A longitudinal sample of girls (N = 271), all born during the same year, were examined at yearly intervals during a period of 11 (N = 174) or 8 years (N = 97). The data gathered included the following: age at menarche, anthropometric dimensions, skeletal maturity scores with the TW2 method, and questionnaire information about the present and past socioeconomic situation and family dynamics. The girls were divided into two groups. Group A (N = 207) comprised girls who lived in families free of strong traumatic events. Group B (N = 64) included girls whose family dysfunction exposed them to prolonged distress. Two anthropometric dimensions were central to the analysis: height and subischial leg length. Age at attaining four different maturity stages were also used: age at menarche, age at a Carpal score of 1,000, age at the RUS score of 1,000, and age at the total bone score of 995. The mean age at menarche of girls from group A was 13.3 years and that for girls in group B was 12.9 (F = 6.295, P < 0.01). There was no correlation between age and height at final stages of skeletal maturation, i.e., at a total bone score of 995 or a RUS score of 1,000 in group A. There was no significant difference in height between girls whose skeletal maturity was completed early and those in whom it was completed late. Girls from group B, whose skeletal maturity was reached earlier, were shorter than those who grew until a later age. In group B, the stature was positively correlated with the age at which the late stages of skeletal maturation was attained (r = 0.26 at a RUS score of 1,000 and r = 0.28 at a total bone score of 995, P < 0.05). Regardless of the ages at which any of the four maturity levels were reached by girls from group A, they were, on average, taller than those from group B at the same maturity level. Only at a RUS score of 1,000, when the sample size is reduced, the difference was not significant. The results show that girls exposed to familial distress are more likely to have an early puberty, which is associated with short final stature.

The marked social-class differences in physical growth of youth, as well as in a variety of health-related biological characteristics of adults, observed in many industrial societies are as a rule interpreted as nongenetic in nature and therefore as purely phenotypic manifestations of social inequalities in living standards. However, this tacitly adopted .no genetics. assumption has very seldom been subject to any empirical validation. The present study is an attempt to provide such validation for the population of Poland. The material was collected over the period from 1960 to 1990 and drawn from cases of disputed paternity. It comprises a total of 8861 adults of both sexes; roughly half of them are males, the presumptive fathers. It was found that throughout the period of several decades covered by this study no significant differences appeared between the various social strata in allele frequencies of any of the following 8 genetic loci: ABO, MN, Rh(D), Hp, Gm(a), AcP, PGM1, EsD. Nor is there any suggestion of long-term trends in allele frequencies for any of the above loci. This pattern is in sharp contrast to the strikingly regular social gradients, and intense secular trends, observed in the population of post-war Poland in stature and age at menarche. It is postulated that the above findings are consonant with the .no genetic component. hypothesis.

Poland is a country with significant regional differences in socio-economic, demographic and epidemiological phenomena. This is partly due to its history; notably the division of Poland among three different countries and the change of the borders after the second World War. The latter caused massive migratory movements of population. Then from the territory which now constitutes one third of Poland, Germans were evicted and Poles settled. These, then new, Western and Northern Territories of Poland (WNTP) are still the most developed parts of Poland with better roads, better housing and easier access to medical service and schools. On the other hand, some of the statistical data concerning the health and lifestyle of the population of these parts of Poland are worse than the corresponding data concerning the rest of Poland. For example the rate of lung cancer, the rate of divorce, the rate of adolescence pregnancies, the rate of cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption are all higher in the WNTP. In 1955, a very comprehensive anthropological nationwide survey of school children was performed. Our findings based on this material exhibit a number of phenomena which might contribute to the explanation of these negative population data. We have observed that the boys born in various regions of pre-war Poland and settled with their parents in the new territories were of different height at the age of 7-18 years than those from the four other regions of Poland whose parents were not resettled. Also the average height of boys, those sons of the migrants who during post-war migration did not go to the west but settled in the central region of Poland, was greater than those who settled in the west of Poland. Our results indicate that among the migrants there was a considerable fraction of people who were physically weaker and less socially adapted in comparison to the rest of the Polish population and that these characteristics have been passed down to the subsequent generation.

Among adult males and females shows no regional differences in eye-colour, thus, the Polish population is homogenous as regards this trait. It is suggested that the regional differences in eye-colour, observed in Poland before World War II, declined in result of the post-war, massive migrations and resettlements of the Polish population.