How do you decide how healthy people are generally in a society? Well one way is to look at how tall, on average, that they are. This is based on the logic that a child who is healthy and well fed will grow into a taller adult than one that does not enjoy these benefits.

Using this simple measure Richard Steckel, a professor of economics at Ohio State University, has looked the health of European populations through the ages and the most interesting finding is that people living in between the ninth and eleventh centuries were quite a lot healthy than those that lived later. Average height declined steadily from this period through to the the industrial revolution in the 17th/18th centuries.

In the last century we recovered much lost ground and are now back to being as healthy as we were 1,200 years ago.

He has applied the same technology to native American populations and discovered that the urbanisation of pre-Columbian societies lead to a general decline in health. One can hypothesise that the increasing density of living lead to hygene issues that impacted the general health of the community in both these societies.

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