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We admire good journalistic arbitrage, and thus take off our hats to Park Seung Guk over at DailyNK for an interesting piece on some new anthropometric data. In a forthcoming article in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, a team of South Korean researchers estimated the average heights of Koreans in the Chosun dynasty from femurs removed from tombs (Dong Hoon Shin, Chang Seok Oh, Yi-Suk Kim and Young-il Hwang “Ancient-to-Modern Secular Changes in Korean Stature.”) The main point of the piece is that Korean stature was relatively unchanged from the 15th through the 19th century—in contrast with European developments—before inflecting in the early 20th century.
But our intrepid DailyNK reporter noticed that the average heights for the Chosun period-- 161.1 plus or minus 5.6 cm and 148 plus or minus 4.6 cm for males and females respectively—permitted comparisons with current-day South and North Korea. Yep, you guessed it: depending on the precise estimate chosen the average North Korean is not any taller than his Chosun dynasty counterpart.
We know, we know; the exercise is a more than a little tendentious. Daniel Schwekendiek’s Socioeconomic History of North Korea provides a useful summary of recent research in this area, including his own, which backs up the core point of the new South Korean study. North-South differences really emerge in cohorts born after 1935-1944. For that cohort, heights were pretty much the same North and South, making the Chosun comparisons a bit of a red herring. Nonetheless, others have drawn the invidious comparison that North Koreans are currently as short as they were under the most oppressive phase of Japanese imperial rule. Ouch.
But much recent analysis has still not captured the full effects of the mid-1990s famine. Moreover, we don't have the data to probe spatial differences across the country, particularly between Pyongyang and the provinces. Tendentious or not, the situation could even be worse than Park suggests.
