Chapter 3 The Birth of Tall People: A History

[Pages:8]Chapter 3 The Birth of Tall People: A History

Our predecessors, the hominids, were roughly three feet tall, the height of a big toddler. i They spent their days roaming the African savannah, hiding from predators, scrounging for food, and, often, dying. Our predecessors were having a hard time not becoming extinct.

The dawn of tall people did not begin on an impressive note. You see, the hominids had a problem: big cats kept eating them. When being chased by a lion-type creature, a prehuman with a maximum wingspan of 2.5 feet and 12" legs has limited self-protection options. He's bait. He's likely to climb a tree, and good tree-climbers have short legs. Which, evolutionarily speaking, reinforces the shortness. Hominids were diminutive for the next four million years. Lucy, who lived 3.2 million years ago, was 3'6" tall and weighed 60lbs.

Yet many modern benefits of talldom are directly connected to this extended period of shortness. Had hominids shot up in size immediately, they might have taken to wandering around alone, as many large animals do. That would have been disastrous. Loners do not tend to develop extreme intelligence (think dinosaurs, giraffes, elephants). Instead, our slow-growing progenitors used teamwork to survive ("you be the bait, I'll climb the tree!"). In the process of fooling the big cats, they developed social skills and intellect, which paved the way for modern smart tall folk.ii

"There's not a lot of good data about when people got tall," says Harvard anthropologist Dan Lieberman. "We say that the big shift was around 2 million years ago with homo erectus, based upon one skeleton, the NarioKotome Boy. He's 9 years old, and would've been about six feet tall when fully grown."

Now, hominids probably would have eventually grown relatively tall anyway--species grow until they either max out their skeleton capacity, or are blocked by a larger creature in the food chain.iii But pre-humans quickly doubled in size for two reasons: to lower their body temperature, and to run. NarioKotome Boy's body was exquisitely designed for the savannah, where a day in the sun could mean literal frying. "People who live in those hot climates are long and thin, and it's because height maximizes the surface area to volume ratio--they can stay quite cool by perspiring," says Lieberman. But Nario was also now too big to hide in trees, and needed to be able to move. Fast. "If you have longer legs, you're more economical when you locomote. You're using less energy per kilometer."

With the 100% increase in size came a 100% increase in caloric needs, met by hunting. And in order to hunt, even longer legs were needed. "We argue that the ability of humans to run marathons is not a fluke. We're the best endurance runners in the world, and it's for hunting," says Lieberman. It's called persistence hunting, jogging after prey for hours on end, if not days. The tall hunter-gatherers who could adeptly wield a spear were more likely to survive socially, and more likely to reproduce.iv

Jump ahead another million years. The true exaltation of tall people--the size! the mystique!--began a few hundred thousand years ago, when the hominids developed the ability to walk and carry things at the same time, and promptly grew another foot. Nomadic hunter-gathering is a much healthier lifestyle than you might think. "They ate a wide variety of food, they exercised every day, and they didn't have the infectious diseases, desk jobs, or stress," says the anthropologist Barry Bogin. "They basically had the bodies of athletes."

From the beginning, talls were powerful. Taller bodies have larger skeletons and more muscle mass, so the tall hunter-gatherers could command more resources, and physically control fellow tribe members, stealing food when needed. "Dominance is the ability to effect another person's behavior," says Kory Floyd, an evolutionary psychologist at Arizona State University. "Physical strength is the natural correlate of dominance, and there's an inherent respect for the large organisms in a species." They grew another foot, averaging nearly today's heights.

The question is why women grew too. Most female mammals are 30% smaller than males, which is the case in ancient hominoid skeletons. "Women's evolutionary niche has been more in terms of nurturing offspring," says Floyd. "It's not as big a deal whether a woman is tall or short in the evolutionary scheme." Today, boys and girls are within millimeters of each other until puberty, and adult men and women just eight percent apart. Experts hypothesize that women had to grow wider hips to accommodate the large

heads of smart human fetuses.v And, most of the time, wider hips were attached to taller women. People are like trees--as they grow taller, they also grow wider trunks to support the weight.

The evolution of tall people was not all smooth sailing. Famine was a killer. Tall bodies need more calories, and when there's a longterm calorie shortage, talls bite the dust.vi Similarly, talls don't excel at hiding from predators, or camouflage. "But those are exceptions," says Floyd. "The general favor goes to tall people. There is a preponderance of evidence. I would argue that there is an evolutionary favoritism that goes along with height."

*

We smugly assume that we are the tallest humans to ever grace the earth. Quite the contrary. The Cro-Magnon people living 30,000 years ago were about our size, and 10% more muscular.vii Hunter-gathering was an exquisitely healthy lifestyle.

Heights plummeted because of a little tall disaster called civilization. "Heights go way down when we go into state society,''says Bogin. "When Egypt conquered the Nile area, the height of peasants fell dramatically. They moved from access to a wide variety of foods to growing what the Egyptian state demanded. Their bones show lots of deficiencies in minerals and iron." The same stunting happened repeatedly throughout history. As late as the 1800s, the male Cheyenne Native Americans, who hunted bison

and berries,viii averaged a whopping 5'10", towering above even today's Americans, not to mention the period's wealthy European monarchies.ix General Custer's cavalry averaged 5'7".x

Cities were a particular breeding ground of short people. A trip to modern Guatemala is an object lesson. Many Latin Americans are about as tall today as they were 8000 years ago as hunter-gatherers, says Bogin. "Their height went wayyyyy down when the empires appeared. They're only beginning to recover." More recent studies of the industrialization of London, Chicago and New York indicate why, and it's not disease.xi When goods suddenly become cheaper, people buy whatever's cheap. And instead of eating wellrounded farm meals of fruits and vegetables, grains, dairy and meat, they skip the pricey shipping-in meat, and eat bread and potatoes.xii

Early civilizations lauded the one trait they rarely had: Tallness. It was quickly upgraded to a matter of morality. Caesar and Tacitus considered height virtuous, attached to a morally superior mind.xiii The Bible and New Testament make similar pronouncements, and are quite height-conscious--many of God's favorites (Jesus, Abraham, et. al) are tall men who tower over their people. King Saul got his job because "from his shoulders and upward he was higher than any of the people."xiv

Firm height data appears starting in early Europe in 800A.D., when King Charlemagne's people were a mere half inch below today's heights. King Charlemagne himself was 6'4", despite having a father named Pippin the Short.

And...then came the downfall. From 1100 to 1800, Europe shrunk, with average men

sometimes approaching the 5'0" line, as is the case with late 1700s French soldiers. As

economist Robert Fogel says of the soldiers storming Bastille, "They looked like thirteenyear-old girls."xv The soldiers averaged 5'0", and weighed 100 lbs.

Copyright ? 2009 by Arianne Cohen

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ip. HEIGHT OF A BIG TODDLER Penn State, "Chimp-sized Hominid Walked Upright

On Two Legs Six Million Years Ago," ScienceDaily (Sept 3, 2004),

/releases/2004/09/040903085349.htm; and R. L. Stauffer,

A. Walker, O. A. Ryder, M. Lyons-Weiler, and S. Blair Hedges, "Human and Ape Molecular Clocks and Constraints on Paleontological Hypotheses," Journal of Heredity 92(6) (2001): 469-74. ii p. MODERN SMART TALL FOLK This is posited by Darwin in The Descent of Man. iii p. LARGER CREATURE IN THE FOOD CHAIN Joel Kingsolver and David Pfennig, "Individual-level Selection as a Cause of Cope's Rule of Phyletic Size Increase," Evolution 58 (2004): 1608-12. Cope's Rule was originally proposed by nineteenth century paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope. The idea was discredited for a while, but it is now back in vogue following recent fossil studies. See Carl Zimmer, "`Bigger is Better' View of Evolution Gains Credence," The New York Times, December 28, 2004. iv p. MORE LIKELY TO REPRODUCE Barry Bogin, Personal Communication. v p. SMART HUMAN FETUSES Ron Rosenfeld, Personal Communication. vi p. TALLS BITES THE DUST As evolutionary ecologist Rebecca Sear writes, "Growing taller than average has survival costs. Large size may increase the energy requirements for maintaining body condition, so that growing too tall may be disadvantageous during periods of food shortage." Rebecca Sear, Nadine Allal, and Ruth Mace, "Height, Marriage and Reproductive Success in Gambian Women," Research in Economic Anthropology 23 (2004): 203-24. vii p. 10% MORE MUSCULAR Barry Bogin, Personal Communication, May 2007. viii p. BISON AND BERRIES Bilger, "The Height Gap." ix p. EUROPEAN MONARCHIES Based on the work of Franz Boas. Stephen S. Hall, Size Matters: How Height Affects the Health, Happiness, and Success of Boys--and the Men They Become.(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 294.

x p. GENERAL CUSTER'S CAVALRY Scott Carson, Personal Communication, July 2007. xi P. IT'S NOT DISEASE John Komlos, "Shrinking in a Growing Economy? The Mystery of Physical Stature during the Industrial Revolution," Journal of Economic History 58 (1998) 3: 779-802. The British, for example, grew two inches shorter between 1840 and 1870, despite the fact that their GDP skyrocketed. John Komlos, "On British Pygmies and Giants: the Physical Stature of English Youth in the 18th and 19th Centuries," Research in Economic History, 2007, 25, pp. 117-136. xiip. BREAD AND POTATOES Marco Sunders, Personal Communication, May 2007; Komlos found that farmers in western Pennsylvania during the Industrial Revolution who were not connected by any rivers remained tall. Timothy Cuff. The Hidden Cost of Economic Development: The Biological Standard of Living in Antebellum Pennsylvania. Aldershot, U.K., and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2005. Ditto for the inmates of Tennessee penitentiaries who didn't have access to trading with Eastern cities. Komlos and his graduate student, Marco Sunders, found that the heights of wealthy Americans applying for passports in the nineteenth century did not decline during industrialization, because the higher economic classes were not affected by changing price points for foods Marco Sunder, The height of Tennessee convicts: another piece of the "antebellum puzzle" Economics & Human Biology, Volume 2, Issue 1, March 2004, Pages 75-86 xiii p. MORALLY SUPERIOR MIND Hall, Size Matters, 14. xiv p. HIGHER THAN ANY OF THE PEOPLE (1 Sam 9:2) xv p. THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRLS Bilger, "The Height Gap."

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