Conversa de café

A conversar com um amigo ele disse-me algo que achei estranho. A altura média dos seres humanos não tem simplesmente aumentado ao longo dos séculos. Entretanto na internet o que encontrei foi isto:

Num primeiro artigo:

Northern Europeans in the 11th century were substantially taller -- almost three inches (7.6 cm) taller on average -- than their descendants on the eve of the industrial revolution around 1750. That might seem bizarre to anyone accustomed to thinking about human height as something that has increased steadily with the so-called march of civilization. But height varies with how healthy and how well off a given society is as a whole, says John Komlos, a prominent height historian at the University of Munich. "We've yet to recognize," says Komlos, "how sensitive the human body is to socio-economic and environmental circumstances."

De outro artigo, no The New Yorker:

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 (1.83 m); the soldiers who stormed the Bastille a millennium later averaged five feet (1.52 m) 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.”
(...)
In both Europe and the Americas, he discovered, humans grew shorter as their cities grew larger. The more people clustered together, the more pest-ridden and poorly fed they became. Heights also fell in synch with global temperatures, which reached a nadir during the Little Ice Age of the seventeenth century.
(...)
By and large, though, any population can grow as tall as any other. This last point may sound counterintuitive. Height, like skin color, seems to vary with geography: we think of squat Peruvians, slender Masai, stocky Inuit, and lanky Brazilians. According to Bergmann’s Rule and Allen’s Rule, animals in cold climates tend to have larger bodies and shorter limbs than those in warm climates. But though climate still shapes musk oxen and giraffes—and a willowy Inuit is hard to find—its effect on industrialized people has almost disappeared. Swedes ought to be short and stocky, yet they’ve had good clothing and shelter for so long that they’re some of the tallest people in the world. Mexicans ought to be tall and slender. Yet they’re so often stunted by poor diet and diseases that we assume they were born to be small.