Two thousand years ago, most people stood noticeably shorter than they do today, but not by as much as you might expect. Adult men in the Roman Empire averaged around 164 to 170 cm (5’5″ to 5’7″), while women averaged roughly 152 to 160 cm (5’0″ to 5’3″). The exact numbers varied by region, diet, and social class, with some ancient populations reaching heights that overlap comfortably with modern averages.
Heights Across the Ancient World
The most detailed skeletal data comes from the Roman Empire, where large burial sites have given researchers thousands of skeletons to measure. Victims of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, preserved at Pompeii and Herculaneum, offer an especially clear snapshot: the average man stood about 164.4 cm (5’5″) and the average woman about 152.1 cm (5’0″). A broader study of skeletal remains from Milan across two millennia found somewhat taller Roman-era averages of 168.5 cm (5’6″) for men and 157.8 cm (5’2″) for women. The difference likely reflects regional variation within Italy itself, with northern populations trending taller.
In Han Dynasty China, which ruled from roughly 206 BC to 220 AD, men averaged about 169.5 cm (5’7″) and women about 159.1 cm (5’3″). These figures, drawn from skeletal remains in the Zhengzhou area, are strikingly close to Roman-era northern Italian averages. Interestingly, Chinese stature actually declined in the centuries that followed: men in the later Tang Dynasty averaged 167 cm, and by the Song Dynasty they had dropped to about 164.5 cm, likely reflecting shifts in nutrition, urbanization, or disease burden.
Northern Europeans during this same period were generally taller than their southern counterparts, a pattern that persists today. By the Bronze Age, average male height in Europe had climbed back to around 167 cm after a significant dip during the shift from hunting to farming thousands of years earlier. Genetic research published in PNAS has linked part of this rebound to migration and admixture from steppe populations in Central Asia, which carried genetic variants associated with greater height.
How Ancient Heights Compare to Today
The tallest men alive today live in the Netherlands and other Northern European countries, where averages reach about 182 to 183 cm (6’0″). The tallest women, in Latvia, the Netherlands, and Estonia, average over 168 cm (5’6″). That means Dutch men today are roughly 14 to 18 cm (about 6 to 7 inches) taller than the average Roman man at Pompeii, and about 13 to 15 cm taller than the average Han Dynasty man.
But that comparison uses the extremes of the modern world. Globally, the picture is more compressed. Men in countries like Timor-Leste, Yemen, and Laos average only about 160 cm (5’3″) today, which is actually shorter than many ancient populations. The gap between the world’s tallest and shortest populations is around 22 to 23 cm for men and about 20 cm for women. That range has barely changed in over a century, even as the countries at the top and bottom of the list have shuffled.
So the real story isn’t that everyone was dramatically shorter 2,000 years ago. It’s that some modern populations have pulled far ahead while others remain at or below ancient averages.
Why People Were Shorter Then
Height is roughly 60 to 80 percent genetic, but the remaining share depends heavily on childhood nutrition and disease. Two thousand years ago, several factors conspired to keep most people from reaching their full genetic potential.
Chronic childhood infections were the biggest drag. Repeated bouts of gastrointestinal illness, parasites, and fevers divert energy away from growth during the critical years before puberty. Without clean water, sanitation, or antibiotics, nearly every child in the ancient world endured these infections regularly. Even mild, ongoing inflammation can shave centimeters off adult height when it occurs during growth spurts.
Diet played an equally important role. Most ancient diets relied heavily on a single staple grain, whether wheat in the Mediterranean, millet or rice in East Asia, or barley in parts of Northern Europe. These diets often lacked sufficient animal protein, calcium, and micronutrients like zinc and vitamin A that support bone growth. During famines, the situation worsened dramatically. Records from ancient Egypt describe populations resorting to eating animal feed during prolonged food shortages, and skeletal chemistry from those periods shows clear shifts in mineral ratios that reflect nutritional desperation.
Social class made a measurable difference. Skeletal remains from wealthier burial sites consistently show taller individuals than those from common graves. Elites had access to more meat, dairy, and diverse foods, and their children were less likely to suffer the worst effects of famine or overcrowding.
The Height Gap Between Men and Women
Men were about 7 to 8 percent taller than women 2,000 years ago, essentially the same ratio seen today. A study of Swedish skeletal data spanning the 10th through 17th centuries found that even as average height rose and fell with changing nutrition, the size of the gap between men and women stayed remarkably constant. This consistency stretches back far further than recorded history. Early human ancestors showed even greater size differences between sexes, and the gap has gradually narrowed over millions of years to the roughly 7 percent difference that has held steady for at least the past several thousand years.
Height Has Not Always Increased Over Time
One of the most surprising findings in the skeletal record is that human height doesn’t follow a simple upward trend. Early modern humans in Europe, around 30,000 years ago, averaged about 174 cm (5’8.5″) for men. That’s taller than most populations 2,000 years ago and taller than many populations today. Height then dropped sharply, falling to around 164 cm during the Mesolithic period roughly 10,000 years ago. The likely cause was the transition from a varied hunter-gatherer diet rich in protein to a more monotonous agricultural diet based on grain.
By 2,000 years ago, heights had partially recovered from that agricultural dip but still hadn’t returned to pre-farming levels in most regions. The dramatic height increases of the past 150 years are largely a product of industrialized food systems, refrigeration, public sanitation, and modern medicine, all of which allow more children to grow without the nutritional deficits and chronic infections that limited their ancestors. In the best-nourished modern populations, average heights may be approaching the upper limit of what human genetics can produce. In less privileged populations, the same constraints that held back the Romans and Han Chinese are still at work.