We have been talking about height – how tall people are, were, will
be and the like. Checking back in the biology reading I’ve done I’ve
found two opposed but interesting ideas.
Man lead a very risky life in the days of hunting/gathering and
great improvements were made with the advent of agriculture. 2.
While agriculture increase the number of people that could be fed,
the general level of nutrition went down. Even for babies…for
example, in the hunter/gatherer lifestyle the babies were nursed for
3-4 years, nursing prevented pregnancy, mother able to carry and
care for one child in the hunter/gatherer lifestyle and get that one
fully able to walk and continue on his/her own before the next one
was born.
Agriculture brought on grains that could be ground and given the
babies so mothers could stop nursing earlier and become pregnant
wiht less elapsed time between pregnancies. The grain - gruel? fed
to the first baby as a soupy mix was not as nourishing as the milk,
leaving the baby less well off than as a hunter/gatherer child.
The hunter/gatherers produced 1 child every 5 years and only half
survived to adulthood. If the entire lifespan of the female was 35
years and the first 10-15 years were pre-puberty then a female might
have 4-5 kids, half of whom survived. The population increase
would be very limited.
IF a hunter/gatherer male child were well nourished and a Cro
Magnon, he’d be 6’ tall at full growth.
According to “everything” I’ve seen or read almost all humans born
and raised in historical times and under the agricultural culture were
on the average not as tall. Up until 1950 the average height for a
man was 5’10" around 1950 the figure was updated to 5’11" . No
changes have been noted since that time and the biology people
“say” we have finally gotten our nutrition up to par with our genetic
height possibility. We’ve gone about as far as we can go.
NOTE: I have no idea how they have ever factored in third world
countries or if the numbers are for Americans in the USA.
So, what do you think? Are we as tall as we are going to be? Did
you social studies books LIE about those hunter/gatherers being
better off than the agricultural peoples when it came to nutrition?
Or would the life one lead as a settled crop grower be that much
safer, kinder, gentler that the swap was worth it?
Are you driving with your eyes open or are you using The Force? - A. Foley
It used to be thought that the Japanese were, on average, shorter than Westerners because of genetics. Now that young Japanese eat as many hamburgers as they do bowls of rice, the average Japanese teenager towers over his parents and grandparents and are, on average, about the same height as their Western counterparts.
I would tend to agree that differences in height over several generations has more to do with nutrition than it does evolution.
Let me start with a great big I don’t really know but …
I’m not certain that agriculture vs. hunter/gatherer was necessarily an either-or proposition. Surely you could catch a few fish or catch a rabbit or two while you were farming. In fact, they probably had more time back then because they didn’t have to fill out so many government forms. [rimshot]
If a group of farmers were able to supplement their diet with wild game I would think their overall diet would have been more nutritious than that of the hunter/gatherers. In addition one of the big advantages to agriculture was raising a big enough crop to last all year, which would always be a risk if you were foraging for food.
Finally, domesticating animals was another side effect of farming. Once you had livestock available then achieving a balanced, nutritious diet would be pretty straightforward.
So my guess is those who adopted agriculture would be better fed than those who stayed with the hunting-gathering lifestyle. In the long run the farmers seem to have been the most successful – most cultures, even primitive cultures, practiced some farming. The exceptions tended to live in either very lush environments or very harsh environments. In the first case there was no need to go to all the trouble to farm and in the latter there was no point.
I’m with Ursa on this one, and not just because she’s got style and panache. My kids are full-blooded Koreans. They were raised here, came to me as babies. They got Western regimens of immunizations from BIRTH, and obviously Western diets from the ages of 6 mo, and 4.5 mo.
They are both still the smallest ones in their classes. BUT- they have not hit puberty yet, and I’d wager that the difference won’t really show until they are finished growing through that period of development.
Cartooniverse
If you want to kiss the sky, you’d better learn how to kneel.
That’s funny Cartooniverse, my cousin is raising a Korean boy adopted at birth - looks 100% Korean - and he’s mid-teens and going to hit 6’ any second now. We all work hard at trying not to grin whenever we see him. My cousin is 6’11" so we make “nurture/nature” jokes when “The Kid” isn’t around.
Are you driving with your eyes open or are you using The Force? - A. Foley
Pluto, I’d have agreed with you, just as you agreed with what was in my textbooks.
But I’m switching over to the other side because of the reading I’ve been doing.
Maybe it was true in some places. We know that until recently the Europeans were “short” but how about the Indians when Columbus et al hit India? Indians were farming when the Pilgrims hit Massachusetts. How did the Pilgrims describe the natives?
Are you driving with your eyes open or are you using The Force? - A. Foley
I’m not sure which contentions you are disputing, Nick.
Are you saying that the average Japanese hasn’t gotten much larger over the last one or two generations? Do you seriously believe that their diets haven’t been radically changed from one that was mostly rice to one that includes protein and iron rich western foods like hamburgers? Do you believe that westerners are still far taller than the average Japanese? All of these assumptions would seem to be invalidated by simple observation. You don’t need to go to Japan, just watch a few old movies and some recent TV shows. I spent a couple of years waiting tables at a sushi restaurant so I’ve met quite a few Japanese people. The older ones are usually much smaller than Americans and prefer a traditional diet. The younger ones seem to average around the 5’10’ American norm and enjoy a more Western diet.
I’m sorry I can’t locate some statistics that show that young Japanese are almost as tall as westerners, but none of the charts I’ve seen specify the average by age.
If you dispute my conclusion that the change in size is due to diet, just say so and prove me wrong.
No, Urs, I don’t dispute the fact that the increase in height is due to better nutrition. I was simply wondering if it’s true the Japanese have for the most part forsaken their traditional diet for our fat-laden Western fare (hamburgers & fries, to be exact). In any event, I don’t think any serious dietician would consider that particular switchover to be advantageous, nutrition-wise. Japanese were always well-endowed (heh) with protein and iron from sources other than beef, i.e. fish and tofu and seaweed and all that other gag-a-roo stuff they eat.
I do still believe that westerners are on average taller than their Japanese counterparts, yes.