originally Posted by Watchman

And presumably a fairly decent and balanced diet. Turkey is one the whole a tad better off both economically and socially than most of the Arab world, isn't it ?

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We're talking medieval period here.

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Originally Posted by Oleander Ardens

In any case I felt like a giant while travelling for some months in India. Note that I'm short of 190 (6'2'') so I'm not exactly small but Indians really are, expect the Sikh.

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Reminds me of my trip to Italy in October, I was 6'0", now 6'1" and still growing. I think the tallest Italian (who was much taller than the average) I saw was 5'11". Great fun. :beam:

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Originally Posted by Ibn Munqidh

We're talking medieval period here.

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And the previous post by KARTLOS, to which I was referring, didn't. Neither was your earlier post which he was quoting. :dizzy2: Surely a quote was not required to make the connection ?

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Originally Posted by Orb

Reminds me of my trip to Italy in October, I was 6'0", now 6'1" and still growing. I think the tallest Italian (who was much taller than the average) I saw was 5'11". Great fun. :beam:

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intersting - where did you go in italy?

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Originally Posted by Ibn Munqidh

Hi,

I was wondering, how tall (average), would the typical man in the medieval age would be. How tall would a white caucasian man be, a mid-eastern man, an asian and so on. Are there any books which cover this topic? or atleast relate to it?

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bringing it back to the original question:

i dont have any specific height charts etc for how tall people were at the time, but it is my understanding from contemporary accounts that the franks were bigger than the saracens.

this would make sense based on both genetics and nutrition.

northern europeans tend to be larger and stronger than people from turkey or the middle east. This trend reflects a clear genetic influence.

from a nutritional point of view it is likely that the knights being social elites probably were well fed on a protein rich diet.

In anthropometric research, the working assumption - backed by medical organisations such as the WHO - are that body sizes don't need to be standardised for ethnicity. Given the same diets, populations of different ethnicity will tend to have similar distributions of heights. It's counter-intuitive given some racial stereotypes, but if you look into it, it's not so strange. (The US may be a good place to witness this, where you have people of many different ethnicities, often sharing similar diets.)

Historians tend to work backwards from the skeletons of different people to make inferences about their diets and indirectly, their level of prosperity. We had a thread touching on this a while back and there was some refence to European heights rising during the later middle ages, in part because the Black Death and other calamities led to more of a food surplus. How non-Europeans compared is an interesting question I don't know the answer to.

I've been kind of wondering. It's a fact the rise in postwar Finnish average heights has been gradual, with each new generation being slightly taller than their parents. I'm pretty sure the overall nutrition levels hit "wholly sufficient and stable" by early Seventies if not earlier however. Would it be possible that the overall dietary intake of the mother had an effect ? More and better building blocks for the fetus and all that (and more milk for the baby after birth as well, presumably) ? And don't women already have their full complement of egg cells for the rest of their life stored up about at birth already ?

Just wondering if there was some sort of cumulative effect.

@somebody else

I don't think that the difference is so great that there would be any visible variations in height.

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Originally Posted by KARTLOS

i dont think it is even an argument mate - the modern inhabitiants of turkey are ethnically not very turkic at all. they have benefited from heavy influx of european and eastern mediteranean genes.

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And yet they don't look very different, overall, from, say, the Turcomen of Turkmenistan, or Uzbeks for that matter; nor do these last two look similar, in any way, to the Mongolians, who live near the place where the Altaic peoples supposedly originated from.

No, you cannot argue physical characteristics based on "race" or "ethnicity", abstract terms that don't really say much about a person at all. Much better to use real biological arguments such as diet.

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Originally Posted by econ21

We had a thread touching on this a while back and there was some refence to European heights rising during the later middle ages, in part because the Black Death and other calamities led to more of a food surplus. How non-Europeans compared is an interesting question I don't know the answer to.

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Well, the Black Death hit hard all along the Mongol Silk Road, which was the very reason it reached Europe in the first place. So, following the tenents of logic, it is safe to assume that something similar happened in the Orient, though it must be said that there was a very different reaction to the Plague there than in Europe.

In Europe they tended to lynch the Jews and Gypsies first. :skull:

... while in the Orient, people tended to isolate themselves and strengthen the bonds of family, clan, and tribe. This is one of the reasons why we had men like Timur tramp their boot all over the Eastern section of your map in the 14th century.

That "eastern" medicine tended to have rather more of a clue about things than contemporary European one probably didn't hurt.

I think one could explain the fast gradual shift by assuming that our genes can assume different setups or finetunes which are linked to external factors like the food environment. If a mother gets all she wants to eat during her preg. her son might have the "food seems to be plenty" gene-stance swichted on. He and his wife have all food they want. There daughter gets born with the "food really seems to be plenty" stance switched on. She and her husband eat and eat and hungers never, so her son is born with the "food is plenty, get big to get a advantage over your big competitors" stance.

I guess that the gradual increase is likly to slow down after some time, causing hardly an increase anymore...

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Originally Posted by KARTLOS

intersting - where did you go in italy?

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Naples for a week, and then went south and spent a few days in Sicily. It was slightly weird in that the Sicilians average not too much shorter than I was and most of the Neapolitans (Only referring to native Italians, not the large number of Africans there) were six or more inches shorter (just estimates, and probably wrong).

Some very nice sites (Pompeii, the museum at Naples, the oracle nearby, the villa del Casale and a few others. Sadly, thanks to my sister's whining and time constraints, I couldn't see a lot of the great medieval architecture there.) and better pizza:balloon2:

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Originally Posted by Orb

Naples for a week, and then went south and spent a few days in Sicily. It was slightly weird in that the Sicilians average not too much shorter than I was and most of the Neapolitans (Only referring to native Italians, not the large number of Africans there) were six or more inches shorter (just estimates, and probably wrong).

Some very nice sites (Pompeii, the museum at Naples, the oracle nearby, the villa del Casale and a few others. Sadly, thanks to my sister's whining and time constraints, I couldn't see a lot of the great medieval architecture there.) and better pizza:balloon2:

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thats what i thought, southern italians do tend to be shorter

it reminds me of when i went to portugal a few years ago (to porto region specifically ) i was shocked by how short everyone was. i am 5 11 and would be prbably lower than average for my generation in the uk, but in portugal i didnt see anyone taller than me.

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Reminds me of my trip to Italy in October, I was 6'0", now 6'1" and still growing. I think the tallest Italian (who was much taller than the average) I saw was 5'11". Great fun

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You didn't meet me than. I'm in fact italian. :yes:

However my village lies in Southtyrol and is thus mostly german speaking. I'm 3/4 of the german part of the historic Tyrol and 1/4 of the italian speaking part...

I now remember a football game where my mountain village played against a village from the valley. I watched it because my cousin had birthday. Basically a match between guys with mostly german ethnicity against mixed italian-german ethnicity. Now squad was around 1,80 or 6' while the others where lower than 170. So our team looked strong - it still lost :yes:

Heigth isn't everything...

Cheers
OA

"Big man. Long fall." ~;p