Demographics: Average male height, over centuries

If you know anyone who likes to romanticize the past before the Industrial Revolution, show them this chart.

Today, if a man is under 5'6, he's considered unusually short. But that would have been unusually tall for practically all of European history until the twentieth… pic.twitter.com/fPpW5clJfY

— Alex Epstein (@AlexEpstein) March 5, 2026