– Why did people get taller over time? I was listening to a podcast today and they said the average height for a man at the time they were talking about was 5ft
In: 5
The height of a human is actually related to how much food was available when they were young. In periods of hunger and famine kids do not grow which means they end up smaller once they hit puberty. This means that throughout a lot of human history the average height have been closer to 5ft then 6ft of today. Of course this is not always the case as we do see a lot of genetic variation causing people to be of different heights and there are ancient civilizations where food was plentiful so people grew tall and strong. We can actually see when the potato spread throughout Europe using the statistics on peoples heights.
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