/anthropology/glossary/stature
Stature is standing height. It is the simplest measurement in this glossary and the most often taken, and it is also the one that conditions move furthest, which gives it a particular use here: no other measure shows so clearly what a class assigned to a population can and cannot mean. The corpus describes stature in plain words, on seven grades from very short to very tall, and its source is unusual among typological works in giving those grades two sets of bounds, one for populations before industrial diets and one for populations after.
Status: Preliminary. Martin's scale is given from the handbook; the source's percentile table is reproduced as printed.
Stature is the one measure in the corpus with no Greek vocabulary. The grades are English: very short, short, rather short, medium height, rather tall, tall, very tall. The literature's one classical word is pygmy, from πυγμή, the length of the forearm, which Homer applied to a people of that height; it names peoples and not a grade, and the corpus uses it in that sense for the short populations of the African forest.
Stature is taken with the anthropometer from the floor to the vertex, the subject barefoot, heels together, standing erect, with the head in the Frankfurt plane. Three circumstances of the measurement affect its comparability. Height falls through the day as the spine compresses, by a centimetre or two, and the handbooks ask for the hour; it rises until the early twenties and declines after fifty, so that only adults between those ages are compared; and women are shorter than men by about seven parts in a hundred, so that every scale is kept by sex.
For populations known only from bone, stature is estimated from the long bones by regression, Pearson's formulae of 1899 and Trotter and Gleser's of 1952 being the ones in use. The estimates carry errors of several centimetres and depend on the population from which the formula was derived, and a stature given for a skeletal series should be read as a reconstruction.
Two schemes are given, and they differ in kind rather than in detail. Martin's divides adult stature into nine grades by fixed bounds. The corpus's source divides it into seven and bounds each grade by the range that holds the middle eighty percent of a population of that grade, from the tenth to the ninetieth percentile; and it gives that range twice, for pre-industrial and for post-industrial populations.
| Grade | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| dwarf | –129.9 | –120.9 |
| very short | 130.0–149.9 | 121.0–139.9 |
| short | 150.0–159.9 | 140.0–148.9 |
| below medium | 160.0–163.9 | 149.0–152.9 |
| medium | 164.0–166.9 | 153.0–155.9 |
| above medium | 167.0–169.9 | 156.0–158.9 |
| tall | 170.0–179.9 | 159.0–167.9 |
| very tall | 180.0–199.9 | 168.0–186.9 |
| giant | 200.0– | 187.0– |
| Grade | Pre-industrial, men | Pre-industrial, women | Post-industrial, men | Post-industrial, women |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| very short | 137–153 | 129–143 | 145–161 | 136–151 |
| short | 148–164 | 139–154 | 156–173 | 146–162 |
| rather short | 154–170 | 144–160 | 162–180 | 152–168 |
| medium height | 157–174 | 147–163 | 165–184 | 155–172 |
| rather tall | 160–177 | 149–166 | 168–187 | 157–175 |
| tall | 165–183 | 154–171 | 174–193 | 162–180 |
| very tall | 173–193 | 161–179 | 183–203 | 170–189 |
The ranges of neighbouring grades overlap by design. Each describes the spread inside a population of that grade, not a boundary between grades.
The difference between the two tables deserves to be drawn out, because it is the difference between two ideas of what a stature class is. Martin's grades are bounds laid on a single scale, so that a man of 165 centimetres is medium on it in any century. The source's grades are populations, each with its own spread, and the same grade stands eight or nine centimetres higher after industrialisation than before. A population that was medium height in 1500 and has since taken up an industrial diet would be medium height still by the source's reckoning and tall by Martin's. Of the two, the source's table is the more candid statement of what the class denotes: a population, under a diet, at a date.
Armies measured stature before anthropologists did. The Roman levy set minimum heights, and the conscription records of the modern states, kept from the eighteenth century, are the longest series of measured heights that exist. Louis-René Villermé read the French records in 1829 and found that the conscripts of poor districts were shorter than those of rich ones, which is the first finding of what is now called anthropometric history and remains its central one. Adolphe Quetelet took the same records in the 1830s and found the heights of a population distributed on the normal curve, with his average man at its centre; stature was thus the trait on which the statistics of populations was founded.
The typologists took stature as a criterion from Ripley onward, and Martin's handbook of 1914 gave it the nine-grade scale. From the 1950s the study of growth, led by James Tanner, made stature the standard measure of a child's condition; and from the 1970s the economic historians, Fogel, Steckel and Komlos among them, read it backwards as a measure of a population's net nutrition over time. The secular rise in European stature, of about a centimetre a decade through the century after 1870, is the best documented change in any human measurement, and it is the fact against which the evidential value of the measure must be judged.
Stature is among the most heritable of human measurements. Within a population, some four-fifths of the variation between adults is accounted for by descent, and it is one of the traits on which the inheritance of continuous characters was first worked out. Yet the same measurement moved by ten centimetres and more in the European populations of the last century without any change in their descent. The two facts appear to conflict and do not, and the reconciliation is worth stating because it governs every other entry in this glossary. Heritability describes the variation between individuals under one set of conditions. It says nothing about what a change in conditions will do to a whole population, and in the case of stature a change in conditions does a great deal.
What conditions do, nutrition in childhood and freedom from disease in childhood do most of. These set how much of an inherited potential is reached, and Villermé's finding has been repeated in every population and period examined since: the poor are shorter than the rich, and the children of the poor grow taller when their condition improves. The corpus's source states the point in its own terms and, as the tables above show, builds it into its scale.
The spread within a population is wider than for any other trait in the glossary. The source says that short types contain tall individuals and tall types short ones, and gives its grades bands that overlap by two-thirds of their width. A grade is accordingly a statement about where a population's centre lies and a poor predictor of any individual in it.
Climate explains less of stature than it does of proportion. Bergmann's rule holds in the large, and the compact peoples of the Arctic are not tall; but the tallest and the shortest populations in the world both live in tropical Africa, the Nilotes of the upper Nile and the forest peoples of the Congo basin, and the source observes that Africa has the greatest range of stature of any continent. The short stature of the forest peoples has a genetic basis of its own, in the pathway of growth hormone, and it has arisen there more than once.
From this the judgment follows, and it is a double one. Stature is a clear measure and a poor marker. It records the condition of a population under a diet at a date with great fidelity, and for that very reason it records the population's descent with little. The corpus's grades refer, by the source's statement, to the year 1500 and to indigenous diets; a comparison of them with any modern measurement is therefore a comparison between two eras before it is a comparison between two peoples, and should be read as such.
Of the 209 local varieties, 205 are given a stature. The source writes "(rather) tall" for a population that reaches the next grade in part, and "medium height to rather tall" for one that spans two; both forms are counted under each grade they name.
| Grade | Types | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| very short | 4 | Aetid, Isthmid, South Andamanid, Tasmanid |
| short | 71 | Annamid, Aoshima, Barrinean, Baykal |
| rather short | 45 | Amur-Sakhalin, Arabian Veddoid, Berberid |
| medium height | 86 | African Alpinoid, Alföld, Anatolid, Arabid |
| rather tall | 52 | Andronovo-Turanid, Anglo-Saxon, Carpathid |
| tall | 54 | Aisto Nordid, Appalacid, Arizonid, Bobo |
| very tall | 1 | Dinkaid |
The counts include the sixteen types written "(rather) short", the sixteen written "(rather) tall", and the twenty written as a range. One type in the corpus is very tall, and it is Nilotic.
Relative trunk length, the proportion into which stature divides, and the part of it that moves most. Somatotype, whose linear component largely restates stature. Head size, for a dimension the source finds only weakly tied to it.
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