Sama Hoole@SamaHoole
In 2022 a team of Czech and Montenegrin anthropologists published the most comprehensive height survey ever conducted in the Western Balkans. They measured 47,158 people across Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, and Kosovo.
The result overturned an assumption that had stood for fifty years. The tallest 18-year-olds in the world are not Dutch.
They are from Montenegro. The average 18-year-old male in Montenegro is 182.9 cm. In Dalmatia, 183.7 cm. There is a continuous belt running from the Adriatic coast through Herzegovina into central Montenegro where average male height exceeds 184 cm. In some towns it is over 187 cm.
This is the highest mean stature ever documented in any human population.
The strange part is that the Balkans are not rich. GDP per capita in Montenegro is roughly a fifth of the Netherlands. Protein intake is well below Western European levels. By every conventional metric, the Western Balkans should be producing average heights similar to Bulgaria or Romania.
Instead they are producing the tallest men on earth.
The explanation is genetic. Y-chromosome haplogroup I-M170, present in over 70% of men in Herzegovina, correlates with male height across all 55 European and Near Eastern populations the researchers tested. Wherever the haplogroup is common, the men are tall.
The haplogroup is descended from the Gravettian culture of the Upper Palaeolithic. The Gravettians were big-game hunters. They specialised, for roughly 15,000 years, in killing mammoth, bison, reindeer, and aurochs across Europe. They ate, in caloric terms, almost exclusively animal products. The most meat-heavy diet documented in the European archaeological record. Hundreds of generations of selection pressure for converting animal protein into skeletal stature.
When the megafauna disappeared, most Gravettian populations dispersed and intermarried with incoming farmers from the Near East, who carried different haplogroups associated with shorter stature. The Western Balkans, isolated by the Dinaric Alps, retained an unusually high proportion of the original hunter genetics.
The men of Herzegovina are the genetic descendants of mammoth hunters who spent the Ice Age eating fat and meat in quantities no modern population approaches.
They are still tall, on a sub-optimal modern diet, because the genes were selected for height by 15,000 years of animal-based eating.
If their nutrition reaches Northern European levels, the prediction is that average male height in central Herzegovina will reach 190 cm within two generations. Six foot three. As an average.
The Dutch built their height in 150 years on dairy.
The men of the Dinaric Alps built theirs over 15,000 years on mammoth.
And the variable, in both cases, was the animal.
