Last week I was writing about Goliath, the giant of biblical renown. The earliest records mark his height at 6 and a half feet, while later stories (including the Old Testament bible) report him being just shy of ten feet tall.
I had commented that the average height was shorter then, so being over 6 feet might very well be gigantic, relatively speaking. Well, now I’m doing the follow-up to that. Just how tall have humans been throughout history?
As it turns out, the answer is remarkably un-dramatic. Currently, the average height of men worldwide measures in at 5 feet, 9 inches. Turn the clock back 1000 years and the average height then was… [suspenseful organ sound] …5 feet, 8 inches. So in the last 1000 years we’ve grown an inch? Not quite. In around the 1600′s when our health and sanitation hadn’t yet caught up to the size of growing cities, human height was averaging 5 feet, 5 inches.
So we’re looking at a general fluctuation of maybe 5 inches per millennium. Not too exciting. Now let’s talk about some notable exceptions!
The tallest man… ever! Robert Wadlow was measured at 8 feet, 11 inches. He died in 1940, at the age of 22. Being ridiculously tall does seem to affect your lifespan. The average age of people over 8 feet is 43 years. (not counting two gentlemen still towering among us) Biologically, the human body runs into a lot of problems at that size, which seems to cast some doubt on Goliath pushing 10 feet and still being an able-bodied warrior.
Now, I find it rather amusing that there is a speck of physical evidence in support of the biblical height claim… but it comes from our ape ancestors. The Gigantopitecus blacki is an ancient species of ape discovered in southern China. All that has been found is a jaw bone and a few teeth, but they are huge! Some very smart people have been working on this, and by comparing the size of the jaw to its nearest related species the whole ape is speculated to be 10 feet tall. It’s a real-life sasquatch!
There are plenty of other stories of giants. Many claim “hearing about” giant skeletons found around the world, but in every case… every single case… the bones were either A) secreted away by some un-named government organization, or B) mysteriously lost. And for science, frankly, that just won’t do.
- Source: Historically Tall – The Height Site
- Source: Gigantopithecus blacki
4 Comments
I find it strange that this post is only focused on the height of men and nothing about the height of women.
Well, it is titled the History of Human Height… not the Herstory.
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Actually, connecting the facts in this and previous articles, it's very possible that Goliath was not "10 feet tall." The Bible doesn't use that measurement system but the anthropic units of cubits and spans. Therefore if people were, in general, shorter than we are today then "6 cubits and a span" would be different measurement in feet and inches. The modern cubit is about 18 inches. But if the Hebrews were near 5 feet tall, it would only make Goliath just over 8 feet.
To add to the confusion, it seems that Hebrews, Romans, and Egyptian had different standards and definitions of the word "cubit." Therefore when the Hebrew bible was converted into Greek during the Helenistic period, the measurements too might have been converted to met the different understanding of "cubit." In some English dynamic translations (ex. New International Version & New Living Translation), the translator do a similar thing by converting cubits to feet measurements for English readers. This seems to point to the were the idea that Goliath was "ten feet tall" stems from… bad presumptions of the translator; not a problem with the actual Bible text.
Have a look at web sites describing the heights of early homo sapiens such as Heidelberg man or Cro-Magnon. Apparently, the males of these species were reliably 6+ footers and in some populations were closer to 7 feet tall. They were also robustly built. It is apparently only in the last few decades that the variety in our diets has approached that of our 'primitive' ancestors again, and we have started to grow to heights that were apparently normal for our stone age ancestors…
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