Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook had Kyle Harper on their podcast recently [1] and he went over topics in this book for about an hour. He brought up that peop

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook had Kyle Harper on their podcast recently [1] and he went over topics in this book for about an hour. He brought up that people that lived in railroad towns in the US in the 19th century were shorter than they were elsewhere, resulting from more stressors related to living in a population-dense area with higher rates of disease transmission. And the same applied to urban parts of the Roman Republic/Empire. But, here [2], another group make the case for pollution being the cause of stunted growth in the UK, which reminds me of this article in The Atlantic pointing out that pollution in parts of the Roman Empire of ~150 AD was only surpassed >1500 years later in the industrial revolution [3]. So maybe the higher density-shorter (and generally less healthy) population relationship is a combination of factors. [1] https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/217-plague-and-the-decline-of-the-roman-empire/id1537788786?i=1000574949041 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/217-plague-and-the-dec... [2] https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/241633/1/Heights_Pollution_R2_F2_Complete.pdf https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/24... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/scientists-reclaim-the-long-lost-economic-history-of-rome/560339/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/scientis...