A few years ago, the news that the average height of Japanese teenagers far exceeded the height of Chinese teenagers triggered several rounds of heated discussions on the Chinese Internet, and many unwilling people turned to the idea of their ancestors because they could not meet the requirements of the "big" han in reality. I don't know who was the one who moved, thought of the Terracotta Warriors, the height of the Terracotta Warriors is easy to find on the Internet, so some people cheered: Qin Han Chinese average height of 1 meter 85!
So why is it that in modern times to modern times, it is one meter six? Some people give a very domineering explanation - they are all harmed by the Manchus, the Manchus have made China poor, and the Han people are short! Ancient Chinese that was a tall and mighty good man who was more than 1 meter 7 per capita!
What are the facts?
Taking the Qin figurines to say that the height is too outrageous
First of all, let's talk about holding the Qin figurines as the height. It is true that the Qin figurines are undoubtedly modeled on the real image when they are manufactured, and thousands of figurines have young adults and look older, and the age coverage is also a bit representative. Isn't this 1 meter 85 real? Before rejoicing, we need to see what a Qin figurine looks like.
Notice that in order to make the figurine statue stand firmly on the ground, each Qin figurine has a non-thin foot pad at the bottom of the foot, so when measuring the height of the clay figurine, the height of this foot pad is counted. From the "Excavation Report of the First Pit of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses Pit of the Mausoleum of the First Emperor of Qin 1974-1984", in fact, this has been studied. The entire height from the foot pad to the top of the head is called "tonggao", and most of the height of the excavated standing clay figurines is in the range of 180cm to 195cm, which is the origin of the so-called 1 meter 85 per person height.
However, also in the "Report", archaeologists also measured another value, that is, the height without the foot pad, only from the sole of the foot to the top of the head, which is called "foot to top height" in the report. So what is the situation of this "foot to the top"?
We can directly look at the data in the Report:
("Qin Shi Huang Mausoleum Terracotta Warriors and Horses Pit No. 1 Excavation Report 1974-1984" One of the Size Registration Forms of Ceramic Figurines)
It can be seen that between the two values of "pass height" and "foot to top height", there is a gap of about 10 centimeters up and down, that is to say, after deducting the foot pads, the height of the very realistic Qin Terracotta Army is only one meter and eight.
But that's not all.
Because "foot to the top" still does not represent "height", why?
Take a closer look at the details of these clay figurines -
Yes, although it is the top of the head, the ancients also had a bun hat on it... Removing this factor, it was necessary to lower several centimeters, so the actual height of the entire Qin Terracotta Army was 1 meter 7.
It doesn't seem to be very bad, 1 meter 7, and the height of modern Chinese youth is the same, even higher than most places. But don't forget, the Qin figurines are military brigades, elite divisions, equivalent to the level of the forbidden army, and their height will naturally be higher than the average of their contemporaries. So where did the height of the ancients look? Some people may move out many history books to prove it with the statements recorded in the history books, but unfortunately, the weights and measures of ancient society are not conclusive, such as the study of the size of the ruler in the Han Dynasty, and when an eight-foot boy appears in the book, we cannot know exactly which "ruler" it is measured. Even in the Ming and Qing dynasties, the construction ruler, measuring ruler, tailoring ruler are still different, what is the seven-foot boy 7 feet? We don't know.
Height estimates from human bones
The text is not good, there are archaeology can help, digging so many ancient tombs, the unearthed remains of the ancients can be really a lot. Of course, many skeletons are already incomplete, perhaps a leg bone or an arm bone, but anthropologists still have a way to estimate the complete height from such a long bone by comparing the complete skeletons of a large number of similar populations and deriving empirical formulas.
(The lower end of the femur excavated from the Sanyan culture tomb in LamaDong, Liaoning Province, shows that its owner suffers from severe rheumatic arthropathy))
At present, the Chinese ancient long bone height calculation equation, in addition to using the internationally more common Trotter-Gleser and Duertuis-Hadden equations, there are Shao Xiangqing, Chen Shixian, the Ministry of Public Security Research Group, Zhang Jizong, Mo Shitai, Zhu Hong, and other scholars, organizations have summarized their own equations, such as Trotter-Gleser on the Mongolian race height calculation equation is:
Height = maximum length of the femur X 2.15 + 72.57 cm
The height calculation equation for Shao Xiangqing's 20- to 30-year-old Han males is:
Height = maximum length of the left femur X 2.30 + 643.62 mm± 34.81 mm
Height = maximum length of the right femur X 2.31 + 644.84 mm± 34.86 mm
Of course, although these equations are different, the conclusions reached are basically close, and it can be considered that everyone has begun to have a stage of common destiny in the study of this field. We can also use these research results to judge the true height of the ancients through the physical remains of the ancients.
Ancient height data
For the sake of the validity of the evidence, let's take a look at what the height of the ancient Chinese was. In the tombs of the original social site of Xiawanggang in Henan, 17 bones were unearthed, of which 15 were males and 2 were females, all adults from their prime to old age. The bones are intact and can be measured directly to calculate the height of the parties, after the archaeological team calculated that the average height of the male was 1.61 meters, the shortest was 1.48 meters, and the highest was 1.77 meters; the two women were 1.54 meters and 1.60 meters tall, respectively.
Also in the Ruins of Waliu Xizhou in Zhengzhou, Henan, 21 men were as low as 1.42 meters, as high as 1.73 meters, with an average of 1.55 meters, and 12 women with an average height of 1.48 meters;
In the Warring States period, the average height of men was 1.67 meters and that of women was 1.54 meters, which seemed to have increased to a certain extent compared with the situation in primitive society and the Western Zhou Dynasty, of course, such a single site could not represent the complete situation of that era.
(Tombs from the Warring States to the Tang Dynasty were found around the ruins of Shengle Ancient City in Inner Mongolia, providing a rich sample for paleoanthropology research, showing a Han Dynasty tomb and skeleton))
In the tuchengzi ruins of Inner Mongolia and Linger County in the same Warring States period, the average height of men was between 1.63 and 1.66 meters, and the females were in the range of 1.51 meters to 1.55 meters. Considering that for a long time, the nomadic peoples of the northern steppe were slightly shorter in height than the residents of the Central Plains, and this result can basically confirm the assumption that the ancients were taller than the primitive society during the Warring States period.
Then to the Han Dynasty, Shaanxi Chengcheng Liangfu Cemetery, of which 7 cases of male average height of 168 .6cm, 3 cases of female average height of 152.83cm, and the previous Warring States period height of a level.
Later, in the Three Yan cultural tombs of Liaoning Lama Cave in the Sixteen Kingdoms era of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, the male was 1.67 meters and the female was 1.54 meters, and in the Northern Wei Datong tombs of the same era, the average height of 14 men was 167.4cm. It shows that the height of Chinese in this period still maintains the level since the Warring States period, and there is nothing special about it.
After more than a thousand years, we will not elaborate on them one by one, but directly look at the height of the Ming and Qing people.
In the Tomb of the Ming and Qing Dynasties in Tao Garden, Jixian County, Tianjin, the average height of men is 167.19cm, and the female is 152.89cm, which is obviously consistent with the level since the Warring States.
That is to say, throughout the ancient society, the average height of Chinese was roughly maintained at the level of 1 meter 67 for men and 1 meter 53 for women, and the ups and downs did not change much in more than 2000 years. This level is basically in the middle of the world in the same period, comparable to the Roman Greeks and the like, and shorter than some northern European Germans with an average height of more than 1 meter 7. Of course, what the ancients averaged 1 meter 7, 1 meter 8, nature is just delusional, modern experience shows that the most critical per capita height is the per capita nutritional status, meat, eggs and milk intake occupies a decisive element in it, ancient Mencius is still looking forward to the seventy can eat meat of the beautiful society, obviously this society can not support how good the per capita nutrition status, natural size will not be much tall. Whether to link pride with height or to the height of ancestors is really speechless.