[isrul]

"ten-year-olds were around 8in shorter than children today: by the time they were fully grown they were nearly as tall as modern adults”. If you have a dead ten year old and a dead adult, how can you claim the ten year old will become a "normal" size? It's dead and will never grow and you never will know what size the full grown skeleton was when it was ten.

[Gatún(CraigIsaMangoTreeLawyer)]

"If you have a dead ten year old and a dead adult, how can you claim the ten year old will become a "normal" size?"

Excellent point.

[El Gato]

If you have a dead ten year old and a dead adult, how can you claim the ten year old will become a "normal" size? It's dead and will never grow and you never will know what size the full grown skeleton was when it was ten.

What was meant was that statistically those who died at 10 where shorter than today's 10 year olds, but that the adults who died where about the same size as today's adults. Again, statistically speaking.

Of course it could be that whatever caused the 10 year olds to die, also tended to cause them to be shorter than they otherwise would have been.

Since genetics pretty much determines one's ultimate height, in absence of adverse environmental effects, disease, malnutrition, the notion would be that until recently those adverse effects kept many people, even most, from achieving their full height. Genes don't change that quickly, in humans that is. In bacteria, fruit flies, moths, etc, they can.