Studying the history of a country or region’s physical health is challenging, as consistently collected indicators of health are hard to come by. However, our recent study looked at the clear link between a population’s health and one simple, widely recorded piece of information – body height.
For most of human history, height remained relatively stable. Until 1800, the average height in Europe hovered between 165 cm and 170 cm, but over the past 200 years something remarkable has happened: heights, globally but particularly in Europe, have increased dramatically. Many European countries saw increases in average heights of…
