Maurice stop putting words in my mouth...of corse people wont all end up with the same height...but have a look at historicle
hieght stats ....our ancestors no more than 100 years ago were on average much shorter.
The Height Gap
Why Europeans are getting taller and taller-and Americans aren’t.
by Burkhard Bilger April 5, 2004
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Keywords
Height;
Anthropometric History, Historians;
van Gogh, Vincent;
Stuifzand, Holland;
Drukker, J. W.;
The Netherlands (the Dutch);
Europe, Europeans
When Vincent van Gogh was thirty-on years old, in the fall of 1883, he travelle to the bleak moors of northern Holland and staye at a tavern in the village of Stuifzand. The loca countryside was hardly inhabited then—“Locu Deserta Atque ob Multos Paludes Invia,” an ol map called it: “A deserted and impenetrable plac of many swamps”—but a few farmers and forme convicts had managed to carve a living from it They dug peat, brewed illegal gin, and place poles across the marshes to navigate by. An squatter who could keep his chimney smoking fo a full year earned title to the land he cleared
There is little record of what happened to van Gogh in Stuifzand—whether he got lost in the marshes or traded sketches for shots at the bar. When I visited the village, the locals mentioned him merely to illustrate an even greater national obsession: height. At the old tavern, which is now a private home, I was shown the tiny alcove where the painter probably slept. “It looks like it would fit only a child,” J. W. Drukker, the current owner, told me. Then he and his wife, Joke (a common Dutch name, they explained, pronounced “Yoh-keh”), led me down the hall, to a sequence of pencil marks on a doorjamb. “My son, he is two metres,” Joke told me, pointing to the topmost mark, six and a half feet from the floor. “His feet”—she held her hands about eighteen inches apart—“for waterskiing.” Joke herself is six feet one, with blond tresses and shoulders like a Valkyrie. Drukker is six feet two.
The Netherlands, as any European can tell you, has become a land of giants. In a century’s time, the Dutch have gone from being among the smallest people in Europe to the largest in the world. The men now average six feet one—seven inches taller than in van Gogh’s day—and the women five feet eight. The national organization of tall people, Klub Lange Mensen, has considerable lobbying power. From Rotterdam to Eindhoven, ceilings have had to be lifted, furniture redesigned, lintels raised to keep foreheads from smacking them. Many hotels now offer twenty-centimetre bed extensions, and ambulances on occasion must keep their back doors open, to allow for patients’ legs. “We will not go through the ceiling,” the pediatrician Hans van Wieringen assured me, after summarizing national height surveys that he had coördinated. “But it is possible that we will grow another ten centimetres.”
Walking along the canals of Amsterdam and Delft, I had an odd sensation of drowning—not because the crowds were so thick but because I couldn’t lift my head above them. I’m five feet ten and a half—about an inch taller than the average in the United States—but, like most men I know, I tend to round the number up. Tall men, a series of studies has shown, benefit from a significant bias. They get married sooner, get promoted quicker, and earn higher wages. According to one recent study, the average six-foot worker earns a hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars more, over a thirty-year period, than his five-foot-five-inch counterpart—about eight hundred dollars more per inch per year. Short men are unlucky in politics (only five of forty-three Presidents have been shorter than average) and unluckier in love. A survey of some six thousand adolescents in the nineteen-sixties showed that the tallest boys were the first to get dates. The only ones more successful were those who got to choose their own clothes.
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Like many biases, this one has a certain basis in fact. Over the past thirty years, a new breed of “anthropometric historians” has tracked how populations around the world have changed in stature. Height, they’ve concluded, is a kind of biological shorthand: a composite code for all the factors that make up a society’s well-being. Height variations within a population are largely genetic, but height variations between populations are mostly environmental, anthropometric history suggests. If Joe is taller than Jack, it’s probably because his parents are taller. But if the average Norwegian is taller than the average Nigerian it’s because Norwegians live healthier lives. That’s why the United Nations now uses height to monitor nutrition in developing countries. In our height lies the tale of our birth and upbringing, of our social class, daily diet, and health-care coverage. In our height lies our history.
Ifirst heard of anthropometric history from John Komlos—the pope of the field as one of his colleagues described him. Komlos, who is a professor at th University of Munich, has the look of an Old World tailor—sharp eyes, recedin hairline, bottlebrush mustache—and the scholarly instincts of a born scavenger For twenty years, he has rummaged through archives on both sides of th Atlantic, gathering hundreds of thousands of height records in search of trend that others may have missed
In his way, Komlos was born to do such research. He stands five inches shy of six feet, and he blames much of the gap on history. His parents were Hungarian Jews who lived in Budapest during the Second World War. In 1944, when his mother was pregnant with him, the Nazis took control of the city and the Russians were poised for a counterattack. “The bombardment started almost simultaneously with my birth,” Komlos told me. (His English is perfect, aside from a few oddly flattened vowels, but he speaks with an exaggerated drawl, as if he had learned the language by watching old Westerns.) His parents managed to get to a bombed-out hospital, using fake identity papers, and to take the baby back safely to the family hideout. But there was little food, and Komlos cried incessantly. One relative told his mother to throw the baby outside, since he wasn’t going to make it anyway. |
