The latest study showed that in developed countries people have become taller, and the highest average height in the world - 1.85 cm - is observed in the Netherlands. Although Americans were the tallest people in the world during World War II (1.77 cm), growth rates had stalled by the end of the 20th century. And while average growth has increased in many countries, it has not been uniform. In some countries plagued by disease, war and other problems, average growth has declined from time to time. The researchers believe that this suggests that negative factors such as hunger or epidemics affect the next generations, and it takes about 5 generations to overcome these factors. According to the latest research, the relationship between growth and quality of life has been identified, and tall people are perceived as more intelligent and influential.
People are getting fatter
Since the 1970s, researchers have studied the growth dynamics of Mayan children and their families in Guatemala, Mexico and the United States. When the Maya moved to the United States, they were 11.4 cm taller than their peers in Guatemala and Mexico. However, their weight also increased and they were more likely to be obese. There is also a trend towards weight gain in the world. So in 2013, 29 percent of the world's population was overweight or obese. Why people get fatter is a subject of scientific controversy. Some researchers believe that overeating and lack of physical activity are to blame. But there is also a theory that genetics play a role here, as well as viruses that have been associated with obesity. Contrary to popular belief, many studies have found a link between being overweight and poverty. Some researchers speculate that this trend is due to epigenetics or inherited changes that affect how the body stores excess energy from food. For example, if your mother and grandmother went through hard times, this is passed on to future generations, and when times are good, the body tries to store extra energy in the form of fat.
Early puberty
In many countries, children start to mature earlier, especially girls. Many studies have shown that the age at which girls reach puberty has dropped over the past half century. For example, a study in the United States showed that the age of menarche dropped by 0.3 years per decade from the mid-1800s, when the first menstruation occurred at age 17, until the 1960s. Research also indicates that there is a link between being overweight and early puberty, and girls with high body mass index reach puberty at an earlier age. This can have negative health consequences, as research has shown that early maturation is associated with the development of hypertension and diabetes later in life. There are also social implications. In some cultures, a girl who has reached puberty is considered old enough for marriage, which means she has fewer opportunities to pursue an education or career.
Human longevity and its negative consequences
People are now living longer than ever. According to WHO, life expectancy worldwide has grown from 30 years in the 20th century to 70 years in 2012. Experts predict that the world average life expectancy for women born in 2030 will rise to 85 years. Increased life expectancy has been linked to advances in medicine, improved sanitation and access to clean water. However, while these factors have reduced the death rate from infectious diseases, the death rate from degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, heart disease and cancer have increased. In other words, people have begun to live longer, but are dying from other diseases than in the past. The rise in autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes, has been linked by some scientists to improved hygiene. That is, when the body is exposed to too few microbes, the immune system overreacts to even the most harmless microbes. Human development in the future What awaits people in the future, given how quickly technology is changing our world? There is some concern that the future of evolution will be shaped by genetic engineering. Bionic implants, nanotechnology and new drugs can extend human life even further. Some scientists believe that we can achieve immortality through technology in the next 30 years. While this sounds like science fiction, it's clear that humans are evolving rapidly and technology is having a big impact.
People are getting taller, fatter and living longer than ever before in history. And all these changes have taken place over the past century, scientists say. However, this is not only about evolution, as one century is not enough for such changes.
Scientists believe that most of the transformations that have occurred over such a period of time are the body's response to changes in conditions, such as improved nutrition, health and hygiene. Here are the main changes that have happened to people over the past century.
Increased human height
The latest study showed that in developed countries people have become taller, and the highest average height in the world - 1.85 cm - is observed in the Netherlands. Although Americans were the tallest people in the world during World War II (1.77 cm), growth rates had stalled by the end of the 20th century.
And while average growth has increased in many countries, it has not been uniform. In some countries plagued by disease, war and other problems, average growth has declined from time to time.
The researchers believe that this suggests that negative factors such as hunger or epidemics affect the next generations, and it takes about 5 generations to overcome these factors.
According to the latest research, the relationship between growth and quality of life has been identified, and tall people are perceived as more intelligent and influential.
People are getting fatter
Since the 1970s, researchers have studied the growth dynamics of Mayan children and their families in Guatemala, Mexico and the United States. When the Maya moved to the United States, they were 11.4 cm taller than their peers in Guatemala and Mexico. However, their weight also increased and they were more likely to be obese.
There is also a trend towards weight gain in the world. So in 2013, 29 percent of the world's population was overweight or obese.
Why people get fatter is a subject of scientific controversy. Some researchers believe that overeating and lack of physical activity are to blame. But there is also a theory that genetics play a role here, as well as viruses that have been associated with obesity. Contrary to popular belief, many studies have found a link between being overweight and poverty.
Some researchers speculate that this trend is due to epigenetics or inherited changes that affect how the body stores excess energy from food.
For example, if your mother and grandmother went through hard times, this is passed on to future generations, and when times are good, the body tries to store extra energy in the form of fat.
Early puberty
In many countries, children start to mature earlier, especially girls. Many studies have shown that the age at which girls reach puberty has dropped over the past half century.
For example, a study in the United States showed that the age of menarche dropped by 0.3 years per decade from the mid-1800s, when the first menstruation occurred at age 17, until the 1960s.
Research also indicates that there is a link between being overweight and early puberty, and girls with high body mass index reach puberty at an earlier age.
This can have negative health consequences, as research has shown that early maturation is associated with the development of hypertension and diabetes later in life.
There are also social implications. In some cultures, a girl who has reached puberty is considered old enough for marriage, which means she has fewer opportunities to pursue an education or career.
Human longevity and its negative consequences
People are now living longer than ever. According to WHO, life expectancy worldwide has grown from 30 years in the 20th century to 70 years in 2012. Experts predict that the world average life expectancy for women born in 2030 will rise to 85 years.
Increased life expectancy has been linked to advances in medicine, improved sanitation and access to clean water.
However, while these factors have reduced the death rate from infectious diseases, the death rate from degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, heart disease and cancer have increased.
In other words, people have begun to live longer, but are dying from other diseases than in the past. The rise in autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes, has been linked by some scientists to improved hygiene. That is, when the body is exposed to too few microbes, the immune system overreacts to even the most harmless microbes.
Human development in the future
What will happen to people in the future, given how quickly technology is changing our world?
There is some concern that the future of evolution will be shaped by genetic engineering. Bionic implants, nanotechnology and new drugs can extend human life even further.
Some scientists believe that we can achieve immortality through technology in the next 30 years. While this sounds like science fiction, it's clear that humans are evolving rapidly and technology is having a big impact.
Increase in human growth. The latest study showed that in developed countries people have become taller, and the highest average height in the world - 1.85 cm - is observed in the Netherlands.
Although Americans were the tallest people in the world during World War II (1.77 cm), growth rates had stalled by the end of the 20th century. And while average growth has increased in many countries, it has not been uniform. In some countries plagued by disease, war and other problems, average growth has declined from time to time. The researchers believe that this suggests that negative factors such as hunger or epidemics affect the next generations, and it takes about 5 generations to overcome these factors. According to the latest research, the relationship between growth and quality of life has been identified, and tall people are perceived as more intelligent and influential.
People are getting fatter. Since the 1970s, researchers have studied the growth dynamics of Mayan children and their families in Guatemala, Mexico and the United States. When the Maya moved to the United States, they were 11.4 cm taller than their peers in Guatemala and Mexico. However, their weight also increased and they were more likely to be obese. There is also a trend towards weight gain in the world. So in 2013, 29 percent of the world's population was overweight or obese. Why people get fatter is a subject of scientific controversy. Some researchers believe that overeating and lack of physical activity are to blame. But there is also a theory that genetics play a role here, as well as viruses that have been associated with obesity. Contrary to popular belief, many studies have found a link between being overweight and poverty. Some researchers speculate that this trend is due to epigenetics or inherited changes that affect how the body stores excess energy from food. For example, if your mother and grandmother went through hard times, this is passed on to future generations, and when times are good, the body tries to store extra energy in the form of fat.
Early puberty. In many countries, children start to mature earlier, especially girls. Many studies have shown that the age at which girls reach puberty has dropped over the past half century. For example, a study in the United States showed that the age of menarche fell by 0.3 years per decade from the mid-1800s, when the first menstruation occurred at age 17, until the 1960s. Research also indicates that there is a link between being overweight and early puberty, and girls with high body mass index reach puberty at an earlier age. This can have negative health consequences, as research has shown that early maturation is associated with the development of hypertension and diabetes later in life. There are also social implications. In some cultures, a girl who has reached puberty is considered old enough for marriage, which means she has fewer opportunities to pursue an education or career.
Human longevity and its negative consequences. People are now living longer than ever. According to WHO, life expectancy worldwide has grown from 30 years in the 20th century to 70 years in 2012. Experts predict that the world average life expectancy for women born in 2030 will rise to 85 years. Increased life expectancy has been linked to advances in medicine, improved sanitation and access to clean water. However, while these factors have reduced the death rate from infectious diseases, the death rate from degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, heart disease and cancer have increased. In other words, people have begun to live longer, but are dying from other diseases than in the past. The rise in autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes, has been linked by some scientists to improved hygiene. That is, when the body is exposed to too few microbes, the immune system overreacts to even the most harmless microbes. Human development in the future What awaits people in the future, given how quickly technology is changing our world? There is some concern that the future of evolution will be shaped by genetic engineering. Bionic implants, nanotechnology and new drugs can extend human life even further. Some scientists believe that we can achieve immortality through technology in the next 30 years. While this sounds like science fiction, it's clear that humans are evolving rapidly and technology is having a big impact.
Skull hunters are sometimes called anthropologists. Georgy Frantsevich Debets is a kind of champion among them. Ten years ago, I, a student and an excavator, listened by the fire to the stories of the head of the complex Kyrgyz archaeological and anthropological expedition. And although the conversation was about serious things, the stories were often funny. For example, how, in the twenties, the head of a railway station in Siberia sold at auction a large box filled with ancient skulls. The student Debets did not have enough money to pay for the transportation of the finds at an increased rate ... (and it was apparently still impossible to take an urgent loan on the card at that time).
... When Georgy Frantsevich took up the problem of rounding the head in people over the past millennia, he had seven thousand ancient skulls at his disposal. Of these, more than a thousand are people of the Neolithic era, two thousand are of the early Iron Age, and four thousand are medieval. In addition, GF Debets divided the skulls into groups according to the territories where they were found.
When comparing the skulls of different eras, two processes were very clearly visible. One is head rounding: brachycephalization. And the other is a thinning of the face and bones of the skull. The human skull became more round and less massive, more graceful. The second process is called by scientists the name of gracilization - from the word grace, which does not need to be explained.
Over the past several millennia, these processes have gone very far. So much so that scientists until recently believed (and many believe even now) that the point is not in the changes in the skull, but in the invasion from other areas of aliens with a different head shape. In different geographical areas, this process proceeds at different rates, in some places it seems to be interrupted, dies down for a thousand or two years. In a word, three thousand years ago, our (again, middle) ancestor had a skull of such massiveness, which has become a rarity today. The bones of the skeleton have also become thinner.
There are a lot of explanations for both of these processes. Brachycephalization, for example, has been associated with a cradle shape. It's amazing how obedient to the external pressure is the child's skull and how "patient" the brain is at the same time, which only it is not able to endure while remaining normal. The ancient Incas artificially lengthened their heads, tightening them in children with a tourniquet over the eyebrows. Some ancient tribes of the Black Sea region managed to make the foreheads of their children almost horizontal, sharply stretching their heads from nose to back ...
So this suspicion of a cradle might have been valid. But - only it could. An invasion of another race? No, neither them, nor racial confusion can explain everything. What has happened in the last three thousand years in large areas of Eastern Europe? The climate has remained the same. The geochemical composition of rocks and soil has not changed. What's the matter then? G.F. Debets put the question in this way:
“It is necessary to pay attention to the phenomena that:
a) would make it possible to establish the differences between the southern outskirts of Eastern Europe and its central regions at the beginning of the II millennium BC. NS.:
b) have undergone significant changes in the central regions over the past two millennia BC. NS.;
c) to some extent smoothed out the differences between the southern and central regions during these two millennia.
Having clarified the course of brachycephalization and gracilization in various regions of Eastern Europe, the scientist paved the way for an explanation of the causes of these processes.
Historians are aware of events of world-historical importance falling in the central part of Eastern Europe at this time. It was at that time that a massive transition to agriculture was taking place here. Could this be reflected in the shape of the skulls? Apparently, it could - Debets comes to this conclusion. He mainly means gracilization. The farmer consumes much less meat (and milk, if we compare only with the cattle breeder) than the hunter or herder. And his body began to receive much less calcium, the main material for the construction of the skeleton and skull. Here, as you can see, the appearance of a person is no longer influenced by the conditions of nature, among which he lives. The socio-economic conditions that have arisen as a result of the activities of mankind come into effect.
In the west of Ukraine, during the same period, there were no major changes in economic life - there agriculture was mastered much earlier. And just there, there have been no special changes in the structure of the skulls over the past millennia. Apparently, the process of gracilization of skulls also took place there, but ended accordingly earlier. But among the local Mongoloid tribes of Eastern Siberia, where cattle breeding continued to dominate in the last millennia, at this time the process of gracilization did not take place at all.
The population of the Mediterranean and Western Asia in the III-IV millennia BC was distinguished by a more gracile skull than the then inhabitants of Eastern Europe. Well, the former, after all, respectively, had become farmers earlier. And there is also reason to think that the ancestors of the "graceful-headed" Mediterranean of the 3rd millennium BC, indeed, were again people with more massive skulls.
However, in the Mediterranean region, something other than the transition to agriculture could have affected the gracilization of skulls. In different climatic conditions, hunting, cattle breeding, farming have different effects on the physical characteristics of people. Pygmy hunters do not have more massive skulls than their farming neighbors.
In tropical Africa, the process of gracilization has clearly affected many purely pastoralist tribes. And what this is about is not yet clear. It is also explained in different ways that the skull, simultaneously with the thinning of its bones, becomes rounder. It is known, for example, that the shape of a ball, which has the smallest surface area, is the strongest, all other things being equal. Has not nature "taken into account" this?
B.A. Nikityuk, Candidate of Biological Sciences, decided to test on animals what circumstances can cause rounding of the skull. No matter how "offensive" it is for people, he set up experiments on rats. And he found out: a change in the usual living conditions of animals, a fairly strong deviation from them, leads precisely to a rounding of the head. Maybe the scientist came across some regularity of the influence of the environment on the body, common to many mammals, including humans?
You can try from this point of view to explain why in the last century in a number of regions of Europe more dolichocephals began to be born than before, that is, there were signs of the termination of the brachycephalic process.
Perhaps, over several thousand years, man, as a representative of a biological species, has finally adapted to the agricultural type of diet?
We did not talk about a tenth share of observations on changes in modern humans, nor did we cite a hundredth of the hypotheses that anthropologists from different countries come up with about them. However, one thing is clear - nature has retained the ability to somehow change our appearance. Rather, man himself retained the possibility of changes.
Anthropology not only registers facts and draws conclusions from them about the past of mankind. She studies the patterns of development of the human body, collects material for predictions, for predictions about the future of the species homo sapiens. Over the past two millennia, even those purely "geographical" changes in man, about which we spoke, have occurred less than in the previous two thousand years. Scientists come to the conclusion that new races of man cannot already arise under the influence of the environment.
Nowadays, people of science love graphics regardless of their specialty. So, the curve of human changes tends to become more and more flat, to turn, in the end, into a straight line. This means that a person in the future in appearance will differ from us relatively little. And it is probably worth saying in conclusion that the deeper anthropologists study the differences between peoples, the more they are convinced of the unity of mankind.
3.01.2016
Man continues to evolve.
We have changed significantly over the past 100 years. If it were modern people at the beginning of the 20th century, they could be recognized without any verification of documents.
People got fatter.
The problem of obesity today is more and more urgent. A study by the World Health Organization last year showed that 29% of the adult population of our planet is overweight. At first glance, the reasons are clear: a sedentary lifestyle, fast food - all this cannot but affect the weight. However, not everything is so simple, since obesity can also be caused by epigenetic reasons. If the ancestors experienced hard times of famine (and such were the case for almost every living person), then the excess of accumulated energy can be “deposited” in the descendants.
And higher.
Over the past few years, the person has become taller. This is evidenced by studies carried out in Russia and in all European countries. The average indicator of growth dynamics in Europe is 11 cm, in Spain and even 12 cm. Today the Dutch are the tallest nation. The average height of men in this country is 1.85 m.It is interesting that during the Second World War the Americans held the palm (1.77 m), but after the middle of the twentieth century in the United States, the dynamics of population growth stopped. According to the WHO, the average growth in Russia in the 60s of the XX century was 1.68, today it is 1.78. Scientists associate the dynamics of growth, first of all, with an improvement in nutrition, an increase in the income of the population, and the development of medicine. Timothy Hutton, economics professor at the University of Essex, argues that growth is the primary indicator of improving public health. Well, we are growing.
Getting weaker?
According to studies cited by anthropologists at Moscow State University, today's adolescents are much weaker than their peers from the 1930s. Measurements carried out on a simple forceometer showed that the average Moscow schoolchild in the last century squeezed 55 kilograms, today the average has dropped to 36. Of course, one cannot say that we are weakening by this indicator, but this should be taken into account as a wake-up call. As we see it, the return of the TRP standards in the country can correct the situation.
We lose concentration.
According to a study published in May last year in the journal Intelligence, the intelligence quotient of people a hundred years ago was 14 points higher than that of our contemporaries, but this is not yet a sign that a person has become stupid over a century, since an IQ test cannot be considered an objective indicator.
New Zealand political scientist James Flynn spoke about this back in the 80s of the twentieth century. He found that, adjusted for time, the rate on this test increased steadily, by about 3-5 points every 10 years. Thus, IQ helps to establish the intelligence of a person in comparison with his contemporaries, in a diachronic respect, this value is correlated.
The reaction speed can tell much more objectively about the level of intelligence development. Thanks to its measurements, it is possible to establish a person's ability to concentrate and promptly solve the task. Researchers at the University of Amsterdam analyzed reaction tests conducted on 9,000 people between 1884 and 2004. The results were disappointing: the average reaction rate dropped so much that it is comparable to 14 points on the IQ system. An unequivocal conclusion that a person has become stupider on this basis cannot be made, but the fact that we have become less concentrated is, unfortunately, a fact.
We sleep less.
Intensive industrialization, scientific and technological progress and other upgrades have led to the fact that people today sleep on average 2-3 hours less than normal. If a century ago it took 8-9 hours a day to sleep, today it takes 5-6 hours. It would seem that it’s okay, but it turns out that this can radically affect the development of mankind. Research conducted by Singaporean scientists from Duke-NUS School of Medicine led by Michael Chi has shown that sleep deprivation causes the brain to age faster. In the long term, lack of sleep could affect the health of entire generations.
We grow up earlier and live longer.
Puberty is happening earlier today than it was 100 years ago. The sexual development of boys and girls in developed countries ends 1.5-2 years earlier than at the beginning of the 20th century, and for every 10 years, the onset of menstruation in girls accelerates by 4-6 months. Acceleration makes people more active in every way. So, there is information about the lengthening of the childbearing period: over the past 60 years, it has increased by eight years. For women in Central Europe, over the past 100 years, menopause has shifted from 45 to 48 years, in our country this time falls on an average of 50 years, and at the beginning of the century it was 43.7 years. We develop earlier, but we live longer. This is not an unambiguous virtue, since a person is forced to learn to deal with new diseases, which medicine simply did not know at the beginning of the twentieth century.
