Population Heights and its Relationship with Ethnicity

[Kagemusha]

I personally think that talking about different races,like Germanic or Celtic race is pretty much thing of the past. When you look at the genetic lineages of the European peoples you hardly come by "races" consisting of people with same kind of genetic heritance. Rather then cultures based on language and certain technologies.For example populations of modern Finns are most closely related genetically to Modern Germans and Dutch, rather then their closest linguistic relatives Estonians. To classify people by racial figures sounds to me pretty 30´s thinking. I think the most accepted theory about the spreading of Proto-Indoeuropean cultures into Europe is still the Kurgan hypothesis.Also competing armenian and Anatolian hypothesis are quit intresting.Here are links to those:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_hypothesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_hypothesis

and ofcourse the classic out of the India hypothesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_India_model

[Somebody Else]

How about gravity? It's lower farther from the equator... that'll make people taller, no?

[Oleander Ardens]

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

[Orb]

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.

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.

[KARTLOS]

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.

intersting - where did you go in italy?

[econ21]

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.

[Watchman]

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.

[Orb]

intersting - where did you go in italy?

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

[KARTLOS]

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

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.

[Sarmatian]

@somebody else

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