8 ms·

How We Get Tall

87 points by sizzle 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- ggreer 13y ago
  I've never heard this before. Do you have a source? Some cursory Googling gives me nothing.
  - ZoF 13y ago
    Yeah, I dislike comments like the parent comment. The statement is clearly based on his/her own intuitive understanding based on anecdotal experience; something that can be useful in forming-opinions/developing-understanding , but shouldn't be asserted as fact. It's particularly annoying because a statement like that isn't easily refuted; I mean, after all, a child who literally doesn't move at all has no physical activity and therefore doesn't grow(dies pretty quick actually), whereas a child who exercises regularly does grow, so the MUST be a correlation between exercise and height right? Ultimately, yes, there obviously is _some_ correlation, how much of a correlation and exactly how exercise reflects on a humans development are left unanswered though. edit: Nvm, it's deleted now.
- ProAm 13y ago
  We need some evidence of this. Ive often heard that people are 1/2 of their adult height by age 3.
SoftwareMaven 13y ago
We still haven't reached the average height we were 40000 years ago[1]. Agriculture allowed us to feed many more people, but it came at a terrible price on human health. And the fact that the article says we are taller now than we have ever been in history, which is patently not true, casts a serious level of doubt on the article. 1. http://australianmuseum.net.au/How-have-we-changed-since-our-species-first-appeared http://australianmuseum.net.au/How-have-we-changed-since-our...
- kordless 13y ago
  The article is mostly based on a work by "Tim Hatton, an economist at the University of Essex in the U.K.". That the author took license calling a moment in man's history 'most of human history' doesn't imply the rest of the article isn't worth anything. Also, I don't know living longer, or living without hunger is that terrible of a price to pay. More souls, after all.
- trentmb 13y ago
  > but it came at a terrible price on human health. Could you elaborate please.
- tsenkov 13y ago
  >"We are now generally shorter, lighter and smaller boned than our ancestors were 100,000 years ago. The decrease has been gradual but has been most noticeable in the last 10,000 years. However, there has been some slight reversal to this trend in the last few centuries as the average height has started to increase." Interesting, thanks for sharing. Another very interesting fact - brain gets smaller in volume and unlike height, this trend is still not reversed (not sure about weight, though).
- ama729 13y ago
  > We still haven't reached the average height we were 40000 years ago[1] Yes we do, there are a number of countries where the average height is close to 183 cm (average in your article, though there are no citations given for that fact): The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Serbia, ... In the Dinaric Alps, it even reach 186 cm, so in fact we ARE taller today[1]. But another article[2] with actual sources point to an 176.2 cm average, much smaller than today. > but it came at a terrible price on human health [Citation needed] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#Average_height_around_the_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#Average_height_ar... [2] http://archaeology.about.com/od/earlymansites/a/cro_magnon.htm http://archaeology.about.com/od/earlymansites/a/cro_magnon.h...
  - graeme 13y ago
    Re: health the linked article said that worse diet led to shorter height. Here's a longer discussions (cited by 178): http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanned%20Documents/Intro/Diamond.PDF http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanne...
septerr 13y ago
Could the fact that America has been a melting pot of immigrants moving in from various parts of the world affected the average American height? I am from Southeast Asia, where average heights are less than European or Americans'. And my impression is more people like me have settled in America in recent years than say several decades ago, causing the average American height to go down. In which case, nutrition and healthcare may not be the (sole) cause.
- ZoF 13y ago
  Yep, this very possibility is stated near the end of the article. "That’s probably not the full story—immigration and fertility changes play a role too, after all."
Gracana 13y ago
"It wasn’t until well after the invention of cars and antibiotics that the average European man outgrew today’s average American teenaged girl." Am I missing something or is that a really bizarre statement?
- refurb 13y ago
  It's a bit odd. Instead of just saying "Until the 1940s, average European men were shorter than today's average American girl", the author tried to spice it up with a historical reference. Surprised the editor didn't demand it be changed.
- rdl 13y ago
  Females are shorter than males. Adults are taller than teenagers. It's saying it took until the 1930+s for European men to reach levels of height we'd consider normal for teenaged girls today.
  - thaumasiotes 13y ago
    Yeah, this reminds me of a somewhat chilling moment when a chinese teenager asked me what I was reading about (regression to the mean). By way of introducing the concept, I asked "if someone is very tall, are their parents probably taller or shorter than they are?" "Shorter". So far so good. "If someone is very short, are their parents taller or shorter?" "Shorter". Apparently, to the current generation, no matter how short you are, your parents are shorter. Long live the CCP :/
    - yen223 13y ago
      As people get older, their height gets shorter. It's not entirely wrong to believe that your parents will be shorter than you, no matter what your height is.
      - thaumasiotes 13y ago
        This process has limits. Older chinese aren't short because they're old, they're short because of nutritional stress. Also, shrinking isn't a linear process. You spend most of your life only shrinking a small amount; most of it happens toward the very end: > For both sexes, height loss began at about age 30 years and accelerated with increasing age. Cumulative height loss from age 30 to 70 years averaged about 3 cm for men and 5 cm for women; by age 80 years, it increased to 5 cm for men and 8 cm for women. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10547143 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10547143
Theodores 13y ago
I would be more interested in a 'door height' study. In lots of rural areas you have doors that are clearly built with the expectation that nobody taller than 5'6" would darken the doorway. I believe hats were more prevalent in these pre-motorcar times so there was even less height consideration made. Doors tell their own story, big cities have been redeveloped (and bombed) whereas rural areas or places that have not got much of a look in since the early days of the industrial revolution have not. Given that there is no theory that fully holds water on why we grow tall (I personally blame the Green Revolution), you could probably blur correlation/causation in a 'door and mattress size' study to conclude that 'if we make the doors bigger then people grow to fill them'.
tom_jones 13y ago
I thought the Maasai people of East Africa were the tallest. Their height is all the more impressive considering their rough lifestyles and nutrition.
- Someone 13y ago
  They may be, but you won't see them influence per country average length much, as there are no countries where the fraction of Maasai in the population is large.
- has2k1 13y ago
  The Maasai are not known for their height, it's the Dinka (remember Manute Bol?) of South Sudan.
Dewie 13y ago
> John Komlos, an economic historian who has studied height extensively, thinks we Americans lost our height advantage because of poorer overall healthcare and nutrition compared to Europe. Our social shortcomings, he believes, are literally making us come up short. "lost our height advantage". These kinds of articles always seem to boil down to "why has America fallen from grace/stopped being #1?".
- crusso 13y ago
  With an added hammer pounding for European-style healthcare, which is mentioned three or four times while considering American immigration influx from "shorter" populations is a throwaway word at the end of the article.
  - BugBrother 13y ago
    Is there no "more fast food in USA" hypothesis? (I.e. a lack of fiber, vitamins or something?)
  - muyuu 13y ago
    I also find the "taller is better" a bit unscientific. So, 10, 20 ft tall is better?
    - Dewie 13y ago
      There certainly seems to a popular opinion/belief that tallness is inherently good; describing a person as tall seems to often be a compliment (at least for men). But I'm not sure that is the case for this article. It seems to be saying that overall tallness in a general population might indicate that the people of the population have had a good childhood, on average, with regards to nutrition and such. But, if you have two people from the same population (in this case, countries), one being tall and the other one short, their stature is probably more attributable to their genes. You can't really say that one has had a healthier upbringing; they might have had an equally healthy upbringing, but they have different genes, which is (according to them) the biggest deciding factor for adult stature. If one of them is 5% taller, how can you know, without any more information, that that 5% isn't all because of genes? In fact, maybe the shorter person has had a healthy upbringing and, so to speak, achieved his full stature potential, while the taller person has had a relatively bad childhood and not really met his tallness potential with regards to his genetic make-up.
juggty_dev 13y ago
I thought the Tutsi were the tallest people.
brianfearn 13y ago
When we compare individuals within homogenous populations, taller people actually live shorter lives and have higher rates of cancer and heart disease: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/07/height_and_longevity_the_research_is_clear_being_tall_is_hazardous_to_your.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
- a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
  Small dogs live longer than big dogs. It's the same in all mammals. Within a species the smaller individuals tend to have a higher metabolic rate, weight adjusted, and live longer.
whiddershins 13y ago
This article is a fantastic example of un-science presented as narrative. Conflicting hypotheses about what causes height increase are presented as fact with no citations and little attention paid to the paradox. This reminds me of virtually every article I've read on population trends for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, gun violence ... and what frustrates me is I think the authors and editors don't realize what complete nonsense this is.
- pcurve 13y ago
  Yep, I was expecting a bit better from the Atlantic. This article shed no new light on the topic.
tokenadult 13y ago
I'm seeing the usual comments about life expectancy and IQ here, so I had better respond to both issues. First of all, and I encourage readers to follow the links for more details, today we have longer life expectancies at birth, at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages than ever before.[1] Whatever it is that we are eating these days, so far our diets aren't undermining the steady long-term trend of increasing life expectancy at ALL ages all over the developed world. An article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here’s why"[2] tells the story of the steady improvements in prevention and treatment that have reduced all-cause mortality and morbidity for Americans and for most people in the developed countries. I have been stunned to realize I now have several aunts and uncles who are past the age of 90 and still living independently and in reasonably good health. A couple years ago I was shopping for a birthday present for my own mother, now more than 80 years old, and I found multiple birthday cards for 80th and 90th birthday cards for sale at the bookstore where I was shopping. Lots of people are living a long time now. But don't just take my anecdotes as evidence. Check what professional demographers write about the issue in peer-reviewed journal articles and say about the issue in press interviews. Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,[3] originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Vaupel is one of the leading scholars on the demography of aging and how to adjust for time trends in life expectancy. His striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."[4] There are also comments here about human brain size and human cognitive ability. First of all, it is entirely clear that human cognitive ability as gauged by "g-loaded" IQ tests has been rising for the last century.[5] That's over a time span that doesn't include any noteworthy increase in brain size and is surely a result of environmental factors. The general trend of hominin evolution over millions of years is a general increase in brain size and a general rise in signs of intelligent behavior like skillfully made tools and visual art, but there is not a completely linear relationship between brain size found in fossils (which are a very limited sample of early hominin specimens) and signs of cultural advancement.[6] Cultural innovation can now be transmitted culturally all over the world, so that a small number of innovators can change the material resources and improve the lifestyles of most of humankind. You may not need to be smart enough to invent anything, because you are already smart enough to use most new inventions, wherever they come from. [1] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box/scientificamerican0912-54_BX1.html http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box... [2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/life_expectancy_history_public_health_and_medical_advances_that_lead_to.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_... [3] http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2860ef54d218ce5ce19abe6a59/dc_biodemography_of_human_ageing_nature_2010_vaupel.pdf http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2... [4] http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.aspx http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.... [5] http://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/about-us/directory/beyond-the-flynn-effect http://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/about-us/directory/beyond... http://www.ted.com/talks/james_flynn_why_our_iq_levels_are_higher_than_our_grandparents http://www.ted.com/talks/james_flynn_why_our_iq_levels_are_h... [6] http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/13/from-neanderthal-skull-to-neanderthal-brain/ http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/13/from-nean...

How We Get Tall

87 points by sizzle 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ggreer 13y ago
I've never heard this before. Do you have a source? Some cursory Googling gives me nothing.
- ZoF 13y ago
  Yeah, I dislike comments like the parent comment. The statement is clearly based on his/her own intuitive understanding based on anecdotal experience; something that can be useful in forming-opinions/developing-understanding , but shouldn't be asserted as fact. It's particularly annoying because a statement like that isn't easily refuted; I mean, after all, a child who literally doesn't move at all has no physical activity and therefore doesn't grow(dies pretty quick actually), whereas a child who exercises regularly does grow, so the MUST be a correlation between exercise and height right? Ultimately, yes, there obviously is _some_ correlation, how much of a correlation and exactly how exercise reflects on a humans development are left unanswered though. edit: Nvm, it's deleted now.
ProAm 13y ago
We need some evidence of this. Ive often heard that people are 1/2 of their adult height by age 3.

SoftwareMaven 13y ago

We still haven't reached the average height we were 40000 years ago[1]. Agriculture allowed us to feed many more people, but it came at a terrible price on human health. And the fact that the article says we are taller now than we have ever been in history, which is patently not true, casts a serious level of doubt on the article. 1. http://australianmuseum.net.au/How-have-we-changed-since-our-species-first-appeared http://australianmuseum.net.au/How-have-we-changed-since-our...

kordless 13y ago
The article is mostly based on a work by "Tim Hatton, an economist at the University of Essex in the U.K.". That the author took license calling a moment in man's history 'most of human history' doesn't imply the rest of the article isn't worth anything. Also, I don't know living longer, or living without hunger is that terrible of a price to pay. More souls, after all.
trentmb 13y ago
> but it came at a terrible price on human health. Could you elaborate please.
tsenkov 13y ago
>"We are now generally shorter, lighter and smaller boned than our ancestors were 100,000 years ago. The decrease has been gradual but has been most noticeable in the last 10,000 years. However, there has been some slight reversal to this trend in the last few centuries as the average height has started to increase." Interesting, thanks for sharing. Another very interesting fact - brain gets smaller in volume and unlike height, this trend is still not reversed (not sure about weight, though).
ama729 13y ago
> We still haven't reached the average height we were 40000 years ago[1] Yes we do, there are a number of countries where the average height is close to 183 cm (average in your article, though there are no citations given for that fact): The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Serbia, ... In the Dinaric Alps, it even reach 186 cm, so in fact we ARE taller today[1]. But another article[2] with actual sources point to an 176.2 cm average, much smaller than today. > but it came at a terrible price on human health [Citation needed] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#Average_height_around_the_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#Average_height_ar... [2] http://archaeology.about.com/od/earlymansites/a/cro_magnon.htm http://archaeology.about.com/od/earlymansites/a/cro_magnon.h...
- graeme 13y ago
  Re: health the linked article said that worse diet led to shorter height. Here's a longer discussions (cited by 178): http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanned%20Documents/Intro/Diamond.PDF http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanne...

septerr 13y ago

Could the fact that America has been a melting pot of immigrants moving in from various parts of the world affected the average American height? I am from Southeast Asia, where average heights are less than European or Americans'. And my impression is more people like me have settled in America in recent years than say several decades ago, causing the average American height to go down. In which case, nutrition and healthcare may not be the (sole) cause.

ZoF 13y ago
Yep, this very possibility is stated near the end of the article. "That’s probably not the full story—immigration and fertility changes play a role too, after all."

Gracana 13y ago

"It wasn’t until well after the invention of cars and antibiotics that the average European man outgrew today’s average American teenaged girl." Am I missing something or is that a really bizarre statement?

refurb 13y ago
It's a bit odd. Instead of just saying "Until the 1940s, average European men were shorter than today's average American girl", the author tried to spice it up with a historical reference. Surprised the editor didn't demand it be changed.
rdl 13y ago
Females are shorter than males. Adults are taller than teenagers. It's saying it took until the 1930+s for European men to reach levels of height we'd consider normal for teenaged girls today.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  Yeah, this reminds me of a somewhat chilling moment when a chinese teenager asked me what I was reading about (regression to the mean). By way of introducing the concept, I asked "if someone is very tall, are their parents probably taller or shorter than they are?" "Shorter". So far so good. "If someone is very short, are their parents taller or shorter?" "Shorter". Apparently, to the current generation, no matter how short you are, your parents are shorter. Long live the CCP :/
  - yen223 13y ago
    As people get older, their height gets shorter. It's not entirely wrong to believe that your parents will be shorter than you, no matter what your height is.
    - thaumasiotes 13y ago
      This process has limits. Older chinese aren't short because they're old, they're short because of nutritional stress. Also, shrinking isn't a linear process. You spend most of your life only shrinking a small amount; most of it happens toward the very end: > For both sexes, height loss began at about age 30 years and accelerated with increasing age. Cumulative height loss from age 30 to 70 years averaged about 3 cm for men and 5 cm for women; by age 80 years, it increased to 5 cm for men and 8 cm for women. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10547143 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10547143

Theodores 13y ago

I would be more interested in a 'door height' study. In lots of rural areas you have doors that are clearly built with the expectation that nobody taller than 5'6" would darken the doorway. I believe hats were more prevalent in these pre-motorcar times so there was even less height consideration made. Doors tell their own story, big cities have been redeveloped (and bombed) whereas rural areas or places that have not got much of a look in since the early days of the industrial revolution have not. Given that there is no theory that fully holds water on why we grow tall (I personally blame the Green Revolution), you could probably blur correlation/causation in a 'door and mattress size' study to conclude that 'if we make the doors bigger then people grow to fill them'.

tom_jones 13y ago

I thought the Maasai people of East Africa were the tallest. Their height is all the more impressive considering their rough lifestyles and nutrition.

Someone 13y ago
They may be, but you won't see them influence per country average length much, as there are no countries where the fraction of Maasai in the population is large.
has2k1 13y ago
The Maasai are not known for their height, it's the Dinka (remember Manute Bol?) of South Sudan.

Dewie 13y ago

> John Komlos, an economic historian who has studied height extensively, thinks we Americans lost our height advantage because of poorer overall healthcare and nutrition compared to Europe. Our social shortcomings, he believes, are literally making us come up short. "lost our height advantage". These kinds of articles always seem to boil down to "why has America fallen from grace/stopped being #1?".

crusso 13y ago
With an added hammer pounding for European-style healthcare, which is mentioned three or four times while considering American immigration influx from "shorter" populations is a throwaway word at the end of the article.
- BugBrother 13y ago
  Is there no "more fast food in USA" hypothesis? (I.e. a lack of fiber, vitamins or something?)
- muyuu 13y ago
  I also find the "taller is better" a bit unscientific. So, 10, 20 ft tall is better?
  - Dewie 13y ago
    There certainly seems to a popular opinion/belief that tallness is inherently good; describing a person as tall seems to often be a compliment (at least for men). But I'm not sure that is the case for this article. It seems to be saying that overall tallness in a general population might indicate that the people of the population have had a good childhood, on average, with regards to nutrition and such. But, if you have two people from the same population (in this case, countries), one being tall and the other one short, their stature is probably more attributable to their genes. You can't really say that one has had a healthier upbringing; they might have had an equally healthy upbringing, but they have different genes, which is (according to them) the biggest deciding factor for adult stature. If one of them is 5% taller, how can you know, without any more information, that that 5% isn't all because of genes? In fact, maybe the shorter person has had a healthy upbringing and, so to speak, achieved his full stature potential, while the taller person has had a relatively bad childhood and not really met his tallness potential with regards to his genetic make-up.

juggty_dev 13y ago

I thought the Tutsi were the tallest people.

brianfearn 13y ago

When we compare individuals within homogenous populations, taller people actually live shorter lives and have higher rates of cancer and heart disease: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/07/height_and_longevity_the_research_is_clear_being_tall_is_hazardous_to_your.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
Small dogs live longer than big dogs. It's the same in all mammals. Within a species the smaller individuals tend to have a higher metabolic rate, weight adjusted, and live longer.

whiddershins 13y ago

This article is a fantastic example of un-science presented as narrative. Conflicting hypotheses about what causes height increase are presented as fact with no citations and little attention paid to the paradox. This reminds me of virtually every article I've read on population trends for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, gun violence ... and what frustrates me is I think the authors and editors don't realize what complete nonsense this is.

pcurve 13y ago
Yep, I was expecting a bit better from the Atlantic. This article shed no new light on the topic.

tokenadult 13y ago

I'm seeing the usual comments about life expectancy and IQ here, so I had better respond to both issues. First of all, and I encourage readers to follow the links for more details, today we have longer life expectancies at birth, at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages than ever before.[1] Whatever it is that we are eating these days, so far our diets aren't undermining the steady long-term trend of increasing life expectancy at ALL ages all over the developed world. An article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here’s why"[2] tells the story of the steady improvements in prevention and treatment that have reduced all-cause mortality and morbidity for Americans and for most people in the developed countries. I have been stunned to realize I now have several aunts and uncles who are past the age of 90 and still living independently and in reasonably good health. A couple years ago I was shopping for a birthday present for my own mother, now more than 80 years old, and I found multiple birthday cards for 80th and 90th birthday cards for sale at the bookstore where I was shopping. Lots of people are living a long time now. But don't just take my anecdotes as evidence. Check what professional demographers write about the issue in peer-reviewed journal articles and say about the issue in press interviews. Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,[3] originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Vaupel is one of the leading scholars on the demography of aging and how to adjust for time trends in life expectancy. His striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."[4] There are also comments here about human brain size and human cognitive ability. First of all, it is entirely clear that human cognitive ability as gauged by "g-loaded" IQ tests has been rising for the last century.[5] That's over a time span that doesn't include any noteworthy increase in brain size and is surely a result of environmental factors. The general trend of hominin evolution over millions of years is a general increase in brain size and a general rise in signs of intelligent behavior like skillfully made tools and visual art, but there is not a completely linear relationship between brain size found in fossils (which are a very limited sample of early hominin specimens) and signs of cultural advancement.[6] Cultural innovation can now be transmitted culturally all over the world, so that a small number of innovators can change the material resources and improve the lifestyles of most of humankind. You may not need to be smart enough to invent anything, because you are already smart enough to use most new inventions, wherever they come from. [1] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box/scientificamerican0912-54_BX1.html http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box... [2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/life_expectancy_history_public_health_and_medical_advances_that_lead_to.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_... [3] http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2860ef54d218ce5ce19abe6a59/dc_biodemography_of_human_ageing_nature_2010_vaupel.pdf http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2... [4] http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.aspx http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.... [5] http://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/about-us/directory/beyond-the-flynn-effect http://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/about-us/directory/beyond... http://www.ted.com/talks/james_flynn_why_our_iq_levels_are_higher_than_our_grandparents http://www.ted.com/talks/james_flynn_why_our_iq_levels_are_h... [6] http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/13/from-neanderthal-skull-to-neanderthal-brain/ http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/13/from-nean...