Objectives: Average adult height of a population is considered a biomarker of the quality of the health environment and economic conditions. The causal relationships between height and income inequality, are not well understood. We analyse data from 169 countries for national average height of men and women and national level economic factors to test the two hypotheses: 1) income inequality has a greater association with average adult height than does absolute income; 2) neither income nor income inequality has an effect on sexual dimorphism in height. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 F o r P e e r R e v i e w 2 include Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Gross National Income per capita adjusted for personal purchasing power (GNI_PPP), and income equality assessed by the Gini coefficient calculated by the Wagstaff method. MethodsResults: Hypothesis 1 is supported. Greater income equality is most predictive of average height for both sexes. Greater per capita purchasing power explains a significant, but smaller, amount of the variation. . National GDP has no association with height. Hypothesis 2 is rejected. With greater average adult height there is greater sexual dimorphism. Conclusions:Findings support a growing literature on the pernicious effects of inequality on growth in height and, by extension, on health. Gradients in height reflect gradients in social disadvantage. Inequality should be considered a pollutant that disempowers people from the resources needed for their own healthy growth and development and for the health and good growth of their children. -----------------------------------------This article is derived from the 2016 Human Biology Association Plenary Session titled "Worldwide variation in human growth -40 years later." The title of the symposium is taken from the 1 st and 2 nd editions of books of the same title by PhyllisEveleth and James Tanner (Eveleth & Tanner 1991). Contributions to the symposium were meant to update the topics included in Eveleth and Tanner's books.The purpose of this article is to update and evaluate worldwide variation in economic and social factors that influence the biology of adult height. We analyze national level data for measured heights for the year 1996 of men and women in 169 countries.We conduct the analysis based on two hypotheses: 1) that income inequality has a greater association with average adult height than absolute income, and 2) that sexual dimorphism in adult height remains fairly constant under different conditions of income and income inequality. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 In the present analysis we employ as measures of income the national GDP (to...

We demonstrate an association between external skeletal robustness and physical activity, which is not captured by in BMI measurements. Children should be physically active in order to maintain skeletal robustness.

There is a common perception that tall stature results in social dominance. Evidence in meerkats suggests that social dominance itself may be a strong stimulus for growth. Relative size serves as the signal for individuals to induce . We construct a thought experiment to explore the potential consequences of the question: is stature a social signal also in humans? We hypothesize that (1) upward trends in height in the lower social strata are perceived as social challenges yielding similar though attenuated upward trends in the dominant strata, and that (2) democratization, but also periods of political turmoil that facilitate upward mobility of the lower strata, are accompanied by upward trends in height. We reanalyzed large sets of height data of European conscripts born between 1856-1860 and 1976-1980; and annual data of German military conscripts, born between 1965 and 1985, with information on height and school education. Taller stature is associated with higher socioeconomic status. Historic populations show larger height differences between social strata that tend to diminish in the more recent populations. German height data suggest that both democratization, and periods of political turmoil facilitating upward mobility of the lower social strata are accompanied by a general upward height spiral that captures the whole population. We consider stature as a signal. Nutrition, health, general living conditions and care giving are essential prerequisites for growth, yet not to maximize stature, but to allow for its function as a lifelong social signal. Considering stature as a social signal provides an elegant explanation of the rapid height adjustments observed in migrants, of the hitherto unexplained clustering of body height in modern and historic cohorts of military conscripts, and of the parallelism between changes in political conditions, and secular trends in adult human height since the 19 century.

The human growth pattern with different developmental stages is a result of evolutionary trade‐offs showing specific features. The prolonged childhood and adolescence with their typical growth spurts is associated with age‐ and sex‐specific development of maturation signs, and changes of body proportions and dimensions. Biological age can be estimated with different methods and helps to classify human growth‐specific biological age stages. These stages include typical body markers, but also sociocultural and cognitive signs. Age‐specific growth velocity patterns and changes in proportions and dimensions are genetically fixed. Humans exhibit phenotypic plasticity that can result in secular trends. Conventionally, increases of body height and earlier maturation are explained by better nutrition and living conditions. However, strategic growth adjustments are being considered as possible explanations for the secular increase in height. In addition, reductions in some skeletal proportions in contemporary populations are assumed to be the result of reduced physical activity.

adolescence, childhood, life history, menopause, senescence | I N TR ODU C TI ONFor this Centennial Perspective, we write about the ways that historical literature has influenced our own current set of understandings of human physical growth and development and our hypotheses of how the human pattern of growth evolved. Four historical events and premises structure our current approach to understanding growth in the context of human life history:1. the discovery that there exists a constant interplay between evolution with physical growth and development; 2. the recognition of novel features of human growth and development, and several ways these may be organized into a continuum of ontogenetic events; 3. evidence that human life course biology establishes the foundation for the capacity for human culture and biocultural reproduction; 4. the interactive nature of human life course biology with the social, economic, and political environment.For each we discuss the basic ideas we currently deploy and how those came into being, drawing on historical theory and especially on articles published in the AJPA and Yearbook of Physical Anthropology (YPA). At first glance, our four events and premises may seem disparate, but we hope to show that they are interrelated and, essentially, different facets of a common human biology. We do not expect all readers to agree with our approach, but we hope that by laying out our broader theoretical rationale we will stimulate new research. In addition, newer AJPA readers may learn something useful about the career-long process of personal theorybuilding as they plan their own professional life course of research, which is the basis of the discipline as it will be 100 years hence.Our essay is not an exhaustive review, rather it highlights some critical research and scholarship and mentions research by the current authors where appropriate ("all is vanity" Ecclesiastes 1:2). | TH E IN TE RP L A Y B ETWE EN E V OLU TI ON WI TH P HY S I CA L G ROWTH A N D DE V EL OP M EN TThe great lesson that comes from thinking of organisms as life cycles is that it is the life cycle, not just the adult, that evolves (Bonner, 1993, p. 93).The study of biological growth in relation to evolution has a venerable history. D'arcy Thompson (1860Thompson ( -1948 used mathematics and principles of mechanics to show in a formal and scientific manner the physical and geometrical constraints of developmental biology within which evolution could operate (Thompson, 1917). Thompson took issue with natural selection as the only force of evolution and as the primary "lathe of evolution", that is, the process that shapes biological form to any functional adaptation. Instead, he argued that some biolog-

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The present investigation confirms the decline in relative elbow breadth in recent decades. Analogue, but even more pronounced changes were detected in pelvic breadth that coincides with the modern decline in upright locomotion. The findings underscore the phenotypic plasticity of humans while adapting to new environmental conditions.

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