The determination of anthropometric historians to unearth the broad patterns of human biological well-being is now too well known to need reiteration. From Richard Steckel's exploratory essays, which could be taken as the launching manifesto of the discipline, to the most recent publications, many hundreds of thousands of records from nearly all continents of the globe have been examined (Mascie-Taylor 1991; Steckel 1979). All of this effort notwithstanding, we are still in the initial phases of this research program, with many important features of the agenda remaining unsettled (Floud, Wachter, and Gregory 1990; Fogel 1993; Komlos 1989; Mokyr and O'Grada 1988). One such question is related to the most startling discovery to date, namely, that as part of its adaptability to its socioeconomic environment, human physical stature has undergone cyclical fluctuations during the course of the last quarter of a millennium (Fogel 1986; Komlos 1987,1994a, 1994b; Nicholas and Oxley 1993).
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