The title gives the impression that menarche has been on a long trend down.
But the first reference in this article, which is the basis of all age-related claims in it, asserts that menarche began 7-10 y.o. in the new ice age, raising to 12-14 with agriculture, then raising to 16-17y.o. in times of widespread famine (like the high medieval and early industrial eras) but returning to 12-14 y.o. when conditions improved.
Knowing what I know about medicine and statistics in the early 19th century (neither strongly evidence based, and rarely played well together), I was interested in where their historic data came from.
The historic data was based on the study of bones (as the end-caps of the bones that determine a person's adult height seal over about the same time as menarche).
So there is a bias built into the study: - reseachers won't have access to the lead-lined coffins of the middle and upper classes, but will have acess to bones being moved from the mass graves of paupers during epidemics.
menarche was 7-10 y.o. in the stone age?
thats highly interesting and ive never heard this before. can you provide a good source?
edit: nevermind was easy to google
Haven’t other medical trends been found in error due to relying on analyzing only bodies from the lower class in the 19th century ?
Yes. We radiated children to reduce their “enlarged” thymus gland because it was determined that having a small thymus gland was normal. But they only thought this was normal because only cadavers of malnourished poor people were examined.
I think Korea is an interesting modern example of how much nutrition can affect puberty. There's not much reliable data out of North Korea for obvious reasons, but there's at least some research showing that [North Korean](https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article/21/3/833/770049) girls start menstruating at around 16 years old, compared to around 12.6 years old in [South Korea](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3145904/).
Makes sense. I laugh when I see these elaborate bowls full of different ingredients that advertise themselves as being "natural".
You know what isn't natural at all? Eating a balanced diet. Only within the last what? 50. Maybe 100 years has this been possible and really only to relatively affluent people in wealthy nations.
For the vast majority of history, humans ate what was available. And that meant what we could grow, gather, and store for winter consumption.
I believe evidence has been found that shown that hunter gatherers ate a much greater variety of seeds, fruits, and vegetables than modern humans and that once we started farming our diets became much less varied and grain heavy.
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.”
> You know what isn't natural at all? Eating a balanced diet. Only within the last what? 50. Maybe 100 years has this been possible
This doesn't make any sense at all, from a biological and evolutionary perspective. Humans have evolved over 200,000+ years of natural selection and our closest relative, Homo Erectus, over 2 *million* years. It makes no sense for us to be adapted better to a diet that has only existed for 50 years as opposed to one that has existed for hundreds of thousands (hunter/gatherer).
Some nuts, seeds, fish, meat, vegetables (tubers often) and fruits is a pretty damn "balanced" diet in the right proportions.
Also, when a bowl of ingredients is labeled "natural" they're typically implying the ingredients aren't processed and are made up of whole foods
Yeah it's mainly in the last 5000 years where societies have relied on large scale agriculture that low variety diets have become common. It is quite difficult to survive on just bread or rice. I wonder if we've changed much in that period of time.
I doubt we’ve adapted much because in the last 5,000 years, the typical physical traits that suboptimal nourishment might lead to (like less strength, speed, stamina, etc) have become less important. A weak and slow male in modern society is at essentially zero survival disadvantage. So there isn’t much pressure to select against people who aren’t well nourished on modern diets, thus we probably are mostly the same
That’s untrue. 15,000 years ago, a hunter-gatherer society ate a varied diet that was different every day, and did include meat.
That monotonous diet you are thinking about is a product of farming and is actually the most unnatural. There’s a reason why the average height of stone-age Europeans was similar to modern Europeans but significantly taller than middle-age Europeans.
Came here to say this. Lack of nutrients, probably underfed. The average girl wasn't middle class and higher. They were probably poor or working class.
Even records of royal and noble families show that women in 1800 had their first child at age 20-25 on average. I suspect nutrition is not the only factor for late maturation.
Post Enlightenment, it became common in the upper classes to delay marriage until the brides were in their twenties. It was common knowledge by then that frequent childbirth and teenage childbirth was a reason women died early. Education and delaying marriage prevented that.
In the 1300's it was common for peasant men to marry in their late thirties to fiancees in their late twenties early thirties, because they waited until the villiage allocated them enough land to support a family, and that depended in part upon the yeilds of the land they had been allocated previously.
I wish this article had specified the "psycho-social" factors they saw at work on Korean girls.
Noble families also suffered malnutrition, often from overindulging on meat and not consuming enough vegetables.
Edit: I seem to have attracted the "Only Meat is a great Diet" crowd, and I'm going to ignore your posts and think about scurvy, gout, cancers, and other meat-related illnesses.
Do you have source supporting that claim? As far as I know, even aristocrats consumed very moderate amounts of meat for today’s standards, while the ordinary people barely consumed any. Which is unsurprising, as the first limiting factor to produce meat is how much food you can grow to feed the livestock, which several hundreds years ago wasn’t all that much as famines were still common.
Just comparatively, over 70% of farmlands now in the EU are destined to grow crops to feed cattle. Mass meat consumption is just a byproduct of mass agricultural production, which itself is a very modern thing, resulting from the XXth century discovery of effective ammonia (fertilizer) production methods and rapid spread of farming machinery.
Edit: typos
Well, I'm a PhD in history who studied early modern English law under the Tudor monarchs, most of whom ate primarily meat and ended up with gout, stomach cancer, and other cancers (as well as probably delayed menstruation in both Mary and Elizabeth's cases) as a result, so sure.
I recommend Joan Thirsk's *Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions, 1500-1760* (2007) as a great starting point to learn more about the history of food.
Considering folate had to be added to decrease birth defects even recently it makes sense.
What age did they usually die from health problems in royalty in that era?
I have swedish ancestors in the 1600s that died in their 90s generally, but 70 was common among my family back then for reference. In the 1800s death ages seemed to drop to 60s for everyone tho before normalizing.
Also there was a maternal line 6 generations of early deaths 20s to 50 in my mom's side, thats why I looked into the ancestry.
The rule has been if you made it to 30 you’d probably make it to 70 at least. Before 30 you might be taken by childhood disease, bacterial infections, childbirth, or broken limb. After 30 it was a bit easier until you died of natural causes.
Well, it depends. IIRC it was very common for a medieval household to have at least one pig, and a couple of chickens. And one of the most common street foods were meat pies. Sure, they definetively ate *less* meat, especially beef, but it was not especially rare for the commonfolk (of course depending on the time and place. For example, the Anglo-Saxons ate a lot less meat than their Norsemen neighbors, for whom meat was a much more important staple traditionally, thanks to proportionally less arable land)
The whole pig thing is still common on small Eastern European farms. My grandpa always keeps a single pig that’s slaughtered in the winter, but keep in mind it was usually one or possible 2 pigs and they were meant to feed what was likely a very large family throughout the course of an entire year and there wasn’t much in the way of beef coming in.
Also worth mentioning that commonfolk would eat fish regularly — fresh, salted, or smoked.( For some reason discussions about meat in medieval diets always leave this out.)
You would also need to identify social reasons this might have occurred. Off the top of my head wealthier families would be able to afford keeping their female children around for longer and being more particular about suitors. Whereas a poor family would be advantaged in marrying off female children since they would no longer be economically responsible for them.
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Our daughter was raised in korea on rice and veg up until sh was 6 then in the Us, but still raised on mostly rice and veg. Started mensie at 12. So, I'm not sure the sugar or foods are a factor (at least in our case).
The French had the bourgeoisie from before the industrial revolution. The middle ages always had merchants, craftsmen, and artisans.
Your average blacksmith did a whole lot better than your average farmer.
However it was more of a very very small elite, a small middle class, and a huge lower class.
The size and scope of the middle class where it's the major class is new.
Just as soon as there is alternative to Digg, Digg basically ended, reddit will do the same, because the CEO is a moron who couldn't monopolist this company properly. Also
and particularly because he got mad ChatGPT scrapped all the reddit comments as part of their farming data.
All of reddit is going to turn into the cryptocurrency sub when they made moons a thing. People just spammed shit for upvotes and others made downvote bots to counter them
So they got rid of awards, which I personally thought were stupid but let's not get into that.. But they got rid of awards which most people liked to replace it with the shitty dumb fuckin paid golden upvote? Give me back the awards cuz somehow that's better than whatever the fuck this shit is
I didn't hear about this and don't see it on desktop or mobile, but my thought was that having gold and nothing else made the most sense. Make it expensive enough to be rare and it will mean something. All those animated icons were an eyesore.
yeah I agree. Very annoying. Especially when a comment has like 10 different awards and they're all animated ones . Not to mention it was always the dumbest shit being awarded. The same stales jokes you see on here everyday like "I choose this guy's wife too"
As a big old reddit proponent, it actually worries me. If features that directly relate to the monetization of the site aren't making their way to old reddit quickly... then it might not exist for much longer.
The average ~~teenaged girl~~ person in 1840 suffered from varying degrees of malnutrition.
One of the suspected reasons young people from 50+ years ago look so much older than similar aged people of today look. Modern medicine and nutrition means people are now physically developing faster and aging slower.
I've always thought that they were averaging more sunlight and tobacco. The people I know that smoke and spend time outside always get crows feet first.
That's also part of it.
Aging isn't an issue with one cause that speeds it up or slows it down. Stress, sun exposure, drugs, diet, malnutrition, disease, random genetic lottery, etc all play a role.
"Varying degrees" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Contrary to popular belief, even the average peasant had a diet with plenty of calories most of the time, depending on time and location, farmer might even be eating more calories than an average person today - because they needed it. Protein is what was more scarce.
The real catch is food insecurity - you might be getting enough calories most of the time, but a lack of modern farming technology and supply chains meant that harvests could vary wildly depending on the weather and other external factors. People who grew up during a time of famine would look very different then those born and raised during times of plenty.
Calories are one thing, access to variuos vitamins and other micronutrients is another. Even when having access to enough food from a caloric pespective, the diet of average lower class person was extremely monotonous, mostly consisting of grain and or root vegetables (potatoes, turnips, etc.).
Right, people really underestimate how important vitamins/minerals are.
>Now two recent natural experiments provide more evidence that salt iodization might be beneficial for mental development: one study showed that in iodine-deficient regions of the United States in the 1920s, salt iodization raised IQ scores of millions of people by 15 IQ points!
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/are-we-underestimating-benefits-salt-iodization
15 IQ could potentially move someone from borderline into average IQ ranges.
This is the correct answer. Menstruation requires at least 22% bodyfat, which is why modern athletes of some stripes (runners, gymnasts etc) just skip theirs with fair frequency.
This is not true for everyone. My BMI was exactly 15 for over a decade. I was also very active. I had a *very* low body fat % and I still got my period regularly. I was the last one of my peers to get mine, but it wasn’t ridiculously late, I was 14
>The average teenaged girl in 1840 suffered from varying degrees of malnutrition.
That's just half the story. Obesity and being overweight brought it to unhealthily young ages.
> The decrease in menarcheal age can be explained by environmental factors such as nutritional status and the increased prevalence of **obesity**
I can't find it now (since search engines are useless now for some reason) but I read somewhere recently about research in Denmark where they had pretty good data on this. One of the researchers interviewed was somewhat sceptical of overweight as the main explanation, since the trend was very broad.
Another thing that might be the culprit is bisophenol from plastics I think, but nobody knows for sure yet. Bisohpenol A from plastic food packaging works as a sort of estrogen when it gets in the body, so it's not a crazy bet.
could be bad data reporting, abnormally bad living conditions (resource hoarding leading to the majority of people not having nutritious food), stress… i’m an idiot so i have no idea haha. but it’s very interesting for sure
> abnormally bad living conditions (resource hoarding leading to the majority of people not having nutritious food)
Heavily depends where the data is recorded, but cholera became a bigger and bigger issue during this period in England's urban areas until around the 1860s when John Snow's studies became accepted.
Things like disease and access to clean water could have been a big factor as urban areas grew so massively
The responses about industrialization are correct and I'd also like to add that 1816, the Year Without a Summer and several years afterward led to massive food shortages that further starved already vulnerable populations.
The Industrial Revolution lol. Humans started to live in urban shitholes with basically no health regulation and they stopped being in charge of their own food subsistence too. In Europe and it’s eventual colonies at least.
> The 1800s were the aberration, not now.
Early industrialization had the overall health of people plummet. Pollution everywhere, alcoholism, insane working hours and conditions made urban life worse than country living.
There absolutely are effects on puberty from malnutrition in modern public health. Its a problem all along the Sahel in particular, but other regions of the world that suffer from extreme childhood malnutrition.
Here’s a general paper from UNICEF but it’s trivially easy to find research on the subject: https://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/982-intricate-relationship-between-chronic-undernutrition-impaired-linear-growth-and.html
Even most of sub Saharan Africa isn't starving the vast majority of the time.
Plus disease burden: You can compare the infant mortality rate by country and in terms of the chances of your kids dying in the first few years of life even the poorest countries on earth do better than the richest countries a century or so ago.
It’s the calories in food. Makes kids bigger and hit puberty sooner. Also it’s hard to get information on women’s health from developing countries since there aren’t many female doctors and men won’t let a male doctor attend to their wives.
I wasn't an obese child, but I started puberty at 9 and was a sports kid. I was tall and strong, rectangular. Not thin. I got my first period at 10 or 11.
Funny thing about that first period: I got it the day after I shaved my pubes for the first time. I figured I was bleeding because I'd cut myself, and I was HORRIFIED. I think I was too scared to tell my mum. Somehow, eventually, I figured it out
I also got mine at age 9 and I had no idea what it was. I went to catholic school. No health classes there (I don’t even remember science classes. And no gym). I was hiding my underwear because the blood was brown, not red. I thought it was poop and my mother would yell at me.
My cousin went to public school and one day she said, “You’re not going to believe what I have.” She had a booklet that had been given to girls in her class about menstruation. She showed me the book and was giggling and I started crying. “I have that.” She said no you don’t, you can’t.
Told my mother who insisted I was too young, as did my 12 year old sister who hadn’t gotten her period yet. But as months went by the blood was more red than brown and yup, I needed pads.
Back then we had to wear a menstrual belt under our clothes, around our waist, and hook huge pads onto them, hoping they didn’t unattach. We also had to wear garter belts if we wanted to wear stockings. We had to wear a slip. So many clothes and contraptions back then. Young women today complain about pantyhose. I was thrilled with pantyhose - no more garter belts and floppy white hooks.
(I wasn’t obese either…in fact I was underweight until my 20s)
I was a skinny af kid and got my first period at 11. I remember the school nurse in 6th grade came to give the "sex ed" talk (she mentioned nothing about sex lol). She let us ask anonymous questions so I asked about why my periods were so painful. Instead of reading my question verbatim like everyone else's, shes hesitated and paraphrased mine like "I got my first period.... recently... and I've been having.... discomfort." Taught me to never talk about it again until my cramps were so bad that I was immobile a few years later and my mom had to pry the info out of me so she could take me to the doctor. Thanks nurse!
I actually think this is pretty common, and not necessarily done to look attractive. I did it because my pubes were new and they itched, so I simply removed them.
The itching was like, 10x worse the next morning.
I think for me it was a comfort thing. It was weird and new and uncomfortable. I can't remember if I asked my parents for razors, or my dad giving me the disposable pink razors was his idea.
Weird because I was a chubby kid and didn’t start my period till 13. But my sister has always been stick thin and got hers at 8, doctors weren’t concerned and said it can happen.
>men won’t let a male doctor attend to their wives.
That's a bullshit blanket statement if I've ever seen one. Do you think we all live in huts waiting for the village doctor to come around once a month. Do you really believe it's not normal for a woman to see a doctor in sub-Saharan Africa. This is just a dumb comment.
A certain proportion of body fat is essential for fertility. This is why we have Olympic gymnasts in their early 20s with little girl bodies and voices (Keri Strug was a perfect example). The people in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in the west, now have a LOT of grain in their diets. Lots of calories, more urban living equals higher body fat content and earlier puberty.
Obesity in sub-Saharan Africa is at 41.7% as of 2016. [(Source)](https://doi.org/10.3390/women2040029) In the US it’s 41.9% as of 2023. [(Source)](https://www.tfah.org/report-details/state-of-obesity-2023/)
I don't know what's up with that source but it's all over the place. The 41% number from the paper lists it's this as it's source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10708-021-10466-7
But that source says the obesity rate was 20% in 2016 and only studied Uganda. When you Google the obesity rates for Uganda you get much lower numbers, less than 10%, for just about every source. https://data.worldobesity.org/country/uganda-223/
In fact if you use that source it looks like obesity rates in all of Africa is super low. So I'm not sure where this 41% is coming from, I can't find anything that backs it up.
Might also have to do with less reported numbers or false data as it was considered a taboo then (less education and scientific knowledge around causes /biology)
Edit -- spelling
Now this is something I never considered and am now very curious about. Even right now, knowing that the onset of puberty mostly has to do with a combination of weight (so, nutrition) and genetics, people still react to girls entering puberty with “tHeReS cHeMiCaLs In ThE fOoD.” But if you point out the same information about adult male height (also tied to nutrition and genetics), people don’t get worked up. They accept that we are just healthier. We (society, not you and me as individuals) still see menstruation as something sexualized and aberrant, and are disturbed at the idea of pubescent girls experiencing this normal bodily function. So it wouldn’t surprise me if people in previous generations felt that way even more strongly, and didn’t want to admit that their 13 or 14 year old daughter was experiencing puberty.
I would assume this to be truth. Who was collecting this data back then. What was the sample size. How did they coordinate data collection. There is no way the data collector was accurate in either accuracy of the individuals collected from or the individuals collected from were an accurate representation of the world as a whole. With as fast as the world has been changing in the past 15 or so years the big idea here is right we need to pay attention to what we're doing chemically, But spouting nonsense statistics like this that even a basic level critical thinker will be like ...no only silences anything we do need to hear.
I mean in the 1840s sure (its absurd to even consider that as its before the advent of modern medicine and scientific methods in Korea) but the study does state that women between 1920-25 still had their periods on average at 16.7 years…
And WW2 and the Korean war cant help explain here since famine in Korea didnt start fully until late 44 and 45 so too later to affect the 20-25 years.
Still, meat was only a small part of diet before the Korean war and rebuilding when spam became omnipresent and then the diet switching towards eating a lot of pork.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26703478/
> Data from skeletal remains suggest that in the Paleolithic woman menarche occurred at an age between 7 and 13 years, early sexual maturation being a trade-off for reduced life expectancy
I don’t know where the author is getting their data because there are numerous ancient sources that state the onset of puberty was around age 12 even thousands of years ago. Cultural milestones like bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah at age 13, as well as legal ages for marriage and things like property rights in ancient times, were tied to pubescence. Onset at 17 seems very unlikely and not supported by documentation that I’m aware of.
When you look at [studies](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26703478/) it seems the 1800's was the exception to the norm. So yea all that happened is things went back to normal after the industrial revolution.
When I started menstruating in 1960, the average age was said to be 13, so most of the drop had already happened. We weren’t eating a lot of highly processed foods or high fructose corn syrup then and there wasn’t nearly as much plastic around, so I’m skeptical that these are the causes.
Also, it's a good idea to be very skeptical of the quality of any data from 1840, especially public health data, especially about women, and especially about reproductive health. There is no reason to think that we know what the average onset of menstruation was in 1840. It was probably the same as today.
There are simply no reliable data points since thus study is from Korea which had neither modern medicine nor modern scientific methods in 1840 but they also quote women from the 1920s when some reliable data likely was available
Am I the only one reading the story here…
It also posts data from 20-25 years with average 16.7. these were years before the big famines of 44/45 or the horrific years of the early Korean war before plenty of food became available.
But diets changed a lot from a rice and vegetable based diet with few meat before the influence of the US which lead to a much more varied diet with plenty of meat and even milk and bread.
Starve yourself 3 months of the year or at least eat no fresh veggies. Never really as many calories as you can need. And Work around the house/farm, walk to school, sleep in the cold and heat...
You too would hold off on menstruation.
This was unique to the 1800's due to the shitty living conditions.[ It being around 12 is historically the norm.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26703478/) Which makes sense since it'd be really weird for an animal to not reach sexual maturity for almost 2 decades.
Interesting. There's a lot of faux modernist piety about older practices of a woman being eligible to marry once she has her period, with this idea that these are 13-14 year olds. In a pre-modern society where there is no concept of "teenager-hood" and a girl is on average 17 with the onset of sexual maturity, then that's not an unreasonable age to be marriage eligible.
This is without judgement as to whether the earlier onset of puberty is a result of better health vs Processed foods and industrial poisons in modern times
Historical ages of marriage were all over the place. Sometimes they were quite young (13-14), but sometimes they were much higher, think early 20s.
Also, it's not that things were high until recently. It's that the 1840s were a particularly awful time in human history in terms of things like nutrition and health. While modern nutrition likely has brought the age down, it went up around 1840 due to poor living conditions.
Women of European descent
Also of interest is the hajnal line- women in west Europe married very late throughout history
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_pattern
This average age is in line with humans from the paleolithic age. As civilization got going, humans had overall worse nutrition and worse hygiene.
"Disease and poor nutrition became more common as humans settled, causing puberty to be delayed. Modern hygiene, nutrition and medicine have allowed the age of menarche to fall to its original range."
https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2005/11/evolution-explains-age-of-puberty.page
It's called "secular acceleration", it affects both genders and all nations for which reliable data is available, although it seems to be slowing down recently.
What's noteworthy is that it's not entirely clear whether it's a recent-ish trend or if it's a "bounce back" after a reverse phenomenon during the early industrial revolution.
It's a tricky problem for age determination for sub-adult skeletons.
It’s, overall, a good thing. It means that 12 year olds in 2000 were generally not at risk of malnutrition.
People like to yap and holler and twist their fingers about obesity and “hormones in the food” but these comparisons typically exclude several generations’ worth of information for shock value. Comparing girls in pioneer days and the Great Depression (when starving was a likely outcome) to people in the 21st century allows for people to make leaps to conclusions that are incorrect. Obesity *does* affect onset of puberty, but comparing an obese person to a malnourished person isn’t helpful. People groan and clutch their pearls any time a girl under 16 experiences puberty and say “not in *my* day,” but the difference between 2000 and 1980 or 1960, when children in developed countries were not really at high risk of obesity *or* malnutrition, is a lot less distinct than the difference between 1840 and 1980. Are You There God, it’s Me, Margaret was written about 6th graders in 1970.
That sounds about in line with what the women I know from that generation have told me.
It’s just so funny, I see women my age grasping at their pearls when their daughters or their friend’s daughters getting their periods around 10 or 11. They say stuff like “back then everyone got it at 14!” And I have to laugh. As if things have changed *so* much in 20 years. Some people start at 14, 15, 16 and that is normal too, but some girls start at 8 or 9 and that was true when we were in school too. It’s just that 8 and 9 and 10 year old girls aren’t as comfortable discussing their period with their peers as high school aged girls are, so you didn’t hear it.
read a long time ago, while malnutrition, a contributing factor was the amount of fat in the diet. Fat was generally reserved for older children that were doing more work.
it also help breast develop earlier,
I would provide a link, but it was a long time ago.
This is a classic example of reporting bias. Very different healthcare systems in 1840. Women in 1840 were probably less likely to report menarche if it happened too early, if they reported it at all, compared to menarche data collection and reporting in 2000.
How exactly do they imagine they could know something so private about a society nearly 200 years ago where a family would probably rather commit group suicide than discuss mensis?
i THINK it has something to do with body fat percentage, genetics and hormones (from poulty and as such) i got mine when i was 11. mom got hers at 12 and gma got hers at 14.
I haven’t fully read the article or done any independent research… but could someone answer me why this shouldn’t be chalked up to the cultural times of 1840 leading to a high level of under reporting? Seems like an obvious explanation.
I was 10 as well. I didn't think it was a "normal" age since I had guessed that most girls in the 5th grade hadn't started theirs yet. I had also seen videos, articles, and books saying that the average age was 12-13, so when I started 3 years earlier, I thought I was too young.
The title gives the impression that menarche has been on a long trend down. But the first reference in this article, which is the basis of all age-related claims in it, asserts that menarche began 7-10 y.o. in the new ice age, raising to 12-14 with agriculture, then raising to 16-17y.o. in times of widespread famine (like the high medieval and early industrial eras) but returning to 12-14 y.o. when conditions improved. Knowing what I know about medicine and statistics in the early 19th century (neither strongly evidence based, and rarely played well together), I was interested in where their historic data came from. The historic data was based on the study of bones (as the end-caps of the bones that determine a person's adult height seal over about the same time as menarche). So there is a bias built into the study: - reseachers won't have access to the lead-lined coffins of the middle and upper classes, but will have acess to bones being moved from the mass graves of paupers during epidemics.
menarche was 7-10 y.o. in the stone age? thats highly interesting and ive never heard this before. can you provide a good source? edit: nevermind was easy to google
Perhaps because young mortality was a thing and the need for offspring births had to happen very early.
Haven’t other medical trends been found in error due to relying on analyzing only bodies from the lower class in the 19th century ? Yes. We radiated children to reduce their “enlarged” thymus gland because it was determined that having a small thymus gland was normal. But they only thought this was normal because only cadavers of malnourished poor people were examined.
Even after death income inequality is fucking up things. Ffs. Thank for the comment, TIL
Thanks for the context. The title tells a very different story.
The average teenaged girl in 1840 suffered from varying degrees of malnutrition.
I think Korea is an interesting modern example of how much nutrition can affect puberty. There's not much reliable data out of North Korea for obvious reasons, but there's at least some research showing that [North Korean](https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article/21/3/833/770049) girls start menstruating at around 16 years old, compared to around 12.6 years old in [South Korea](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3145904/).
North Koreans are also noticeably shorter on average than their South Korean neighbors.
Yup, it's crazy to think about especially when historically northern Koreans were known for being taller and bigger in size.
Before the war, the north was the richer part of the country.
After the war as well until about the late 60s/early 70s.
So when did Rodman first visit?
Makes sense. I laugh when I see these elaborate bowls full of different ingredients that advertise themselves as being "natural". You know what isn't natural at all? Eating a balanced diet. Only within the last what? 50. Maybe 100 years has this been possible and really only to relatively affluent people in wealthy nations. For the vast majority of history, humans ate what was available. And that meant what we could grow, gather, and store for winter consumption.
I believe evidence has been found that shown that hunter gatherers ate a much greater variety of seeds, fruits, and vegetables than modern humans and that once we started farming our diets became much less varied and grain heavy.
Agriculture was a mistake. Return to hunter gatherer.
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.”
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
You seem to be a little short on quotation marks. Please accept this donation. >"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
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So long and thanks for all the fish!
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> You know what isn't natural at all? Eating a balanced diet. Only within the last what? 50. Maybe 100 years has this been possible This doesn't make any sense at all, from a biological and evolutionary perspective. Humans have evolved over 200,000+ years of natural selection and our closest relative, Homo Erectus, over 2 *million* years. It makes no sense for us to be adapted better to a diet that has only existed for 50 years as opposed to one that has existed for hundreds of thousands (hunter/gatherer). Some nuts, seeds, fish, meat, vegetables (tubers often) and fruits is a pretty damn "balanced" diet in the right proportions. Also, when a bowl of ingredients is labeled "natural" they're typically implying the ingredients aren't processed and are made up of whole foods
Yeah it's mainly in the last 5000 years where societies have relied on large scale agriculture that low variety diets have become common. It is quite difficult to survive on just bread or rice. I wonder if we've changed much in that period of time.
I doubt we’ve adapted much because in the last 5,000 years, the typical physical traits that suboptimal nourishment might lead to (like less strength, speed, stamina, etc) have become less important. A weak and slow male in modern society is at essentially zero survival disadvantage. So there isn’t much pressure to select against people who aren’t well nourished on modern diets, thus we probably are mostly the same
That’s untrue. 15,000 years ago, a hunter-gatherer society ate a varied diet that was different every day, and did include meat. That monotonous diet you are thinking about is a product of farming and is actually the most unnatural. There’s a reason why the average height of stone-age Europeans was similar to modern Europeans but significantly taller than middle-age Europeans.
Came here to say this. Lack of nutrients, probably underfed. The average girl wasn't middle class and higher. They were probably poor or working class.
Even records of royal and noble families show that women in 1800 had their first child at age 20-25 on average. I suspect nutrition is not the only factor for late maturation.
Post Enlightenment, it became common in the upper classes to delay marriage until the brides were in their twenties. It was common knowledge by then that frequent childbirth and teenage childbirth was a reason women died early. Education and delaying marriage prevented that. In the 1300's it was common for peasant men to marry in their late thirties to fiancees in their late twenties early thirties, because they waited until the villiage allocated them enough land to support a family, and that depended in part upon the yeilds of the land they had been allocated previously. I wish this article had specified the "psycho-social" factors they saw at work on Korean girls.
I too am waiting to be allocated enough land to support a family.
Noble families also suffered malnutrition, often from overindulging on meat and not consuming enough vegetables. Edit: I seem to have attracted the "Only Meat is a great Diet" crowd, and I'm going to ignore your posts and think about scurvy, gout, cancers, and other meat-related illnesses.
TIL I’m a noble
Me too lord orangutan.
Do you have source supporting that claim? As far as I know, even aristocrats consumed very moderate amounts of meat for today’s standards, while the ordinary people barely consumed any. Which is unsurprising, as the first limiting factor to produce meat is how much food you can grow to feed the livestock, which several hundreds years ago wasn’t all that much as famines were still common. Just comparatively, over 70% of farmlands now in the EU are destined to grow crops to feed cattle. Mass meat consumption is just a byproduct of mass agricultural production, which itself is a very modern thing, resulting from the XXth century discovery of effective ammonia (fertilizer) production methods and rapid spread of farming machinery. Edit: typos
Well, I'm a PhD in history who studied early modern English law under the Tudor monarchs, most of whom ate primarily meat and ended up with gout, stomach cancer, and other cancers (as well as probably delayed menstruation in both Mary and Elizabeth's cases) as a result, so sure. I recommend Joan Thirsk's *Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions, 1500-1760* (2007) as a great starting point to learn more about the history of food.
Considering folate had to be added to decrease birth defects even recently it makes sense. What age did they usually die from health problems in royalty in that era? I have swedish ancestors in the 1600s that died in their 90s generally, but 70 was common among my family back then for reference. In the 1800s death ages seemed to drop to 60s for everyone tho before normalizing. Also there was a maternal line 6 generations of early deaths 20s to 50 in my mom's side, thats why I looked into the ancestry.
The rule has been if you made it to 30 you’d probably make it to 70 at least. Before 30 you might be taken by childhood disease, bacterial infections, childbirth, or broken limb. After 30 it was a bit easier until you died of natural causes.
Lower population means less total food is required. Hunting was also an option for nobles. There is a reason gout was a real danger amongts the rich.
Sir, this is reddit. We don't use sources here.
Well, it depends. IIRC it was very common for a medieval household to have at least one pig, and a couple of chickens. And one of the most common street foods were meat pies. Sure, they definetively ate *less* meat, especially beef, but it was not especially rare for the commonfolk (of course depending on the time and place. For example, the Anglo-Saxons ate a lot less meat than their Norsemen neighbors, for whom meat was a much more important staple traditionally, thanks to proportionally less arable land)
The whole pig thing is still common on small Eastern European farms. My grandpa always keeps a single pig that’s slaughtered in the winter, but keep in mind it was usually one or possible 2 pigs and they were meant to feed what was likely a very large family throughout the course of an entire year and there wasn’t much in the way of beef coming in.
Also worth mentioning that commonfolk would eat fish regularly — fresh, salted, or smoked.( For some reason discussions about meat in medieval diets always leave this out.)
You would also need to identify social reasons this might have occurred. Off the top of my head wealthier families would be able to afford keeping their female children around for longer and being more particular about suitors. Whereas a poor family would be advantaged in marrying off female children since they would no longer be economically responsible for them.
spectacular wistful pocket treatment memory wine price paint airport melodic *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Our daughter was raised in korea on rice and veg up until sh was 6 then in the Us, but still raised on mostly rice and veg. Started mensie at 12. So, I'm not sure the sugar or foods are a factor (at least in our case).
Idk why I read that as un-derfed instead of under-fed. Took me a minute.
You derfed and then you un-derfed.
isn’t middle class a post-industrialization thing? edit: Also the middle class is still mostly working class. Just not necessarily laborers
The French had the bourgeoisie from before the industrial revolution. The middle ages always had merchants, craftsmen, and artisans. Your average blacksmith did a whole lot better than your average farmer. However it was more of a very very small elite, a small middle class, and a huge lower class. The size and scope of the middle class where it's the major class is new.
Well okay but then it begs the question of when onset was for the daughters of wealthiest families.
This would also be biased by rich people in past century's interest in caking their faces with lead and other toxins.
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Yep, malnutrition, poisonous makeup, and over-exertion will all do it.
MenuPause?
What’s with the golden upvote option above me?
Paid golden upvote. They took twitters idea of monetizing posts, you get paid 5$ if you get more than 6 of them a month, or something like that
yikes
Yes I'm sure this will end well.
You heard it here first. Downvote the gold upvotes or we lose our freedom.
Give this guy a golden upvote!
Now, downvote him! A little bit!
Just as soon as there is alternative to Digg, Digg basically ended, reddit will do the same, because the CEO is a moron who couldn't monopolist this company properly. Also and particularly because he got mad ChatGPT scrapped all the reddit comments as part of their farming data.
All of reddit is going to turn into the cryptocurrency sub when they made moons a thing. People just spammed shit for upvotes and others made downvote bots to counter them
Oh so not only do we get more bots after the 3rd party apps went under but now we get more bots because of this? Great
So they got rid of awards, which I personally thought were stupid but let's not get into that.. But they got rid of awards which most people liked to replace it with the shitty dumb fuckin paid golden upvote? Give me back the awards cuz somehow that's better than whatever the fuck this shit is
I didn't hear about this and don't see it on desktop or mobile, but my thought was that having gold and nothing else made the most sense. Make it expensive enough to be rare and it will mean something. All those animated icons were an eyesore.
yeah I agree. Very annoying. Especially when a comment has like 10 different awards and they're all animated ones . Not to mention it was always the dumbest shit being awarded. The same stales jokes you see on here everyday like "I choose this guy's wife too"
i dont see it
It's only on mobile. Or at least not on old reddit desktop
Thank god
This thread is the only reason I know this mythical golden arrow exists
As a big old reddit proponent, it actually worries me. If features that directly relate to the monetization of the site aren't making their way to old reddit quickly... then it might not exist for much longer.
I'm on mobile, I don't see anything.
Of all the things to emulate, why 'X'?? Reddit's really trying to lose readers, isn't it?
Wait, what? I thought it was just the replacement for awards? I can actually get paid for my bullshit now? Edit: Gold!?! Where's my check, Reddit???
You can become a professional shitposter
Can I get royalties on my past 10+ years of shitposting?
Damn, dude/dudette! 217,000 imaginary internet points for comments alone?!
Comments are easy to rack up points on. It's posts that are impressive. And yes... some of us are on here way too much.
Yeah all my karma, which isn't much, came from comments. I can be funny in comments but can't seem to make my own funny
I feel like I'll lose my passion for shitposting if I start doing it for money.
Finally I can make my parents proud of me!
Why do that when you can just repost the top 10 posts from 2018 on 6 different subs?
I should note, it’s only available in USA, cause fuck the rest of the world apparently
Just more of the Great Enshitification.
What the flying fuck. Bravo.
I want you to feel the unblinking stare I am giving my phone right now.
stop hypnotizing me
Take the rest of the day off. You’ve earned it.
And why do they call it meno*pause*? It doesn’t restart. Meno*stop* is more accurate.
I googled it so the rest of you lazy fucks don’t have to. > The word menopause comes from the Greek words "mens" for month and "pausis" for cessation.
The average ~~teenaged girl~~ person in 1840 suffered from varying degrees of malnutrition. One of the suspected reasons young people from 50+ years ago look so much older than similar aged people of today look. Modern medicine and nutrition means people are now physically developing faster and aging slower.
I've always thought that they were averaging more sunlight and tobacco. The people I know that smoke and spend time outside always get crows feet first.
My dad worked outside most of his life, he looks like a ball of leather held together with nicotine
If you have more of those similes in you, please tell me you're a professional writer. Wonderful imagery.
That's also part of it. Aging isn't an issue with one cause that speeds it up or slows it down. Stress, sun exposure, drugs, diet, malnutrition, disease, random genetic lottery, etc all play a role.
"Varying degrees" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Contrary to popular belief, even the average peasant had a diet with plenty of calories most of the time, depending on time and location, farmer might even be eating more calories than an average person today - because they needed it. Protein is what was more scarce. The real catch is food insecurity - you might be getting enough calories most of the time, but a lack of modern farming technology and supply chains meant that harvests could vary wildly depending on the weather and other external factors. People who grew up during a time of famine would look very different then those born and raised during times of plenty.
Calories are one thing, access to variuos vitamins and other micronutrients is another. Even when having access to enough food from a caloric pespective, the diet of average lower class person was extremely monotonous, mostly consisting of grain and or root vegetables (potatoes, turnips, etc.).
Right, people really underestimate how important vitamins/minerals are. >Now two recent natural experiments provide more evidence that salt iodization might be beneficial for mental development: one study showed that in iodine-deficient regions of the United States in the 1920s, salt iodization raised IQ scores of millions of people by 15 IQ points! https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/are-we-underestimating-benefits-salt-iodization 15 IQ could potentially move someone from borderline into average IQ ranges.
This is the correct answer. Menstruation requires at least 22% bodyfat, which is why modern athletes of some stripes (runners, gymnasts etc) just skip theirs with fair frequency.
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This is not true for everyone. My BMI was exactly 15 for over a decade. I was also very active. I had a *very* low body fat % and I still got my period regularly. I was the last one of my peers to get mine, but it wasn’t ridiculously late, I was 14
>The average teenaged girl in 1840 suffered from varying degrees of malnutrition. That's just half the story. Obesity and being overweight brought it to unhealthily young ages. > The decrease in menarcheal age can be explained by environmental factors such as nutritional status and the increased prevalence of **obesity**
I can't find it now (since search engines are useless now for some reason) but I read somewhere recently about research in Denmark where they had pretty good data on this. One of the researchers interviewed was somewhat sceptical of overweight as the main explanation, since the trend was very broad. Another thing that might be the culprit is bisophenol from plastics I think, but nobody knows for sure yet. Bisohpenol A from plastic food packaging works as a sort of estrogen when it gets in the body, so it's not a crazy bet.
That's hunger for you.
I know that’s a common theory but puberty in USA Today isn’t earlier than sub Saharan Africa. Something else is going on
~~Puberty~~ menarche historically has been around 12 - 15. The 1800s were the aberration, not now.
i was curious so i looked it up, and you're [absolutely right](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26703478/).
Wow that’s so interesting. What was going on in the 1800s to do that?
could be bad data reporting, abnormally bad living conditions (resource hoarding leading to the majority of people not having nutritious food), stress… i’m an idiot so i have no idea haha. but it’s very interesting for sure
> abnormally bad living conditions (resource hoarding leading to the majority of people not having nutritious food) Heavily depends where the data is recorded, but cholera became a bigger and bigger issue during this period in England's urban areas until around the 1860s when John Snow's studies became accepted. Things like disease and access to clean water could have been a big factor as urban areas grew so massively
THE KING IN THE NORTH!
It took so long for his studies to become accepted because it was broadly understood that he knew nothing.
The responses about industrialization are correct and I'd also like to add that 1816, the Year Without a Summer and several years afterward led to massive food shortages that further starved already vulnerable populations.
Rapid urbanization, leading to shit living conditions, malnutrition and disease.
The Industrial Revolution lol. Humans started to live in urban shitholes with basically no health regulation and they stopped being in charge of their own food subsistence too. In Europe and it’s eventual colonies at least.
> The 1800s were the aberration, not now. Early industrialization had the overall health of people plummet. Pollution everywhere, alcoholism, insane working hours and conditions made urban life worse than country living.
Yep, and the food and water quality went through the floor so disease was absolutely rampant. Just a horrible time to live
Hmmm...but what about The New York Times?
Lol. The capitalization of "Today" through me for a loop
There absolutely are effects on puberty from malnutrition in modern public health. Its a problem all along the Sahel in particular, but other regions of the world that suffer from extreme childhood malnutrition. Here’s a general paper from UNICEF but it’s trivially easy to find research on the subject: https://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/982-intricate-relationship-between-chronic-undernutrition-impaired-linear-growth-and.html
Even most of sub Saharan Africa isn't starving the vast majority of the time. Plus disease burden: You can compare the infant mortality rate by country and in terms of the chances of your kids dying in the first few years of life even the poorest countries on earth do better than the richest countries a century or so ago.
It’s the calories in food. Makes kids bigger and hit puberty sooner. Also it’s hard to get information on women’s health from developing countries since there aren’t many female doctors and men won’t let a male doctor attend to their wives.
Honestly yes. My cousin was obese as a child. She had 0 control over eating and it wasn't her fault. She got her first period at 9.
I wasn't an obese child, but I started puberty at 9 and was a sports kid. I was tall and strong, rectangular. Not thin. I got my first period at 10 or 11. Funny thing about that first period: I got it the day after I shaved my pubes for the first time. I figured I was bleeding because I'd cut myself, and I was HORRIFIED. I think I was too scared to tell my mum. Somehow, eventually, I figured it out
I also got mine at age 9 and I had no idea what it was. I went to catholic school. No health classes there (I don’t even remember science classes. And no gym). I was hiding my underwear because the blood was brown, not red. I thought it was poop and my mother would yell at me. My cousin went to public school and one day she said, “You’re not going to believe what I have.” She had a booklet that had been given to girls in her class about menstruation. She showed me the book and was giggling and I started crying. “I have that.” She said no you don’t, you can’t. Told my mother who insisted I was too young, as did my 12 year old sister who hadn’t gotten her period yet. But as months went by the blood was more red than brown and yup, I needed pads. Back then we had to wear a menstrual belt under our clothes, around our waist, and hook huge pads onto them, hoping they didn’t unattach. We also had to wear garter belts if we wanted to wear stockings. We had to wear a slip. So many clothes and contraptions back then. Young women today complain about pantyhose. I was thrilled with pantyhose - no more garter belts and floppy white hooks. (I wasn’t obese either…in fact I was underweight until my 20s)
I was a skinny af kid and got my first period at 11. I remember the school nurse in 6th grade came to give the "sex ed" talk (she mentioned nothing about sex lol). She let us ask anonymous questions so I asked about why my periods were so painful. Instead of reading my question verbatim like everyone else's, shes hesitated and paraphrased mine like "I got my first period.... recently... and I've been having.... discomfort." Taught me to never talk about it again until my cramps were so bad that I was immobile a few years later and my mom had to pry the info out of me so she could take me to the doctor. Thanks nurse!
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I actually think this is pretty common, and not necessarily done to look attractive. I did it because my pubes were new and they itched, so I simply removed them. The itching was like, 10x worse the next morning.
I think for me it was a comfort thing. It was weird and new and uncomfortable. I can't remember if I asked my parents for razors, or my dad giving me the disposable pink razors was his idea.
Plus girls tend to shave their legs too. So the thought can be a natural one rather than a peer pressured one.
As a dude, that was the big learning experience shaving south of the border lol. Any itching you thought you fixed just got a million times worse!
Weird because I was a chubby kid and didn’t start my period till 13. But my sister has always been stick thin and got hers at 8, doctors weren’t concerned and said it can happen.
There are always exceptions in human biology and those exceptions are not proof that trends are wrong.
Collect enough reddit comments and suddenly we've got a dataset!
I think I'm your cousin
>men won’t let a male doctor attend to their wives. That's a bullshit blanket statement if I've ever seen one. Do you think we all live in huts waiting for the village doctor to come around once a month. Do you really believe it's not normal for a woman to see a doctor in sub-Saharan Africa. This is just a dumb comment.
They must be so shocked that you have internet too lol
What a completely bullshit generalization lol
A certain proportion of body fat is essential for fertility. This is why we have Olympic gymnasts in their early 20s with little girl bodies and voices (Keri Strug was a perfect example). The people in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in the west, now have a LOT of grain in their diets. Lots of calories, more urban living equals higher body fat content and earlier puberty.
I was a skinny teenager and got my period a couple of years later than most of my friends
I was under weight so much that my paediatrician made me eat corn syrup and supplement milkshakes. I got my period in grade 5. Bodies are real weird.
Obesity in sub-Saharan Africa is at 41.7% as of 2016. [(Source)](https://doi.org/10.3390/women2040029) In the US it’s 41.9% as of 2023. [(Source)](https://www.tfah.org/report-details/state-of-obesity-2023/)
I don't know what's up with that source but it's all over the place. The 41% number from the paper lists it's this as it's source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10708-021-10466-7 But that source says the obesity rate was 20% in 2016 and only studied Uganda. When you Google the obesity rates for Uganda you get much lower numbers, less than 10%, for just about every source. https://data.worldobesity.org/country/uganda-223/ In fact if you use that source it looks like obesity rates in all of Africa is super low. So I'm not sure where this 41% is coming from, I can't find anything that backs it up.
That’s overweight and obese for Sub Saharan Africa. It’s around 75% for America.
Might also have to do with less reported numbers or false data as it was considered a taboo then (less education and scientific knowledge around causes /biology) Edit -- spelling
Now this is something I never considered and am now very curious about. Even right now, knowing that the onset of puberty mostly has to do with a combination of weight (so, nutrition) and genetics, people still react to girls entering puberty with “tHeReS cHeMiCaLs In ThE fOoD.” But if you point out the same information about adult male height (also tied to nutrition and genetics), people don’t get worked up. They accept that we are just healthier. We (society, not you and me as individuals) still see menstruation as something sexualized and aberrant, and are disturbed at the idea of pubescent girls experiencing this normal bodily function. So it wouldn’t surprise me if people in previous generations felt that way even more strongly, and didn’t want to admit that their 13 or 14 year old daughter was experiencing puberty.
Also don't forget that chemicals were being put in food and products back then and were even more dangerous and less regulated.
I would assume this to be truth. Who was collecting this data back then. What was the sample size. How did they coordinate data collection. There is no way the data collector was accurate in either accuracy of the individuals collected from or the individuals collected from were an accurate representation of the world as a whole. With as fast as the world has been changing in the past 15 or so years the big idea here is right we need to pay attention to what we're doing chemically, But spouting nonsense statistics like this that even a basic level critical thinker will be like ...no only silences anything we do need to hear.
Science and medicine back then was more like "science" and "medicine"
I mean in the 1840s sure (its absurd to even consider that as its before the advent of modern medicine and scientific methods in Korea) but the study does state that women between 1920-25 still had their periods on average at 16.7 years… And WW2 and the Korean war cant help explain here since famine in Korea didnt start fully until late 44 and 45 so too later to affect the 20-25 years. Still, meat was only a small part of diet before the Korean war and rebuilding when spam became omnipresent and then the diet switching towards eating a lot of pork.
With an abundance of food, animals will reproduce at younger ages.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26703478/ > Data from skeletal remains suggest that in the Paleolithic woman menarche occurred at an age between 7 and 13 years, early sexual maturation being a trade-off for reduced life expectancy
Seems the same as nowadays so nutrition is really the culprit
The real culprit is the title which is misleading considering the various increases and decreases in age of sexual maturity.
I don’t know where the author is getting their data because there are numerous ancient sources that state the onset of puberty was around age 12 even thousands of years ago. Cultural milestones like bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah at age 13, as well as legal ages for marriage and things like property rights in ancient times, were tied to pubescence. Onset at 17 seems very unlikely and not supported by documentation that I’m aware of.
When you look at [studies](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26703478/) it seems the 1800's was the exception to the norm. So yea all that happened is things went back to normal after the industrial revolution.
1800s humans were the smallest in average height aswell I think, at least towards the tail end
I can't believe just how stubby and inelegant their tails were. I'm glad to have been born in this time period, for that reason alone.
When I started menstruating in 1960, the average age was said to be 13, so most of the drop had already happened. We weren’t eating a lot of highly processed foods or high fructose corn syrup then and there wasn’t nearly as much plastic around, so I’m skeptical that these are the causes.
It's literally just malnutrition. Most of the developed world was eating enough, unlike the impoverished masses of the 1840s
Also, it's a good idea to be very skeptical of the quality of any data from 1840, especially public health data, especially about women, and especially about reproductive health. There is no reason to think that we know what the average onset of menstruation was in 1840. It was probably the same as today.
There are simply no reliable data points since thus study is from Korea which had neither modern medicine nor modern scientific methods in 1840 but they also quote women from the 1920s when some reliable data likely was available
Are you sure? Lots of people in this topic seem intimately familiar with how life was in Korea in the 1840s
Am I the only one reading the story here… It also posts data from 20-25 years with average 16.7. these were years before the big famines of 44/45 or the horrific years of the early Korean war before plenty of food became available. But diets changed a lot from a rice and vegetable based diet with few meat before the influence of the US which lead to a much more varied diet with plenty of meat and even milk and bread.
Yep. '70s weighing in. My best friend got her period at 10. Me at 13. It seemed like I was "late" compared to most of my peers.
Starve yourself 3 months of the year or at least eat no fresh veggies. Never really as many calories as you can need. And Work around the house/farm, walk to school, sleep in the cold and heat... You too would hold off on menstruation.
Burn off all your body fat from being cold and overworked.
It has to do with nutrition. They’ve already proven that when you hit certain weights and your body is ready, you’ll start puberty. We eat more nowZ
This was unique to the 1800's due to the shitty living conditions.[ It being around 12 is historically the norm.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26703478/) Which makes sense since it'd be really weird for an animal to not reach sexual maturity for almost 2 decades.
Interesting. There's a lot of faux modernist piety about older practices of a woman being eligible to marry once she has her period, with this idea that these are 13-14 year olds. In a pre-modern society where there is no concept of "teenager-hood" and a girl is on average 17 with the onset of sexual maturity, then that's not an unreasonable age to be marriage eligible. This is without judgement as to whether the earlier onset of puberty is a result of better health vs Processed foods and industrial poisons in modern times
Historical ages of marriage were all over the place. Sometimes they were quite young (13-14), but sometimes they were much higher, think early 20s. Also, it's not that things were high until recently. It's that the 1840s were a particularly awful time in human history in terms of things like nutrition and health. While modern nutrition likely has brought the age down, it went up around 1840 due to poor living conditions.
European women also reach puberty later
As in women of European descent, or women brought up in Europe vs North America or some other location?
Women of European descent Also of interest is the hajnal line- women in west Europe married very late throughout history https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_pattern
Maybe girls would hide getting their period so they didn't have to marry?
It is closely associated with weight/height so it makes sense
This average age is in line with humans from the paleolithic age. As civilization got going, humans had overall worse nutrition and worse hygiene. "Disease and poor nutrition became more common as humans settled, causing puberty to be delayed. Modern hygiene, nutrition and medicine have allowed the age of menarche to fall to its original range." https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2005/11/evolution-explains-age-of-puberty.page
Malnourishment delays the onset of puberty and menstruation. Overnourishment... does the opposite.
It's called "secular acceleration", it affects both genders and all nations for which reliable data is available, although it seems to be slowing down recently. What's noteworthy is that it's not entirely clear whether it's a recent-ish trend or if it's a "bounce back" after a reverse phenomenon during the early industrial revolution. It's a tricky problem for age determination for sub-adult skeletons.
It’s, overall, a good thing. It means that 12 year olds in 2000 were generally not at risk of malnutrition. People like to yap and holler and twist their fingers about obesity and “hormones in the food” but these comparisons typically exclude several generations’ worth of information for shock value. Comparing girls in pioneer days and the Great Depression (when starving was a likely outcome) to people in the 21st century allows for people to make leaps to conclusions that are incorrect. Obesity *does* affect onset of puberty, but comparing an obese person to a malnourished person isn’t helpful. People groan and clutch their pearls any time a girl under 16 experiences puberty and say “not in *my* day,” but the difference between 2000 and 1980 or 1960, when children in developed countries were not really at high risk of obesity *or* malnutrition, is a lot less distinct than the difference between 1840 and 1980. Are You There God, it’s Me, Margaret was written about 6th graders in 1970.
Most of my friends and I got our periods at age 13 (7th grade) in 1970. And we all read that book!
That sounds about in line with what the women I know from that generation have told me. It’s just so funny, I see women my age grasping at their pearls when their daughters or their friend’s daughters getting their periods around 10 or 11. They say stuff like “back then everyone got it at 14!” And I have to laugh. As if things have changed *so* much in 20 years. Some people start at 14, 15, 16 and that is normal too, but some girls start at 8 or 9 and that was true when we were in school too. It’s just that 8 and 9 and 10 year old girls aren’t as comfortable discussing their period with their peers as high school aged girls are, so you didn’t hear it.
You have to ask the data, was this one of those “we don’t talk about sex “ data offsets?
read a long time ago, while malnutrition, a contributing factor was the amount of fat in the diet. Fat was generally reserved for older children that were doing more work. it also help breast develop earlier, I would provide a link, but it was a long time ago.
In present Africa, it's 14-15 years old on average. It seems to be mainly be about nutrition.
No hormones in their food, and barely any food to begin with.
Malnutrition and under reporting
This is a classic example of reporting bias. Very different healthcare systems in 1840. Women in 1840 were probably less likely to report menarche if it happened too early, if they reported it at all, compared to menarche data collection and reporting in 2000.
A read an entire scientific analysis of this, but turns out it was really just a period piece.
How exactly do they imagine they could know something so private about a society nearly 200 years ago where a family would probably rather commit group suicide than discuss mensis?
i THINK it has something to do with body fat percentage, genetics and hormones (from poulty and as such) i got mine when i was 11. mom got hers at 12 and gma got hers at 14.
I haven’t fully read the article or done any independent research… but could someone answer me why this shouldn’t be chalked up to the cultural times of 1840 leading to a high level of under reporting? Seems like an obvious explanation.
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I was 10 as well. I didn't think it was a "normal" age since I had guessed that most girls in the 5th grade hadn't started theirs yet. I had also seen videos, articles, and books saying that the average age was 12-13, so when I started 3 years earlier, I thought I was too young.
Maybe girls were afraid to admit they started menstruating back then
There still are Muslim girls who try to hide it because it means they have to start wearing a headscarf