Why the ancient Japanese were so short was actually restricted by a biological law.

Starting from the Han and Wei Dynasties, China called Japan Japanese, which means short. During the Edo period, the Japanese became shorter. The average height of adult males is about 155cm~ 158cm, and that of females is about 143cm~ 146cm.

Then the question is, why were the Japanese in the Edo era so small?

The answer is that there are different opinions, and some say it is affected by nutritional status; Some people say that the Japanese lifestyle inhibits the growth of Japanese leg bones, thus limiting their height; Some people say that the ancient Japanese only ate grains, vegetables and fish for a long time, lacking animal meat to provide rich protein, and malnutrition led to short stature.

Because when it comes to nutrition, the shogunate generals in the edo period in Japan ate a lot of lean meat, but the height data of Japanese generals:

Moreover, by 1945, the height of Japanese women is still below 150cm, and that of men is around 160cm. Therefore, the Japanese are short in height and have certain genetic factors.

Second, the island governs the island

The reason why Japanese people are tall and short is the island regulations.

What is the law of islands?

1964, British scientist John Bristol Foster investigated the growth of animals on 1 16 island, and pointed out that in the island environment, if there were no natural enemies, the size of small animals would get bigger and bigger; On the contrary, if food is scarce, large animals will become smaller and smaller, which is the island law.

The law of islands, simply put, is that small animals get bigger and big animals get smaller.

For example, we know that elephants are all big, but these elephants are all mainland elephants, such as Asian elephants and African elephants. They are all elephants on the Asian and African continents, with a body length of 4 meters and a weight of more than 4 tons.

If these elephants arrive on the island, the resources are very limited and there is not enough food to maintain a normal elephant population, so the big elephants starve to death, while the small elephants are easy to survive because they need less food. An adult elephant eats 100~200 kilograms of plants every day. If a herd of 500 normal-sized elephants is maintained, it needs at least several thousand square kilometers of geographical space.

To maintain the same number of dwarf elephants, dozens of square kilometers of territory may be enough. Therefore, under the action of natural selection, the body of the island elephant becomes smaller and smaller. In this way, after moving to the island, the body becomes smaller, which is called island dwarfism.

Borneo pygmy elephant is the elephant on this island. Borneo elephants are very small, because the ecological environment on the island of Borneo cannot meet the food needs of normal elephants.

Borneo is kalimantan island.

Borneo pygmy elephants, commonly known as Borneo elephants, are much smaller than Asian elephants and African elephants on the ordinary continent. Adult male Borneo elephants are no more than 2.5 meters tall, much like the cubs of normal-sized elephants, with big ears and long tails, and are more docile than Asian elephants.

The picture above shows an adult Borneo elephant, not a young Asian elephant.

Although the Borneo elephant is short, it is not the smallest dwarf elephant. Because Borneo is the third largest island in the world, with an area of 740,000 square kilometers, it is located in the tropics and has a tropical rain forest climate, and the tropical rain forest is the richest ecosystem in the world, so the resources on Borneo are relatively rich.

One of the smallest elephants in history is the European dwarf elephant, which mainly lives in Sicily. Sicily, with an area of 25,700 square kilometers, is the largest island in the Mediterranean, with a current population of about 5 million. However, compared with Borneo, Sicily is a very small island, and it is not a tropical region, so there are very few resources on Sicily.

So the European dwarf elephant in Sicily is only about 90 cm when it grows up. The European dwarf elephant is closely related to the Asian elephant, but after several generations of evolution, it finally became the shortest. It only takes 5000 years for an elephant species with a height of 4 meters to evolve into an elephant with a height of 1 meter!

Sicilian dwarf elephants died out 10 thousand years ago.

Compared with the four tigers, the Siberian tiger on the far left is the Sumatran tiger on the far right.

In addition to the vegetarian Borneo elephant, there are also meat-eating tigers. The Sumatran tiger on Sumatra Island in Indonesia, the Java tiger and the Bali tiger on Java Island are the representatives of this kind of tiger.

1937 the extinct Bali tiger is the smallest of modern tigers, and its size is smaller than that of the Northeast Tiger and South China Tiger 1/3. Bali Lake is about1.15m long and weighs about100kg. It is really as big as a leopard.

The smallest tiger in existence is Sumatra tiger. Male tiger weighs 100- 150kg, and female tiger weighs 75- 100kg.

In addition to making big animals smaller, the island method will also make small animals bigger. After moving to the island, the body became bigger, so it is also called island gigantism.

Examples are the elephant turtle in Seychelles, the Komodo monitor lizard in Indonesia, the elephant bird in Madagascar (extinct before17th century), the fear bird in New Zealand (extinct before 1800) and so on.

Take the elephant bird as an example. We know that at present, the largest bird on the earth is the African ostrich. They are land animals and can't fly. Adult birds can reach 2. Male ostriches can weigh up to150kg.

In Madagascar, which is close to the African continent, land birds are getting bigger and bigger because there are no large carnivores such as lions and cheetahs. The elephant bird here is more than 3 meters tall and weighs 500 kilograms, surpassing the ostrich. An elephant egg is about 30 cm long and 2 1 cm in diameter, and its volume is equivalent to 100 eggs. This is the largest bird egg known.

The elephant bird was last seen by humans in 1649, and then it became extinct. Elephant birds are extinct because local aborigines like to eat elephant eggs, just as we like to eat eggs.

Comparison of Elephant Bird, Ostrich, Man and Chicken

Of course, this does not mean that elephant birds are giant ostriches in Madagascar. Elephant birds are actually not related to ostriches. They have been breeding in Madagascar from a very early age and have evolved into such a huge body without large predators.

Comparison between eggs and elephant eggs

The well-known Komodo monitor lizard is the most classic case of small animals getting bigger in the island law. This giant lizard, which lives on Komodo Island with an area of nearly 520 square kilometers, has the physique of a large crocodile, which is much larger than our common small lizards such as geckos.

On Komodo Island, where there are no other natural enemies, the lizards on the island gradually occupied the top of the food chain, and finally evolved into such a huge shape as it is today with the passage of time.

The mountain is not high, and the fairy is named; The water is not deep, and the dragon is the spirit; If the island is not big, ordinary animals can also become a tourist attraction, so Komodo Island has become a tourist attraction, and tourists from all over the world come here to see the "beauty" of the monitor lizard.

Of course, any scientific truth or law will be questioned, and island law is no exception.

Some people take bats on the island as an example, saying that their shapes will remain unchanged for thousands of years. However, this argument against it is unscientific, because the island law is a natural law that affects terrestrial animals, but it cannot restrain flying animals. Because the food chain and reproductive system of flying animals are not completely limited by the island's ecological environment, birds and bats can not only migrate to other areas for food, but also breed with similar birds and bats in other areas.

We all know that there are migratory birds and resident birds in the world. Even resident birds still have a wide range of activities, and it is difficult for the ocean to limit their habitat expansion.

Third, Japan's countermeasures

Generally speaking, island law is difficult to restrain human beings, because people have the ability to transform nature and will not be trapped on the island, but there are exceptions.

One situation is that in the early days of mankind, human beings had limited ability to transform nature. For example, flores, a realistic version of the Hobbit, lived 654.38 million to 60,000 years ago, and finally they became extinct 654.38+02 million years ago.

This primitive man should not have mastered the technology of shipbuilding, so they were trapped on the island. Their adult height is only100 ~10 cm, their weight is about 25 kg, and their brain capacity is only 1/3 of ours, just like that of gorillas (400 CC).

Flores arrived in loris Island 6,543,800 years ago. At first, they were as big as other primitive humans, but the resources on flores Island were very limited and food was very scarce, so in a few hundred thousand years, flores people evolved into a very short race.

Flores (left), Homo sapiens (middle), Neanderthals (right)

From the last article, we already know that the island rule can not only make the large animals at the top of the food chain smaller, but also make the small animals at the bottom of the food chain bigger.

After human beings invented canoes, rafts and other navigation tools, the applicable characteristics of the island law's restrictions on human beings are no longer obvious.

But there is another exception, that is, closing the country.

Japan's Tokugawa shogunate issued a "lock-in order", so Japan closed its doors in the Edo era, and Japan was an island country, so the image of the Japanese in the Edo era really shrank a lot.

The above picture shows the height data of people on Japanese islands in different periods through archaeological excavations. It can be seen that from 4000 BC to around A.D., the height of residents on Japanese islands was around 158cm, until A.D. 1 century, a group of people suddenly came, which Japanese historians called "people on horseback". They should have arrived in the Japanese archipelago by boat, conquered the aborigines, and made the height of the Japanese rise to 164cm in a short time.

After that, the communication between the Japanese archipelago and the outside world gradually declined, which led to the gradual decline of the Japanese height. Until the edo period, due to the closed door of the shogunate, it was difficult for the Japanese to obtain foreign resources, so their height fell below 154cm. It can be seen how harmful it is to close the door to the outside world.

In order to change the short stature of Japanese people in a short time and avoid becoming dwarfs, the Japanese government promulgated the School Lunch Law, which made bottled milk a compulsory diet for teenagers and children, and it became an important part of education, making children realize the importance of milk.

With the supplement of calcium in milk, the height of Japanese people has really made a qualitative leap. At present, the average height of Japanese is over 170cm for men and about 160cm for women. At this time, the Japanese are about the same height as us in China.

This shows how influential the Island Law is.