Why are caucasians taller

The Netherlands, as any European can tell you, has become a land of giants. 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. 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. Like many biases, this one has a certain basis in fact. Height variations within a population are largely genetic, but height variations between populations are mostly environmental, anthropometric history suggests. 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 the University of Munich, has the look of an Old World tailor—sharp eyes, receding hairline, bottlebrush mustache—and the scholarly instincts of a born scavenger.

For twenty years, he has rummaged through archives on both sides of the Atlantic, gathering hundreds of thousands of height records in search of trends 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. In , when his mother was pregnant with him, the Nazis took control of the city and the Russians were poised for a counterattack.

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. During the war, his father, Herbert, had spent months in a Hungarian forced-labor battalion outside Stalingrad, returning on foot when the Russians broke the German siege, in the winter of After the war, Herbert Komlos was imprisoned again, this time by the Communists.

A month later, when it failed, he packed up his family and fled for America. Biologists say that we achieve our stature in three spurts: the first in infancy, the second between the ages of six and eight, the last in adolescence. Any decent diet can send us sprouting at these ages, but take away any one of forty-five or fifty essential nutrients and the body stops growing. Komlos was twelve years old when he left Hungary, and he had been malnourished most of his life. His first growth spurt had been cut short; his second was hardly more successful.

When Komlos and his parents arrived in Chicago, in the winter of , America was a land of almost mythical abundance. For more than two centuries, its people had been so healthy and so prosperous that they towered above the rest of the world—about four inches above the Dutch, for example, for most of the nineteenth century.

But he found the restaurants not nearly as impressive as the giants who fed there. There is a rueful tone to his nostalgia. His father arrived with no money, no English, and no marketable skills, Komlos says. For a year, he worked in a factory, making belts, for a dollar an hour. When it was clear that he would never be promoted, he quit and started his own business, making leather watchbands at home.

In Hungary, there had always been a market for handmade goods, but Chicago stores were full of cheap imports. To compete with Hong Kong, Herbert Komlos had to work sixteen hours a day while his wife worked ten, and John put in twenty-five hours on the weekend. They ate better than in the old country, but only a little. And those experiences are spelled out in their bodies. Komlos now knows that he arrived in America at a pivotal point in its history. Over the next fifty years, by most indicators dear to economists, the country remained the richest in the world.

But by another set of numbers—longevity and income inequality—it began to lag behind Northern Europe and Japan. One evening last winter, Komlos and I were walking by the U. Standing at a discreet distance, he slowly sized up each man as if with a pair of calipers. These guys are more like me. Records for women are much more scarce, but they tend to follow the same trends.

Looking down these rows of men, four abreast, Komlos could see the shadowy ranks of their ancestors lined up behind them, from West Point cadets and Citadel graduates to Union soldiers, Revolutionary War soldiers, and fighters in the French and Indian War.

If you were to stretch a string from the head of the earliest soldier in that row to the head of the most recent recruit, you might expect it to trace an ascending line. Humans are an ever-improving species, the old evolution charts tell us; each generation is smarter, sleeker, and taller than the last.

Yet in Northern Europe over the past twelve hundred years human stature has followed a U-shaped curve: from a high around A. Charlemagne was well over six feet; the soldiers who stormed the Bastille a millennium later averaged five feet and weighed a hundred pounds. In the fall of , when Komlos was working on a Ph. Most historians, if they thought about height at all, tended to assume that it was tied to income.

The more people earn, the better they eat; the better they eat, the taller they grow. Fogel and Engerman found nearly the opposite to be true: Southern plantations were almost thirty-five per cent more efficient than Northern farms, their analysis showed. Slavery was a cruel and inhuman system, but more so psychologically than physically: to get the most work from their slaves, planters fed and housed them nearly as well as free Northern farmers could feed and house themselves.

He went through more than ten thousand slave manifests—shipboard records kept by traders in the colonies—until he had the heights of some fifty thousand slaves; then he averaged them out by age and sex.

The results were startling: adult slaves, Steckel found, were nearly as tall as free whites, and three to five inches taller than the average Africans of the time. To eat, apparently, they had to be old enough to work. But Fogel was more than willing to stand corrected. A popular local saying immodestly sums up this achievement. The biggest single Dutch landgrab came with the construction of the Zuiderzee Works, a mind-boggling engineering project that saw the Netherlands steal another 1, sq km of land in the heart of the country.

Consequently, as the sea was pegged back, Dutch farmers turned not to cash crops like wheat, but to cows, which grazed merrily on what had once been the ocean floor. They remain among the biggest consumers of milk in the world. Those eponymous cities, along with Woerden and beautiful Alkmaar, are amongst the best places to witness the Dutch love affair with dairy at its most ardent. They host the most famous cheese markets in the Netherlands, where traders and farmers indulge in the time-honoured Dutch tradition of haggling animatedly over wheels of cheese, before settling on a price and sealing the deal with a handshake.

In Woerden, farmers bring their wares to market on antiquated tractors and clip clop across the market square in their wooden clogs which have chunky heels that add another couple of inches to their height, as if they needed it. Someone who could do with that boost is me: topping out at cm, just shy of the average American, I do feel short in the lofty Netherlands, and at the floating farm I wondered if van Wingerden was trying to tell me something when she offered me a bottle of milk, produced on the water by her offshore herd.

This has now been corrected. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc. Why are the Dutch so tall? Lauderdale of Princeton University wrote in Our slipping height advantage might, in the end, be far less meaningful than measures like life expectancy or obesity.

And of course, there's nothing wrong with being petite. But given that how tall we grow reflects how well we grew up, the trend of the incredible shrinking American is worth paying attention to. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic.

Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. Average heights of men over time across European countries Tim Hatton. Those from white-collar backgrounds were taller: This follows the theory that wealth buys better food and living conditions, and thus greater height in adulthood. The men who hailed from the top two social classes stood a half-inch taller, on average.

The more kids there were in a household, the shorter they were: Not only because there was less food to go around, but also because it made it more likely that there were more people in each bedroom. The researchers measured the percentage of women by region who were only able to sign their marriage certificates with an X, rather than their name.

People from areas with a high percentage of illiterate mothers were a quarter-inch shorter. People from industrial districts were shorter than those from agricultural areas: Regardless of income, the Dickensian living conditions of 19th century British cities suppressed height by about nine-tenths of an inch.

On top of being hit with factory pollution, urban dwellers were packed into filthy, disease-ridden slums. Average man in the U.