Limb Lengthening Forum
Community Hangout => Off Topic => Topic started by: CaptainAmerica on March 05, 2018, 04:23:07 AM
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A common idea here is that early puberty = shorter height. It's typical to see in men, I know a lot of kids who were 5'4-5'5 and prepubescent, high-voice, etc until sophomore year in high school and they all grew to be over 6ft, meanwhile the kids who matured in 8th grade were done growing by the time high school started.
People stop growing once puberty hits apparently because estrogen slowly causes the growth plates to fuse. This is a common reason to explain why women are shorter than men, their higher levels of estrogen and earlier maturation causes them to stop growing earlier and for them to be shorter.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acceleration1.jpg
Yet female height has increased over the past 200 years while the age female's have their first period has decreased significantly. Just look at Germany, they reach puberty a whole 2.5 years earlier.
If you cut off any boys puberty and growing time by 2.5 years, he would be significantly shorter, I mean 3 inches shorter. Yet, this trend in earlier menarche has had absolutely no effect on final female height.
Is puberty time, duration, hormones, etc... really not as important to final height as doctors think?
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Another question to pose is what is the bio-evolutionary advantage of early puberty in males? Like why does it even need to happen at all? If it's such a maladaptive phenomenon why the heck does it still occur?
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Male height has also grown.
I'd guess both women and men with precocious puberty end up shorter than their non-precocious peers. The fact they're still taller now is most likely due to the increasingly better living standards, nutrition, epigenetics, and also sxxual selection. So everyone's taller now, despite the fact many are hitting puberty earlier. You need to compare differences in height of modern people and look for a statistically significant correlation between puberty and their final heights.