A new paper in the Economics & Human Biology journal argues that male height in Europe is mostly determined by nutrition and genetics. That's not exactly earth shattering news. However, the authors also point out that Y-chromosome haplogroup I-M170 shows a strong correlation with the highest average stature on the continent, and speculate that the link between the two might be Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherer ancestry:
The average height of 45 national samples used in our study was 178.3 cm (median 178.5 cm). The average of 42 European countries was 178.3 cm (median 178.4 cm). When weighted by population size, the average height of a young European male can be estimated at 177.6 cm. The geographical comparison of European samples (Fig. 1) shows that above average stature (178+ cm) is typical for Northern/Central Europe and the Western Balkans (the area of the Dinaric Alps). This agrees with observations of 20th century anthropologists (Coon, 1939; Lundman 1977). At present, the tallest nation in Europe (and also in the world) are the Dutch (average male height 183.8 cm), followed by Montenegrins (183.2 cm) and possibly Bosnians (182.5 cm) (Table 1). In contrast with these high values, the shortest men in Europe can be found in Turkey (173.6 cm), Portugal (173.9 cm), Cyprus (174.6 cm) and in economically underdeveloped nations of the Balkans and former Soviet Union (mainly Albania, Moldova, and the Caucasian republics).
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The trend of increasing height has already stopped in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Germany. In Norway, military statistics date its cessation to late 1980s.
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In contrast, the fastest pace of the height increase (≥1 cm/decade) can be observed in Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Latvia, Belarus, Poland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece, Turkey and at least in the southern parts of Italy.
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Although the documented differences in male stature in European nations can largely be explained by nutrition and other exogenous factors, it is remarkable that the picture in Fig. 1 strikingly resembles the distribution of Y haplogroup I-M170 (Fig. 10a). Apart from a regional anomaly in Sardinia (sub-branch I2a1a-M26), this male genetic lineage has two frequency peaks, from which one is located in Scandinavia and northern Germany (I1-M253 and I2a2-M436), and the second one in the Dinaric Alps in Bosnia and Herzegovina (I2a1b-M423)16. In other words, these are exactly the regions that are characterized by unusual tallness. The correlation between the frequency of I-M170 and male height in 43 European countries (including USA) is indeed highly statistically significant (r = 0.65; p < 0.001) (Fig. 11a, Table 4). Furthermore, frequencies of Paleolithic Y haplogroups in Northeastern Europe are improbably low, being distorted by the genetic drift of N1c-M46, a paternal marker of Ugrofinian hunter-gatherers. After the exclusion of N1c-M46 from the genetic profile of the Baltic states and Finland, the r-value would further slightly rise to 0.67 (p < 0.001). These relationships strongly suggest that extraordinary predispositions for tallness were already present in the Upper Paleolithic groups that had once brought this lineage from the Near East to Europe.
Citation...
Grasgruber et al., The role of nutrition and genetics as key determinants of the positive height trend, Economics & Human Biology, available online 7 August 2014, DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2014.07.002
