How much impact do gains in height have on shoulder breadths within Taiwanese families?

Abstract

Taken as a whole, results here support the view that secular changes in stature are not accompanied by similar changes in body breadths, perhaps so that responses to developmental environmental improvements do not alter thermoregulatory equilibria that reflect long-term evolutionary processes. These results indirectly constrain plausible hypotheses about how ancestors of Austronesian speakers altered their body size and shape as they voyaged to Fiji, Western Polynesia, and beyond.

Is arm length a sexually selected trait in humans? Evidence from mixed martial arts.

“…A weakness of the present study, and indeed all previous studies, is that they measured arm span, rather than arm length. Arm span includes shoulder width (biacromial width) as well as arm length, which may account for some of the sex differences and athletic advantages observed, as this is thought to be sexually dimorphic from puberty (Floyd, 2017). Controlling for body size may have partially addressed this in the present study, but I cannot rule out this possibility.…”