Be careful with things along the line of “the effect seems to be widely acknowledged”, just because those effects that are are also often the ones least critically reviewed.
Yes this can be true, and it is worth digging into. The 6′2″” figure is just a number from memory. From what little searching I did recently, I can’t find much support for it.
The bone studies I have seen have a pretty wide dispersion of average heights. All show some trend for loss of average height around the dawn of agriculture (or even a little before), although it varies and is probably not as high as what I originally stated. This is probably so murky that it may not be worth drawing conclusions from.
A more interesting route could be to look at data from particular populations as they transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists. There we could expect to see evidence for a significant loss of health initially followed by a massive selection effect, based on the health problems many humans from isolated tribes exhibit when exposed to the modern diet.
It just occurred to me that size is one of the easiest things to select for (which is why large dogs are an order of magnitude larger than small dogs), and agriculturists are in much less need of size than hunter gatherers. Maybe humans pre-agriculture were all naturally taller, but rarely reached their maximum height?
I believe that people living in developed nations usually grow to their maximum individual height, and that differences in height are almost entirely genetic among people with adequate nutrition. Since we’ve gotten taller as malnutrition has become less and less frequent, it seems reasonable to postulate that this is fulfilling potential rather than genetic drift. However, famines during the beginning of the agricultural revolution could have decreased the height of humans, since being larger didn’t help one find alternate food sources (like it might have earlier in human history), but did require more sustenance.
There are probably a number of holes in this theory; despite humans breeding dogs to be vastly varying in size during this same period, I doubt that the time period in question is really quite enough to have altered human size naturally. I also think archeologists would be aware of this and be able to recognize changes even in malnourished size over the time periods being discussed.
Yes this can be true, and it is worth digging into. The 6′2″” figure is just a number from memory. From what little searching I did recently, I can’t find much support for it.
The bone studies I have seen have a pretty wide dispersion of average heights. All show some trend for loss of average height around the dawn of agriculture (or even a little before), although it varies and is probably not as high as what I originally stated. This is probably so murky that it may not be worth drawing conclusions from.
A more interesting route could be to look at data from particular populations as they transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists. There we could expect to see evidence for a significant loss of health initially followed by a massive selection effect, based on the health problems many humans from isolated tribes exhibit when exposed to the modern diet.
It just occurred to me that size is one of the easiest things to select for (which is why large dogs are an order of magnitude larger than small dogs), and agriculturists are in much less need of size than hunter gatherers. Maybe humans pre-agriculture were all naturally taller, but rarely reached their maximum height?
I believe that people living in developed nations usually grow to their maximum individual height, and that differences in height are almost entirely genetic among people with adequate nutrition. Since we’ve gotten taller as malnutrition has become less and less frequent, it seems reasonable to postulate that this is fulfilling potential rather than genetic drift. However, famines during the beginning of the agricultural revolution could have decreased the height of humans, since being larger didn’t help one find alternate food sources (like it might have earlier in human history), but did require more sustenance.
There are probably a number of holes in this theory; despite humans breeding dogs to be vastly varying in size during this same period, I doubt that the time period in question is really quite enough to have altered human size naturally. I also think archeologists would be aware of this and be able to recognize changes even in malnourished size over the time periods being discussed.