On 09/01/13 00:11, Russell Coker wrote:
On Sun, 6 Jan 2013, "Geoff D'Arcy" <geoff.darcy@gmail.com> wrote:
On 05/01/13 13:40, Trent W. Buck wrote:
Russell Coker wrote:
That's hardly surprising. None of the problems that have been pointed out with Wikipedia are new. People haven't changed much in 10,000+ years.
Well, I hear they got taller...
I hear they got shorter...
"Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9'' for men, 5' 5'' for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3'' for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors." http://goo.gl/dK6j
That article is about people who are malnourished being shorter. It's the same now, people who had good food and a good social environment when they were young are on average taller than those who didn't. Genetically there's been no great change, it's just a matter of how many people are lucky enough to have good food and a good environment.
Yes that's completely true, it's a dietary issue, not a genetic one. But the common perception appears to be that we are physically larger than our ancestors and that this has been the trend over time. However archaeology suggests that only now are we returning to the size of our pre Neolithic ancestors.
There's a lot of fairly dubious stuff about how nice things supposedly were in hunter-gatherer societies. For starters I can't imagine a society where a woman left her tribe to live with her husband's tribe being any good in terms of the treatment of women.
Yes socially I think only an extreme patriarch would find it attractive. But many hunter gatherer cultures understand the finite nature of environments and how to live sustainably within them. I think this is what the author was nostalgic for in the referenced article.