I heard people were much shorter centuries ago. Is this true?
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I heard people were much shorter centuries ago. Is this true?
I'm pretty sure they were, and I have heard that improved nutrition is one of the main reason people are taller now than centuries ago, but I'm not an expert on the topic.
so, they're like, indian short?
They were like short like in back around WW2 Japanese Imperial Guard units had an entry height requirement of 155cm - and that was stricter than the humbler corps had. Having mainly rice to eat does that.
These days the younger Japanese tourists, of around my age or thereabouts (ie. mid-twenties) I see coming to the museum I work in are quite often around my height - and I'm a bit over 180cm. Heck, surprisingly many of the young women come close to my height too. The middle-aged ones, about the parents of the above, tend to be noticeably shorter.
The hike in average heights has been about as startling here in Finland within about the last century or half. Increased standards of living and by far improved nutrition levels do wonders.
The nobility and other upper castes could reach heights that are normal, or even extraordinary, for today. In the Tower of London's armory, for instance, there's a suit of armor from the 14th century for a guy that stood at least three, maybe four heads taller than I am (1.80-1.85 m). A real giant. I reckon the suit stood at some 2.3 meters height.
Well, if we assume the Philistine champion Goliath (of Old Testament fame) was similarly an unusually tall man, if not suffering from genetic gigantism...
But yeah, the upper classes were generally taller. For one thing they ate better on the whole (they might suffer from any number of vitamin deficiencies etc. like everyone else, but they didn't actually go hungry); for another their diet tended to include rather more meat, fish and similar "luxury" articles that as it happens are among the primary sources of animal protein, which as it happens is about the single most central building block the metabolism uses for height growth...
Yep. You should keep in mind, though, that on average, the nobility and other such warrior castes in societies, including our own European one, were on average smaller than we were. If you're the average Dutch height of 1.85 m, you'd probably be one of the tallest knights out there, I'd wager.
Quite likely - but then again, as it has been said the average middle-class Westerner these days lives in more luxury than a Medieval king...
Still, them contemporary records often remark on uncommonly tall people (who for some reason very commonly tend to earn the unimaginative sobriquet "the Tall"...).
People weren't that much shorter. Look at what some people eat nowadays: fastfood. The people in medieval times had a better diet.
But yes they were a bit shorter, don't expect big differences tho, it will have been like 5-10 cm, maybe 15 with a bit of luck.
I'm 1.86-1.88 (don't know for sure). When I was in London I slept in a 1.80m bed, because they considered that a normal size. When I was in Italy I could look over the heads of most of the people with ease.
People differ, even nowadays.
Take the Flores Human for example, that was a real dwarf, simply because it didn't need to be tall (it's a palaeolithic human tho). Or the Neanderthalers, they had bigger brains than us.
1.80 centimeter normal over their?
so 500 years ago it would be 1.70? (no hieght in feet?)
The average Roman was around 155 centimeters tall, IIRC. The average Celt or German would've been somewhere along the lines of 10 to 20 centimeters taller, still making them substantially smaller than the average Dutchman (which, I might add, is the tallest people in the world, so that is perhaps a bad standard to go by).
It does come down to nutrition. Whatever the bad sides of present-day diets (fastfood and the like) they are more importantly more regular and larger amounts than in the past, excepting higher classes. A regular diet is important to allow the body to recover after labour, which I might add is a less dominant part of (Western) societies nowadays which means we can get by on an amount of food which would probably have stunted growth of a person in past centuries.
Roman provinces of Germania and Raetia from the first century to the fourth century AD
Global Height Trends in Industrial and Developing Countries, 1810-1984: An Overview
The Biological Standard of Living in Europe During the Last Two Millennia
The two other links have several graphs worth checking out. In Europe it seems average male height was 168'ish cm +/- a few cm(depending on region). That went down a bit in late 18th/19th century only to go up again during 20th century. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height for current average height in various countries.
CBR
It is true that the median height of people has increased dramatically over the past couple centuries. What would be though intresting to know,how much average weight have changed, i would think that in the past people had larger average muscle mass then novadays, thanks to manual labour and constant training and campaigning for the warrior casts. I would suppose that people novadays have lot more bigger percentages of fat from their weight then our ancestors did. It would be intresting to know,if someone has actually studied that.:yes:
CBR: That's really, really interesting a read. Thanks for posting it! They were a whole lot taller than I though they'd be. But then again, since it's Switzerland/Austria/Bavaria they're talking about, we can't exactly speak of the average Roman; more like the average German under Roman rule. So... is there any info on the average height of people from Italy in the same age?
Well than it seems they didnt have that much of a hieght difference from today...awww.....
maybe if we go back even farther...
I have not been able to find any specific info on Rome/Italy. Its either numbers for Mediterranean in general or Greek. Vegetius provides us with some numbers which was 165cm as minimum for basic infantry: http://pace.cns.yorku.ca/York/york/tei/logistics?id=26Quote:
Originally Posted by Baba Ga'on
The last link(page 15 figure 3) in my previous post shows a difference of around 3-4 cm between the Mediterranean and the North/Eastern group in the first few centuries.
K COSSACK:
Going even further back there is the hunter-gatherer society which seemed to have pretty good average height and then it went downhill with the introduction of agricultureThe Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
CBR
Hunter-gatherers had a fairly varied diet with a fair bit of animal protein. They also tended to die pretty young due to the harshness of the lifestyle, and the economy could only support a very small population for a given land area.
Dunno what you have against agriculture really. Without the surplus it could generate cities would not have been possible; without cities, no high culture, and without high culture, n0 c0mpu73rz 4 j00... :yes:
Because it appears that the so called "Neolithic Revolution" was not so much of a revolution at first. At least not everywhere. People didnt switch to agriculture because it was cool but because they had hunted down all the big animals to extinction. They were forced to turn to agriculture for survival and in the beginning that meant hard work for less varied nutrition.Quote:
Originally Posted by Watchman
It seems it took quite some time before before they had developed the skills and knowledge needed to regain the loss in height. And one could argue that parts of SE Asia has only been catching up in the last few decades. Rice is nice but it doesnt produce tall people.
CBR
That was always one of the inherent paradoxes of agriculture - it could feed great numbers of people reasonably reliably, but was vulnerable to disasters causing loss of crops and tended to create population overgrowth issues, and the average individual was often startlingly poorly, if nonetheless survivably, fed (although this was often more due to someone else taxing the snot out of him...).
Still, without that developement we'd still be trapping squirrels and gathering berries in teensy-weensy family groups.
Yep. The Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese and Malay may be short, but there's lots of 'em. ~;)
Seeing the length of the soldier's bunks at Vally Forge was rather startling and that dates back only a little over 200 years.
A visit to the Battle of Bosworth museum will bring you face to face with Henry Tudor's suit of armour (IIRC) - he was TINY! I do believe the mediaeval era marked bit of a low point...
On that topic, I've noticed many if not most people examining old armours merrily fail to notice the breastplate only comes down to around your waist for certain articulation-related reasons...
A question from the unenlightened: How long where they then?Quote:
Originally Posted by Gregoshi
yeah something like that.Quote:
Originally Posted by K COSSACK
I know of Neolithic male graves which would make humans about 1.70 in that time, not that much shorter.
I think it was around mid-170cm's here too for men; about the same as today actually.
hm, i really thought there would be 5 foot tall people..........
but all along ppl were normally OUR hieght...what a load of crap i heard...
Depends on the time and place. Go back a hundred years in about any at-the-time primarily agrarian society, and that wouldn't be particularly unusual. 'S (almost) all about the diet.
all ppl eat fruites vegetables and animals.
not much difference to me...........
Yeah, well, couple'a centuries back most folks ate about no fruits or animals, and barely enough other veggies to keep the soul stuck to the body...
And that's only as long as one of the many possible disasters didn't bugger the harvest. The witness accounts of some of the uglier famines are real horror movie material, I'll tell you that.
There is one thing you need to keep in mind.
Roughly speaking there are two kinds of bread, brown and white.
Brown is healthy and what we all should be eating
White is far less good for you
In Medieval times all noblemen and higher people ate white bread because they thought it was better, while the normal men had the healthy food.
Especially outside of the cities they had more than healthy lives.
In Europe that pretty much meant rye for dark bread and wheat for the rest. AFAIK rye doesn't really even grow down around the Med, so not much they could do about it...
Although in the Early Modern period that, too, was shipped by the ton from the North to keep the urban poor from going on food riots.
AFAIK, they ate a whole lot more bland vegetables (such as potatoes) and a whole lot less meat a hundred years back in the European countryside. Van Gogh's most famous painting out of his early, "depression" phase, De Aardappeleters (the potato eaters) is all about it. Not a whole lot in a potato except starch, and if you eat 'm without anything on the side... Pair that with the occasional famine and you get the message.
Also, I don't think brown bread or rye can really compensate in a diet lacking almost completely in meat, fruit, and a relatively wide variety of vegetables. Besides, what do we eat on our bread today? Precisely. Ten to one your average peasant didn't have anything to put on his.
Potatoes were a New World import, though. One of the better ones (the bad ones included a couple of embarassing diseases...) actually, as it did somewhat improve the food envelope of the peasantry and was fairly easy to cultivate. Plus the things retain a degree of vitamins and other useful thingies even after reasonable amount of preparation.
Around here rye bread wasn't usually eaten by its lonesome. Although given that in the western parts of Finland the practice was to bake the things in batches and let them dry, which makes them damn near hard as concrete even if they keep pretty well, soaking them in some suitable liquid was pretty much a dire necessity to render them consumable again anyway... A fairly common one was the salt water fish were stored in, AFAIK.
Then again, most regions weren't as lucky as fishing possibilities went as we were.
I heard that the ancient Finns (read: Viking Age and after) put moss in their bread, but that could just as well have been an urban myth.
EDIT: Yeah, I asked my mother about it (her family is a peasant one) and they actually did eat something on their bread, at least hereabouts. It involved the fat off bacon, which was combined with syrup and then smeared on bread.
These days most use butter - that was naturally a luxury in the old days, being mostly exported. The consumption of butter on your bread was actually a sign of "good life" recently enough that in some postwar comedy movies (Sixties-Seventies actually I think) one character's general lowbrow greed and nouveau riche lifestyle is emphasized by him laying the stuff something like an inch thick...
The relatively-nutritious layer under the bark of some trees, known as pettu in Finnish, was incidentally used as a substitute for grain in bread during the leaner years. Ought to tell you something. The practice was probably more or less universal among the peasants of the Forest Belt; people obviously tend to figure these things out pretty readily.
Moss, I suspect, is rather ill suited for human consumption so I figure that story can either be dismissed as hearsay, or alternatively was disorted beyond recognition somewhere in telling.
In that case, I guess somebody mistook pettu for moss somewhere during translation. ~;)
Huh, it's on the Wiki too.
I don't really recall the specific length of the bunks Martok. I just remember the impression they left with me. I did a little searching to try and find out, but had no luck. Washington did issue orders regarding the size of the huts, but not the bunks inside.Quote:
Originally Posted by Martok
Necro for something I read in Ice Age Britain today:
Moreover, reconstructions of the rest of the body show they [Homo Sapiens Cro-Magnon] were on average taller than people today, but according to bone density measurements, probably weighed more or less the same. (N. Barton, 2005. Ice Age Britain. pp. 100)
Interesting, especially since I bet no-one of you expected this.
Can't say I did, but I'm not particularly surprised either. Weren't the Cro-Magnon a kind of early "beta copy" of what later became Homo Sapiens Sapiens or something ?
From what I understand Cro-Magnons were Homo sapiens, and humans today, as in in this very instant are Homo sapiens sapiens because somehow we are special.Quote:
Originally Posted by Watchman
taller huh, so ppl got shorter all the way to modern times??
watchman? or anybody else...
Introduction of agriculture marks the start of a rather dramatic reduction of height, then slowly increases again to stabilise a bit below the old average. It then takes another drop some time before or around the start of the industrial age only to take a big jump in 20th century. Some areas still havent reached the average height of the hunter-gatherer culture while other regions have surpassed it.Quote:
Originally Posted by K COSSACK
That pretty much sums it up.
CBR
:bow:Quote:
Originally Posted by CBR
No, we stopped that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Uesugi Kenshin
Now we simply are H. Sapiens again
Cro Magnon are so called early H. Sapiens, but they don't differ from us genetically
Sorry mate, but I'd say that's simply bull.Quote:
Introduction of agriculture marks the start of a rather dramatic reduction of height, then slowly increases again to stabilise a bit below the old average. It then takes another drop some time before or around the start of the industrial age only to take a big jump in 20th century. Some areas still havent reached the average height of the hunter-gatherer culture while other regions have surpassed it.
I can give you some mesolithic graves with small humans and neolithic with longer than those.
Reduction in height, if that happened around that time has nothing to do with agriculture. At the end of the Ice Age the average height could have dropped for the simple fact that men adapted to the new warmer climate (Cro-Magnon was long and slim, well build for survival in colder temperatures). This, in the Levant, is about the same time as the start of the Neolithic (about 1,500-2,000 years difference). The Neolithic in North-Western Europe didn't start to 6,000-5,500 BP.
And what is the average height from these eras? I already gave a link but here it is again http://homepage.mac.com/johnpell/ANT...20mistake.html. Its also mentioned on wiki about effects of disease and famine in early days of agriculture. Settlements here in Denmark also shows less varied/rich nutrition with the shift from hunter-gatherer to agriculture.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stig
But if it is indeed "simply bull" at least have the decency to provide some links with futher information to enlighten us all.
CBR
And were it "simply bull", I'd like to know the explanation to the soaring average heights in, say, Finland or Japan in the postwar period that have gone hand in hand with the improved standard of living and better and more varied nutrition levels (ie. more or less everybody getting enough to eat since infancy, and the menu not being almost entirely plant-based).
First of all calling it: The Worst Mistake In Human History is wrong to start with, and that makes sure I won't take the article too seriously. Furthermore I don't use links, I read books. If I want to write an essay for Neolithic, or Archaeozoology I'm not allowed to use the internet, hence why I know no links.Quote:
Originally Posted by CBR
And while I answer your question you can answer mine:
-Why do animals, after being domesticated, lose height?
Answer:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Anyway, for your link:
This is wrong. Adopting agriculture has nothing to do with having more or less food when looking at it like this.Quote:
One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"
Plants and animals were domesticated because this was better and easier.
What's easier, having 10 pigs around or having to hunt them.
If you hunt them they can become extinct in the area you live, if you herd them that should never happen.
Mesolithic like hunter-gatherers cannot be compared to modern farmers. We have become dependent of agriculture, the early neolithic farmers did not.Quote:
It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.
For insight into this read Zvelebil (and his model of the introduction of farming, the 3 phases)
This might be true, but I miss references and dating methods used.Quote:
Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunter-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5'9" for men, 5'5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 b.c. had reached a low of only 5'3" for men, 5' for women.
Furthermore I would like to know on how many this is based.
Furthermore calling farming a failure is plain wrong. We wouldn't have come this far as we are now without it.
And I simply miss sources he used.
What does our selective breeding of domisticated animals have to do with differences in human nutrition throughout history?Quote:
Originally Posted by Stig
And there you just answered why they eventually moved to agriculture. Large animals where hunted down to extinction. Even today we still "hunt" in the form of fishing. The need for fish is now so big we are overdoing it in some oceans, and for example cod farming is on the rise.Quote:
If you hunt them they can become extinct in the area you live, if you herd them that should never happen.
What about the sentences just before the one you quoted?
So for some its not "easier and better" to turn to agriculture. And of course the higher amount of protein in a hunters diet compared to a farmers.Quote:
It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania.
Now of course we would never have reached the stage we are at now without agriculture. But what he is pointing out is that agriculture had lots of negative effects. The answer is not as straightforward as "it was better" Yes better than die from starvation but not better than hunter-gatherers as long as there were animals enough.
I guess he could have picked another title. Certainly not something that puts me off, but each to his own. Sources would have been nice but I picked this article as it was written by Jared Diamond who can hardly be called a nobody.
edit: oh and titles/quotes/links to reviews etc of books on the subject is fine for me
CBR
Bushmen in Tanzania yes.Quote:
So for some its not "easier and better" to turn to agriculture.
However these Bushmen are not living in neolithic Europe.
Europe was very different, real game used to be:
-horse
-deer
-boar
And believe me, that's about it. In the last Ice Age, and even lasting till about 9000 BP there were plenty of good huntable animals. Reindeer for example was one of the most important types of food for a long time. And later on climate changed and men had to go and hunt smaller animals (boar, beaver or even birds). More forests came and the steppes disappeared.
Something from some of my colleges I had last year:
Concerning LBK:
Why didn't they hunt:
Concerning the first non-löss farmers (the Swifterbantculture):Quote:
No time due to farming
No need due to farming
Not enough animals through hunt in the area they lived in
They hunted and had domesticated animals. 50% of all animal bones were pig, 30% were wild animals.
Site S2 (near S4 were we found farmland this year):
about 40% of pig/boar
15% beaver
8% birds
23% fish
===================================================
And more:
Why did men started farming anyway:
Ecological reasons:
climate change (big changes in rainfall and temperature), hunting-gathering became an unsure way of living.
Social reasons:
wheats and farmanimals introduced as a form of prestige. Everyone wanted them, hence why they changed to it.
===================================================
Since you're Danish you might know something about the TRB/TBK, your first culture that did farming:
Finds from the site of Bouwlust (from what is called Teifstich TRB/TBK) (I'll split them in game and domesticated):
domesticated 10%
game 65%
unsure 25%
And this is what anyone would call farmers.
And I'm not even counting fish and birds.
The change to farming took a long long time, and for a long time people used both options, it's not like it just suddenly appeared and everyone did it.
Doesn't matter, not everyone agrees with Clive Gamble or Lewis Binford.Quote:
as it was written by Jared Diamond who can hardly be called a nobody.
In Denmark it seems it went from hunter-gatherer to farming within perhaps just 100-200 years. Before that most lived near the coast (Ertebøllekultur 5.400 - 3.900 BC) after the spread of the forests.
But how and why they changed is not interesting for this discussion. Its the effect on average human height that is. Since you were after sources I found a couple of articles that has several references.
A brief review of the archaeological evidence for Palaeolithic and Neolithic subsistence
Health Costs of the Shift from Foraging to AgricultureQuote:
However, associated with the general decrease in health associated with the adoption of agriculture, as evidenced in skeletal remains, is a significant and dramatic population increase, which is the trade-off that our ancestors made. To increase population size food production must increase beyond the carrying capacity of the environment, and domestication and control of plants and animals allow this. However, associated with this is overcrowding and the observed general decline in individual health, and we are still living with the effects of this Neolithic revolution today.
Quote:
The trends in nutrition and disease accompanying the shift from hunting and gathering to early agriculture, though neither absolute nor universal, clearly show that the health costs of this subsistence shift were significant. Levels of overall nutrition declined and the rates and severity of infection increased; due to the synergistic relationship between nutrition and disease, the trends would have exacerbated each other.
CBR
I find it hard to see why all of a sudden the nutrition would get worse:
1. You have a fixed diet
2. You have access to more meat
3. You have a fixed access to veggies
If the Neolithic men got smaller I would blame it on climate change, not on nutrition.
We came out of an Ice Age, man was tall and slim, ultimately build for Ice Ages.
In that view, is it not strange that the longer people live more north. Scandinavians, Dutchmen, people from the Baltic States tend to be longer than Italians, Spaniards and Greeks.
Agriculture is a bit of a gamble you know. When it goes well it can feed far larger populaces than other ecologies, but one cold night at the wrong point and you get a famine.
Nevermind now stuff like soil exhaustion. It's actually a fairly precarious system to base a society on, but...
Which might of sort of have something to do with the heavily by necessity vegetable-based Mediterranean cuisine and such funny little details as population density (for millenia already high around the ecologically poor Med, low in the fertile North) and what it does to nutrition levels. Classical Greek and Roman writers were aware of the difference, which was simply due to the fact the "northern barbarians" were able to add more meat to their diet by hunting in the vast tracts of wilderness.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stig
Besides, who said we were always tall ? Average height has soared here since the early 1900s, as most folks are no longer piss poor farmers desperately scraping a living out of a rather unforgiving climate.
Protein is important during childhood for final height. The big meat consumption that hunter-gatherers appears to have helped a lot.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stig
Farming doesnt seem to have produced more meat until the industrialisation. And one hectar land can feed like 6+ times more people with pure plantbased food than meat. Risks of famine and disease seems also to have been higher.
Now skeletal remains do get scarce the earlier we go back and I dont know if we have info from all parts of europe from Neolithic times. So maybe some regions didnt see a drop in height because they recieved the whole package of knowhow in one go. So far I have only found articles mentioning a drop in body stature and health with the introduction of agriculture.
I have seen some suggest that our larger intake of dairy products (protein again) might cause that extra height up here in northern Europe. But there might be some genetics involved too, no idea really.
CBR
True, however, as you said here. People never gave up hunting completely (as I also said before). Farming didn't just start and Hunting-Gathering didn't just disappear. Even tho we see TRB as farmers they hunted for a enormous amount of time.Quote:
Classical Greek and Roman writers were aware of the difference, which was simply due to the fact the "northern barbarians" were able to add more meat to their diet by hunting in the vast tracts of wilderness.
And that is why the earliest farmers (LBK) in Western Europe settled on the löss grounds, no soil exhaustion there. These grounds were used for intensive farming till the 19th century (hence why we find little of them, or atleast, we could find more).Quote:
Nevermind now stuff like soil exhaustion.
Yes, but that does not mean they starting doing that right away. In the larger cities yes. Cities started to develop in Greece and the Levant, and people in those cities got less meat and more plantbased food. However outside of those cities, and certainly in North-Western Europe this was simply not the case.Quote:
And one hectar land can feed like 6+ times more people with pure plantbased food than meat. Risks of famine and disease seems also to have been higher.
Actually, earlier in this there was already a link to something about hunter-gatherers, which the Cro-Magnon were, being a lot taller than their sedentary descendants, if a lot less numerous. But, yeah, when I read that, I was suprised ~;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Stig
The difference is however that around the densely populated Mediterranean there was for the most part too many people for the amount of unclaimed land (which was often difficult to reach anyway - one reason it was uncultivated) for hunting to play any real part in the life of people other than aristocrats (who occasionally did it for sport), and fringe rustics like mountain dwellers and other such marginal groups. Most people were busy enough scraping up a living from the for the most part distinctly uncooperative Mediterranean soil, and had neither the opportunity nor the time for such pursuits.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stig
And of course the Med for the most part had jack all for fishing, whereas the Atlantic and the numerous waterways of "transalpine" Europe yielded a decent catch of fish for human consumption.
...for the record, in the 1500s a French traveler for example observed that "an Italian feast is comparable to French or German appetizers" or something to that effect, which ought to sort of underline the disparity as the context was upper-class circles.
Small wonder the Northerners tended to be taller. More building blocks.
Oh maybe barley or legumes? Or how bout just making something and buying their wheat? You know trade…Quote:
In Europe that pretty much meant rye for dark bread and wheat for the rest. AFAIK rye doesn't really even grow down around the Med, so not much they could do about it...
[QUOTE] And of course the Med for the most part had jack all for fishing, whereas the Atlantic and the numerous waterways of "transalpine" Europe yielded a decent catch of fish for human consumption.[QUOTE]
Not really – The Med and the Black sea might be fished out now, but at least in the classical period they were quite good fisheries. Please show some evidence to the contrary.
The Black Sea I don't know about (it gets the effluent of those huge Russian and Central European rivers which probably makes it decently rich ecologically), but I've read from scrupulous enough research the Med had only very few decent fishing spots in the 1500s and far as I know that had always been the case. That inland sea is, after all, a former lowland plain flooded when the Atlantic broke through Gibraltar; by all accounts most of it is practically ecologicallly barren compared to just about any other sea. Among the things most of it lacks is the... whatwasitcalled... "continental threshold" between the coast and the "watery desert" of the actual deep sea, where much sealife (that is readily accessible and useful for humans anyway) is concentrated.
Put this way: the Atlantic fisheries for millenia netted enough prey for it to be exported far and wide, and support thriving coastal communities of hardy seamen thus never having problems finding competent crews for ships; the Med, far as I know, pretty much only ever imported seafood because it had so little of its own available, and was always short of skilled sailors and seafarers for navies both merchant and military.
The Med did import a lot of grain, from the fertile fields of "northern" Europe and the verdant plains of Ukraine. By the ton too; the landed nobility of late Medieval and Early Modern Poland and Hungary made incredible fortunes exporting the produce of their feudal plantation-estates, and the trading cities at the river mouths that acted as intermediaries got filthy rich on their middleman position as well. As an aside rye, barley and other such "dark" grains were regarded as poor man's food around the Med and only imported and relied on because it was the only way to avoid bread shortages and food riots.Quote:
Originally Posted by conon394
AFAIK the Romans conquered Gaul partly for its agricultural capacity too, and in any case were heavily reliant on grain exports from Sicily, North-Western African coast and Egypt - some of the few truly fertile grounds around the Med, and long the breadbaskets of the whole region - to feed their bigger cities.
Continental shelf is what you mean, Watchman. Huh, didn't know the Mediterranean didn't have that. Fits, though.
By the by, this "poor" picture you paint of the Mediterranean... how does that stroke with the reputation of Tunisia as a bread basket of the Roman empire? Even now a large part of that country is fertile, I've heard. Egypt is logical: that's the Nile. Tunisia, though...
Like Hell do I know the exact details of the geography involved, but I've a hunch it has something to do with it being part of the same "basin divider bottleneck" as Sicily and southern Italy, which have similarly long been noted for their fertility. My uneducated guess would be richer soil in the region due to volcanic activity - there's relatively many dead and hibernating volcanoes in that region, aren't there ? The vagaries of freshwater supplies (for irrigation) from highland regions as rivers, the bedwater base etc. might also be involved.
On another note, what's the rainfall pattern of that region ? It's sort of an open passage between the north-south ridge of the Apennines in Italy and the highlands and warm desert air mass of the Northern African interior; it wouldn't be strange if air currents moving eastwards over the Mediterranean basin (in part coming in from as far away as the Bay of Biscay through the passage between the Pyrenees and the Massif Central, responsible for the long notoriously, by Mediterranean standards at least, rough sailing in the Gulf of Lions) would partially end up "squeezing" through the Campania-Sicily-Tunisia opening, with due increase in rainfall in the region and duly better conditions for vegetation.