Tag Netherlands

Humans getting taller – is it all in the mind?

LisaTulfer Leave a comment

I recently listened to a programme on the BBC World Service which explored the reasons why humans have got taller in recent generations, and why people in some countries are generally taller than in others.  The programme grabbed me from its opening sentence, which asserted that the Netherlands was the tallest country for men (for women, Latvia just nudged ahead).  As I am half-Dutch, and have always been one of the tallest women amongst my friends and colleagues, this interested me.

There is not, it appears, a consensus as to the cause of this increase in height (nor is it consistent – in some places, such as the United Kingdom, the rate of increase has slowed markedly, and in others, such as Uganda, it has actually reversed).  There are two main theories: firstly, it’s genetic.  The predisposition to be tall is inherited, either individually or in certain groups of the population.  Secondly, it is attributed to the improvements in nutrition and healthcare during the past two centuries or so, together with (arguably) greater equality in society.  This, it is argued, explains why the historic differences in heights between the privileged classes and the poor (evidenced by archaeology) have narrowed in recent generations as nutrition and healthcare have improved in the general population.  This theory is also espoused by Dutch researchers, who attribute the Netherlands’ position as a country of unusually (by international standards) tall people to a national diet which is big on dairy produce, an excellent welfare state, and a more equal society.

I’m no scientist, so I’m not qualified to evaluate the detail, but on the face of it this second theory is quite plausible.  It also avoids the slightly queasy overtones of eugenics which inevitably attach to any theories which posit that one group of people is genetically better than another – and undoubtedly human society regards being tall as a Good Thing.  Small may be beautiful, but higher is better – just think for a moment about all the words and phrases which include ‘high’ – can you think of many that are negative?  Would you rather be high status or low status?  High class, high quality, the moral high ground, high-minded, the high life – altitude equals advantage.  Studies show that taller people are more successful, healthier, richer.  Taller men are deemed more attractive to women.  It has a wide range of psychological advantages – most humans equate height with status and leadership.  Who wouldn’t want to be tall?

The programme offers a third theory, however – that increased height is linked to increased optimism.  Where a society is hopeful about its future, its children and grandchildren grow taller.  Until fairly recently, the USA was the country with the tallest people – might this be a result of the American Dream?  The programme cited the case of Germany after the First World War, when the rigid stratifications of society broke down and there was the prospect that people could improve their situation.  So many children grew so tall that it was thought to be a medical problem, an abnormality.  Proponents of this theory cite sub-Saharan Africa, where height increased significantly in the middle of the 20th century, arguing that this was as a result of a wave of optimism after the end of colonialism; in many countries where there has been ongoing instability that trend has since reversed, with adults now being, on average, shorter than their grandparents.  Also, this theory suggests that the famous tallness of the Dutch was due to a surge of optimism in 1848, the ‘Year of Revolution’ in Europe which in the Netherlands saw the creation of a constitutional monarchy.

So – can tallness be caused by optimism, self-confidence, a positive view the future?  Could a physical change like this be the result of a psychological outlook – a psychological outlook on the part of a society or community, moreover, rather than the individual who is growing up tall?  I find it a fascinating idea.  I was born in the late 1960s, which was, I gather (I was a bit young at the time to experience it first hand), a time of optimism, social change and liberation.  More specifically, my parents were at that time turning their backs on the constraints of society and looking ahead to a life of fulfilling their dreams of travel and freedom.  My father (of Welsh ancestry and a working-class background) was born during the First World War and at 5’6” (168cm) was significantly taller than his parents or siblings.  My mother was a shade shorter than him, and the tallest person in her (Dutch) family was my grandfather (born in 1900 into a professional middle-class family), who had peaked at 5’7” (170cm).  By the age of 13 I was the same height as my grandfather, and a final growth spurt while at university took me to 5’ 7 ¾“ (172cm).

This makes me quite a bit taller than the average for a woman in the United Kingdom (figures vary, but it’s somewhere around 5’4” or 162cm), and also taller than the average for the Netherlands (5’6” or 168cm).  In the UK, it is very unusual for me not to be the tallest woman in the room – so much so that it’s quite disconcerting when I meet a woman who is taller than me.  I had always put my height down to Dutch genes and good nutrition – but what if it’s actually a product of being born to idealistic parents at a time of promise and societal optimism about the future?  And how does that fit with my mindset, which is definitely not positive or optimistic – wouldn’t it be the ultimate irony if my tall body was the product of a psychology that my mind doesn’t share?


Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

If you are interested in the programme which inspired this piece, it’s available to listen at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct064s.

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Portraits of the past – my family history in photographs

LisaTulfer 1 Comment

Last year I came into possession of a large collection of family photographs.  I am the last person standing on that side of the family, so on the death of the last of the previous generation is all passed to me.  We’re not talking a few albums here – the collection completely filled the back of an SUV!  Most of the albums were in poor condition and had been stored in damp or dusty places, so a priority was to remove all the photographs (copying the annotations onto the back of the photos where appropriate) and throw away the wreckage of the albums.  There were also a lot of loose photographs, as well as some in frames (many with broken glass).

Eventually, I was able to group them into rough families, eras and locations.  There were a huge number of duplicates, so the first edit was to choose the best of the duplicates, again copying any annotations, and put aside duplicates for cousins in America if they were likely to be of any interest to them.  Then, I went through each group of photographs, weeding out any which were of no particular family history interest, or where the features were blurred, or choosing one from a series of almost identical shots (there were lots of these, especially 1950s landscapes.  It was apparently a thing in Scandinavia to take many photographs of the back of people standing in a field gazing at distant hills…).

After many evenings and weekends of going through photographs, peering through a magnifying glass at blurry faces, and getting very dusty, I have now whittled the collection down to a single crate, all divided into acid-free archival envelopes labelled with details of the contents (pre-war Holland, Helsinki Olympics 1952, holiday to Wales July 1961, etc).  I also started a notebook, with a page for each year, so that I could track the events and movements relating to the various strands of the family.  One wet Sunday afternoon this winter I plan to create a timeline from the notebook, which colour coding for each branch of the family, for the whole of the 20th century (and also scanning the most interesting ones of shared ancestors to send to my American cousins).

This side of my family is Dutch (via military service in the Dutch East Indies and internment in Japanese camps during WWII), with various members emigrating to America, Finland and Britain.  It has been a fascinating – and occasionally harrowing – exercise to follow individuals from newborns, through rites of passage, family memories, pets and holidays, to ageing, and in one case, death (it seems it was the fashion to take open casket photographs in 1940s America).

I have glimpsed the interiors of Dutch colonial houses of the 1930s, Scandinavian holiday shacks in the 1950s, and American ranches in the 1970s.  I have found that some of the stories I was told as a child were true, and others were not, while still others have got garbled in the telling.  I have been saddened by the toll that WWII took on my grandfather (he was in his 60s when I was born, so I never knew him as anything other than old).  I have been moved by how much my teenage grandparents were obviously in love, in photographs from their courting days which I had never seen.  I have seen my own features and expressions looking out at me from the faces of long-dead relatives.  And I now have a much clearer sense of who I am, and where I have come from.