In 2015, the official release of a data Chinese average height showed that the average height of adult men in China was 167.1 cm, and the average height of adult women was 155.8 cm. Objectively speaking, this average height is not called "high", the reasons are naturally multifaceted, and I will not argue here.
For a long time, everyone had their own set of fixed cognitions about the height of Chinese people. For example, northerners are generally taller than southerners; for example, the living conditions of the ancients are not good, and nutrition cannot keep up, so their height is generally not as high as that of modern people. But after the excavation of ancient tombs 5,000 years ago in Shandong, some fixed cognitions have been subverted.
The Jiaojia site was discovered in Jiaojia Village, Jinan, Shandong Province, and this site was also included in the list of "Annual Top Ten National Archaeological New Discoveries" in 2017. The site was discovered 33 years ago, and archaeologists arrived and found that there were countless remnants of the Dawenkou culture left here.
A brief introduction to the Dawenkou culture, which belongs to the Chinese Neolithic culture, has a long history, about 6500 to 4500 years ago, and the Yellow Emperor period is about 4600 years ago, that is to say, the ancient ancestors of the Jiao family lived earlier than the Yellow Emperor. The question is, do you think that the ancestors lacked clothes and food, and their height was definitely not as high as ours?
Objectively speaking, the life of the ancestors is naturally not as good as that of modern people, they "work at sunrise and rest at sunset", mainly rely on artificial crops, and have low productivity, which is true; but archaeologists have found that the male tomb owner in Tomb M 184 of the Jiaojia site is close to 2 meters tall.
His skeleton looks like a "giant", and his identity before his death should be a tribal leader according to analysis. In addition to him, many tall skeletons of more than 1.8 meters in height have been unearthed in other tombs, which shows that the ancients were not as generally short as we think, on the contrary, their height can also be proud of many modern people.
Did the ancients really surpass us in height? We can look at some examples from historical sources. The Warring States Policy records: "Zou Jixiu has more than eight feet, and his appearance is beautiful. "Zou Ji was a minister of the State of Qi during the Warring States period, and at that time, one foot was equivalent to the current 23.1 centimeters, so that Zou Ji's height was at least more than 1 meter 84, close to 1 meter 9.
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms also records: "The First Lord (that is, Liu Bei)... Seven feet five inches long, he was on his knees and looked at his ears. "During the Three Kingdoms period, one foot is equivalent to the current 24.2 centimeters, and Liu Bei's height is about 1.81 meters, which is put into modern society, and Liu Bei also belongs to the appropriate "tall man".
These data prove at least one thing: there was no shortage of tall ones in ancient times. The "giant skeleton" unearthed at the Jiaojia site also looks logical. 5,000 years ago, Shandong men were already tall and mighty men, and experts speculated about the emergence of this phenomenon for different reasons.
Some experts believe that the status of these tomb owners before they were born is relatively high, so they also occupy more resources, popularly speaking, eat well and tall; but some experts have proposed that Shandong water and soil have raised people since ancient times, when the farming culture was advanced, the climate environment was warm and humid, so tall people sprung up like mushrooms after the rain, and even passed on to future generations through genes, and then continued to this day.