Agrippa: How Pygmies became short

[Agrippa]

No, Agrippa. We haven't agree on anything. All pygmies have normal human brains... meaning the body stops growing after the brain has fully matured... The brain doesn't prematurely stop growing in pygmy populations.

Thats true, did I say something else?

"Fully mature" is different from population to population and individual to individual.

Again true and untrue at the same time since we can see that mature races (compare with the links I posted) have a certain development of the body in which they reach the leptomorphic maturity, whereas other, mostly rather pyknomorphic groups, retain infantile proportions of lets say the premature phase of mature racial types (like Dinarid, Silvid etc.)

That can be even proven statistically, as I said I will make, when I have more time and nerves, a whole thread about the basic physical relations of body types, including plates, measurements, comparisons etc...

So its true from the standpoint of progressive types (and general human development-Hominisation) to state that primitive groups show signs of phylogenetic and infantile ones of ontogenetic retardation (or in the last case earlier determination, to say it friendlier and probably more appropriately too).

[human2]

agrippa said:

No, Agrippa. We haven't agree on anything. All pygmies have normal human brains... meaning the body stops growing after the brain has fully matured... The brain doesn't prematurely stop growing in pygmy populations.

Thats true, did I say something else?

To be honest, and I hope, again, you don't take offense, I don't know what you say most of the time. You speak in ambiguities, mixing applied values with objective facts.. so that you can actually argue the opposite stances using the same language.

What I'm sure of is that you don't mean what I mean.

[Educate Me]

Mayas are not reduced like pygmies, the reason why some groups had almost pygmie like height is that they were starved populations who couldnt achieve their normal heights, poor nutrition.

[Educate Me]

In the early nineteen-seventies, when the anthropologist Barry Bogin first visited Guatemala, the country’s two main ethnic groups seemed to live on different social planes. The Ladinos, who claimed primarily Spanish ancestry, were of average height. The Maya Indians were so short that some scholars called them the pygmies of Central America: the men averaged only five feet two, the women four feet eight. The Ladinos and the Maya shared the same small country, so their differences were assumed to be genetic. But when Bogin, who now teaches at the University of Michigan, began taking measurements he soon found another cause. “There was an undeclared war going on,” he says. The Ladinos, who controlled the government, had systematically forced the Maya into poverty. Whether they lived in the city or in the countryside, the Maya had less food and medicine, and they had much higher rates of disease.

A decade and a half later, after civil war had erupted and up to a million Guatemalans had fled to the United States, Bogin took another series of measurements. This time, his subjects were Mayan refugees, between six and twelve years old, in Florida and Los Angeles. “Lo and behold, they were much taller than the Maya in Guatemala,” Bogin says. By 2000, the American Maya were four inches taller than Guatemalan Maya of the same age, and about as tall as Guatemalan Ladinos. “As far as I know, it’s the biggest increase of its kind ever measured,” Bogin says. “It shows that they weren’t genetically small. They weren’t pygmies. They were suffering.”

www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040405fa_fact

[Agrippa]

ienjoylurking said:

Mayas are not reduced like pygmies, the reason why some groups had almost pygmie like height is that they were starved populations who couldnt achieve their normal heights, poor nutrition.

Thats true but such trends lead a) to modification and b) long term selection in the direction of reduced pyknomorphy. Thats evident if looking at the typical Istmid subtype of Zentralids, especially if comparing with normal Zentralids (Pueblid subtype) which are reduced themselves, but still with more normal proportions. The Istmid type is the epitome of a reduced-dependent-poor farmer population type.

Even if they grow they just look like "giant babies", because of their infantile growth and proportions, but dont reach normal height and proportions if speaking really about Istmids - most, not all Maya are of that subtype.

Istmids and the Palaungid subtype of Palaemongolids are just extreme examples of reduction-infantilisation of farmer populations.

Other Indianid racial types suffered too, but even if they were short, they looked nothing like that.

Typical Istmids:

Yes, they grow if getting more food, but more in the breadth than length...
And in most cases you can draw a line from head to head in such Indianid types, that is genetic uniformity, social conditions alone would still make them looking more different if being genetically more different. But thats an inbred poor farmer population, and it was like that since the old Mayas reached their carrying capacity and began to biologically degenerate and losing their former cultural height as well.