Friday, June 20, 2008

Attack of the Euro Giants - [Rufus]



















Europeans are getting taller as Americans shrink, read the whole article here, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/04/05/040405fa_fact?printable=true

"For centuries, he explained, governments have kept careful records of their soldiers’ heights, providing a baseline against which modern populations are compared...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 800 A.D., to a low sometime in the seventeenth century, and back up again. Charlemagne was well over six feet; the soldiers who stormed the Bastille a millennium later averaged five feet and weighed a hundred pounds. 'They didn’t look like Errol Flynn and Alan Hale,' the economist Robert Fogel told me. 'They looked like thirteen-year-old girls.'”

4 comments:

Thud said...

Erm..looking out of my window the subhuman midgets that pass as many Brits here today make this a rather dubious proposition.

Mighty Skip said...

Well, the US gets a lot of immigration from Southeast Asian nations, China, Japan and so on. Not to mention Central and Southern Americans, who are not well known for height.

A german woman I know who is short for her country commented on how much easier it is for her to buy clothes here in the US and that she doesn't feel quite as short here as back home.

Mighty Skip said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mrs. Right said...

Hey! Where are you guys?! Come back, shane!