Population history and ecology, in addition to climate, influence human stature and body proportions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Worldwide variation in human stature and limb proportions is widely accepted to reflect thermal adaptation, but the contribution of population history to this variation is unknown. Furthermore, stature and relative lower limb length (LLL) show substantial plastic responses to environmental stressors, e.g., nutrition, pathogen load, which covary with climate. Thus ecogeographic patterns may go beyond temperature-based selection. We analysed global variation in stature, sitting height and absolute and relative LLL using large worldwide samples of published anthropometric data from adult male (n = 571) and female (n = 268) populations in relation to temperature, humidity, and net primary productivity (NPP). Population history was modeled using spatial eigenvector mapping based on geographic distances reflecting the hypothesized pattern for the spread of modern humans out of Africa. Regression models account for ~ 50% of variation in most morphological variables. Population history explains slightly more variation in stature, sitting height and LLL than the environmental/climatic variables. After adjusting for population history, associations between (usually maximum) temperature and LLL are consistent with Allen's "rule" and may drive similar relationships with stature. NPP is a consistent negative predictor of anthropometry, which may reflect the growth-limiting effects of lower environmental resource accessibility (inversely related to NPP) and/or pathogen load.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".