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In Search of Human Origins, Part II

Student Handout

Still Evolving After All These Years

Are you bigger or smaller than your grandparents were at your age? What about your great-grandparents? Instead of digging up the family records, make a graph of the data below and see if it gives you a clue as to what you might find.

Chart 1
Average Height (in centimeters) of North American Boys

Age	birth	2	4	6	8	10	12	14	16	18	20
1880	50	82	95	108	118	127	138	149	162	16	170
1960	60	90	104	117	128	137	149	163	170	172	172

Chart 2
Average Weight (in kilograms) of North American Boys

Age	birth	2	4	6	8	10	12	14	16	18	20
1880	3kg	12	15	18	23	27	33	40	52	58	58
1960	4kg	13	17.5	22	27	34	43	54	62	67	69

height in cm	200
	150
	100
	50
		0	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90	100
weight in kg

Questions
Write your answers on a separate sheet of paper.

What can you conclude from your graphs? What other evidence might you want to collect to prove that we are still getting bigger? How useful are these data in helping you to draw conclusions about the relative sizes of other groups of humans besides North American boys? What are some possible explanations for this increase in size?
If these data charts were not available, how might anthropologists have discovered this growth increase in boys over the past century? What artifacts of the past could we compare to contemporary items to document the increasing size of Americans?

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