[…] For most of human history, height remained relatively stable. Until 1800, the average height in Europe hovered between 165 cm and 170 cm, but over the past 200 years something remarkable has happened: heights, globally but particularly in Europe, have increased dramatically. Many European countries saw increases in average heights of over 15 cm, and this has been especially evident in the Netherlands – the average Dutch man has grown from 166 cm in 1810 to 184 cm today, an increase of 18 cm in just two centuries. Dutch men are currently the tallest in the world.
[…] Recent research shows that long-lasting or recurring illnesses were associated with shorter adult heights in the Netherlands in the 19th century, while shorter, one-off periods of illness may have actually been helpful for growth. This is likely because less severe illnesses boosted immunity against future infections.
The deaths of parents, particularly of mothers, have also been shown to result in shorter heights. For very young children, this would have been because they depend on their mothers for nutrition, but it was also true for older children, indicating the profound stress of losing a primary caregiver.
Curiously, although losing a mother was linked to shorter children’s heights – in the Netherlands and elsewhere – losing a father was not, potentially due to the gendered nature of parental care in this period.
I have a friend whose parents came to the US from Holland, and I believe he’s 6’6" (201cm). He said it was really strange when he went to Holland to visit family because he’s so used to being a head taller than everyone else - looking out over a crowd - but in Holland there were tons of people as tall as he.
Very interesting that the article says the current Dutch generation is shorter than their parents.
Being too tall or big streses the body, could be just natural selection moderating avg height.
Evolution (natural selection) doesn’t work that way though. That would only work if either people started only having kids with shorter people, or those stresses you’re taking about caused people to die before having kids, which I didn’t think is happening.
“Regression to the mean”, it was studied a century, or so, ago. It’s not about stress directly but the average/ natural/ non-stressful height is the most probable outcome indeed.
This was Francis Galton, a British polymath of the 19th and early 20th century, who observed that certain characteristics of parents -such as height- are not passed on completely to their children. If parents’ heights lie at the tails of the distribution in both directions, the heights of their children tend to lie closer to the mean of the distribution. Simply speaking, tall parents have kids shorter then they are, and short parents have kids taller than they are.
Galton invented what we today now as linear regression.
The article says that the Dutch children are now shorter than their parents. I was wondering whether this is simply a manifestation of the regression toward the mean, first discovered by Galton (and published in 1886)?