Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9439901" data-attributes="member: 18">Yes. The 1800s figures seem like they may either be bollocks or have some sort of specific causes. They just don't line up at all with the archaeology and history from earlier times (even rough times), and there doesn't seem to any particular actual theory for why age of menarche would suddenly jump up from 14-15 as it was in Medieval Europe, to 16-17, then slam down to 12-13 and stay there (whereas going down from 14-15 to 12-13 makes sense, as people get better fed and healthier and possibly industrial chemicals also play a role).It's not that your recollection is wrong, to be clear - it's that the claim that the 1800s figures were in any way reflective of periods before the 1800s (and perhaps 1700s) seems... hard to sustain. Possibly they weren't even reflective of the actual 1800s.If we're to assume that they're not some kind of Victorian nonsense (which, frankly, they could be, but probably not) then lack of calories/nutrition and massively increased use of serious child labour (particularly doing physically demanding work) would be the most likely causes in pushing the age up, combined with higher level of stress, probably. All of those things definitely can have an impact. And we do know that people in the 1800s often ate far worse than people in say, the 1300s (in terms of both calories and nutrition) - yes absolutely including peasants/serfs. But I can't even find anyone with even that obvious-seeming theory. There just doesn't seem to be a theory at all as to why that would happen. There does seem to be a baseless assumption that before the 1800s the figures must have been the same or higher, because they came down in the 1800s, but archaeological fact flatly repudiates that notion.Indeed archaeology shows that the age of menarche among normal people in virtually all of history was closer to the ages we see now that it is to the reported ages from the 1800s.I just couldn't find anything to support the temperature stuff being significant. I strongly suspect that was overwrought pop-science conjecture that has since been discarded. Certainly the central heating thing is a myth - even the figures I could find don't remotely support that or match at all timing-wise.</blockquote>

Verification