Modern man is a giant compared to the Neolithic one

reply to post by schuyler


I see your point that royalty may not have been eating healthier than the peasants. Thanks for that information. Still, all produce has declined in nutritional content in the last century. That's a result of topsoil depletion due to over-farming land with monocultures over time. If the peasants had access to vegetables and brown rice, why would they be growing in recent years compared to then?

As for the lifespan, it's a fallacy to state it's nearly doubled. That's a simple trick of statistics. If you control for infant mortality rate differences, the gap is greatly decreased.

The average man who lived to 60 in 1920 had a life expectancy of 16 additional years. Today, the average person at 60 has a life expectancy of 20 years. That's 4 additional years.

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I have no problem thinking diet influences many aspects of health, including height. I just don't see it increasing height in the last 30 years as has happened all acrooss the world. I see people eating more empty calories, gaining girth, and clogged arteries, not height due to diet.

reply to post by webedoomed


my thoughts exactly kids are still eating chips and pizza just like we did back then in 20 years they have gone up 6-7 inches in hight i am 6'2 and feel normal when the kids are about but not back then and as someone pointed out 100 years ago or more doors were 5'0 it makesme think are people like fish and grow to the size of the inviroment or soomething but is the earth growing as well now that is a interesting youtube video ifonly i could link it

Inorganic fertilisers! The introduction of artificial fertilisers happened right at the time when people started growing taller, and meant that vast amounts of nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus were pushed into the food chain. All cells need phosphorus in order to replicate and stay healthy. So if all the cells are all bouncy and healthy the total stack is higher? Resulting in over-all growth and taller stature? Too bad though for the natural deposits of phosphorus are soon empty, which means disaster to all life and food production if we don't solve the problem. And our bones are mostly made up of calcium. A metal.

Food today is actually less nutricious than a few hundred years ago, so I don't buy that one. And as one of you pointed out, the life expectancy growth can be explained with the infant mortality rate dropping.

reply to post by Utnapisjtim


I could get on board with that, though the timing doesn't really fit. Fertilizers were used mostly post ww2. So why the growth before, and after? Article states starting at the end of the 19th century, which would be the 1890's roughly. Anecdotal evidence suggests further growth in the last 20-30 years.

What fits best is industry. It really took off post 1850's, increasing exponentially. Though industry has leveled off in developed nations, developing nations still make global air quality levels more smogish on the whole than previous decades.

An easy way to show NPK may increase growth/height, is hydroponics. Though there are obvious differences in the system, part of it is feeding with an NPK solution. I think it's obvious that hydro grows larger/taller, though many do think the overall quality is not as good as organic/soil.

So maybe it depends on which growth spurt we're dealing with. Perhaps a good chunk is due to introduction of fertilizers with an abundance of NPK, but I think other factors are at play here.

reply to post by webedoomed


Could the industrialisation messed with gravity? The extensive transformation of massive and liquid hydrocarbons into gass (oil and coal etc.) does mean that great amounts of fossilised organic matter from the time of the dragons is now suspended in the air as CO2, methane and other gases.

If we took a chart showing American presidents' heights through the centuries and superimposed a graph showing global warming over the same period, I guess you would get the same result as when Al Gore did the CO2 stunt some time back.

reply to post by Utnapisjtim


If you don't agree with climatologists regarding global warming/climate change, that's fine, but it has nothing to do with the abundance of evidence regarding air pollution relating to industry.

You're only making yourself look like a fool with the above post. Please be reasonable, else continue to troll your own thread.

webedoomed
reply to post by Utnapisjtim

 

If you don't agree with climatologists regarding global warming/climate change, that's fine, but it has nothing to do with the abundance of evidence regarding air pollution relating to industry.

You're only making yourself look like a fool with the above post. Please be reasonable, else continue to troll your own thread.

Exactly where in the post in question do I even remotely challenge global warming? I'm serious. You said indiustrialisation caused rise in human average height. Al Gore says industrialisation caused global warming. Given you are both right, there would be a link between human height and global warming, looking at how I wrote it I see that it could be taken as irony, but the irony here is elsewhere, and it's striking

Seeing that Norway were pioneers in the development and widespread use of non-biological fertilisers in the beginning of the 1900's, much thanks to the brilliant mind and Norwegian hero-- seven times Nobel Price nominee Kristian Birkeland (Wikipedia-link), who developed a method of harvesting Nitrogen from the air (some also said he was the real inventor of x-ray too, based on an assistant claiming to have seen a photo of Birkeland's hand showing the bones inside). The further mixing Nitrates with Phosphorus and Calcium, resulted in crops yielding many-fold and the plants themselves were getting much bigger.

Also seeing how Norwegians have grown from being rather short to be among the tallest people on the globe. In roughly 100 years. It seems the fertilisers didn't stop with the plants they were designed for, but found it's way into the humans eating it also, resulting in general hypergrowth in average height.

reply to post by webedoomed


It just depends on where you live.

Move to a place like San Antonio and you will still be a giant.

I am 5'8 and most of the men there needed barstools to talk eye to eye.

Either way I believe diet has much to do with any changes in height. Western diets have historically been shown to increase heights by quite a bit. The modern western diet is saturated in energy and nutrients compared to the diet here of even 40 years ago. One of the side effects has been height increases and obesity in those whose metabolism might not be as strong.

I remember my mother telling me of not having enough money as a single working woman to buy milk for her first round of kids in the 70's. Programs like food stamps have drastically increased in usage over the last 20-40 years.

Again it just depends on the race as well.

The average for whites in U.S. is like 5'10, Mexicans 5'7, blacks 5'10.

In my opinion the potential height of human beings is probably around 6'0-6'7 for men and 5'10-6'2 for women. Kind of what you find in Scandinavian and Nordic countries.

Over years we'll probably see heights increase to the amounts above and then level off.

999zxcv
reply to post by webedoomed

 

my thoughts exactly kids are still eating chips and pizza just like we did back then in 20 years they have gone up 6-7 inches in hight i am 6'2 and feel normal when the kids are about but not back then and as someone pointed out 100 years ago or more doors were 5'0 it makesme think are people like fish and grow to the size of the inviroment or soomething but is the earth growing as well now that is a interesting youtube video ifonly i could link it

They may be eating pizza, but they're by NO means eating the same ingredient list.