Now, scientists have figured out a new reason for the height of the Dutch—and it has to do with natural selection. Scientists have long been fascinated by the sheer tallness of the Dutch, who gained over eight inches in height over the past century and a half. But a new study suggests that evolution made the Dutch taller than the rest of us.
The researchers found that the sharp increase in height of the Dutch people was triggered by the change in the political system of the Netherlands in the mid th century. Before the establishment of the liberal democracy in the Netherlands, this country was a colonial empire.
During the colonial period, most of the wealth of the Netherlands was in the hands of high society. But after the establishment of liberal democracy, the wealth started to diffuse among all the groups in Dutch society. As a result, the income of the average people of Dutch society got a boost. They got access to better medical care, medicine, better products, and nutritious food.
Their average lifespan increased and the mortality rate dropped down. Thus, their living standards also improved. This directly contributed to the sharp increase in the average height among the Dutch people. And this explanation is based on pretty straightforward logic.
With more money, people can buy more nutritious food, afford better health care and medical treatment. As a result, they can provide better living standards for themselves and their family so that their children can grow taller and healthier.
But the higher living standard of the Dutch people is not the only reason why they are so tall. Many countries made significant improvements in the past few decades similar to the Netherlands. But these countries did not witness such a sharp increase in height of their citizens as the Netherlands. The other reasons are also discussed briefly here. This is another reason why the Dutch people are so tall. They consume a lot of dairy products. And you must've heard that calcium makes the bones grow stronger and bigger.
And scientists confirmed that there is a direct correlation between height and dairy product consumption. For years, scientists have been trying to figure out why. Now researchers have found evidence that natural selection may be a factor. In other words, in the Netherlands, taller people had more children. Stulp and his team at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine discovered this by mining data from a large database of information about people living in the northern Netherlands from to In the United States, the pattern was strikingly different.
It was shorter women and average height men who had the highest fertility. There is no concrete explanation for why taller Dutch people have more children. And on the reclaimed land, they built a nation that went on to rule the very waves it defeated. A popular local saying immodestly sums up this achievement. The biggest single Dutch landgrab came with the construction of the Zuiderzee Works, a mind-boggling engineering project that saw the Netherlands steal another 1, sq km of land in the heart of the country.
Consequently, as the sea was pegged back, Dutch farmers turned not to cash crops like wheat, but to cows, which grazed merrily on what had once been the ocean floor. They remain among the biggest consumers of milk in the world. Those eponymous cities, along with Woerden and beautiful Alkmaar, are amongst the best places to witness the Dutch love affair with dairy at its most ardent. They host the most famous cheese markets in the Netherlands, where traders and farmers indulge in the time-honoured Dutch tradition of haggling animatedly over wheels of cheese, before settling on a price and sealing the deal with a handshake.
In Woerden, farmers bring their wares to market on antiquated tractors and clip clop across the market square in their wooden clogs which have chunky heels that add another couple of inches to their height, as if they needed it.
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