Eli5: Why are modern day humans so much taller than people from earlier times in history such as the romans and Napoleon?
In: Biology
They didn’t have as much access to the amounts of nutritious food we have now. Though Napoleon wasn’t that short, 5′ 6″….that’s only about an inch under the most recent average male height (worldwide).
1. Higher availability of food and nutrition
2. Maybe shorter individuals had less chances of scoring a mate than their taller peers, so natural selection 🙂
People are definitely bigger overall. That said, small adult clothing is the most likely to survive, since you can take something large in for a smaller person, but not really make a small piece bigger. So that does affect our ideas about past sizes to some extent.
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