The Makhunik Ceiling
January 10, 2018
About a century ago the residents of Makhunik in eastern Iran may have measured just 100cm tall – some 50cm shorter than the average height of their contemporaries. Of the roughly 200 stone and clay houses that make up the ancient village, some 70 or 80 are exceptionally small – with the ceilings of some as low as 140cm.
Growing crops and keeping animals has always been difficult in this dry, desolate region. Turnips, grain, barley and a date-like fruit called jujube constituted the only farming. People subsisted on simple vegetarian dishes such as kashk-beneh (made from whey and a type of pistachio that is grown in the mountains), and pokhteek (a mixture of dried whey and turnip). If presumption about their height are true the Makhunik grew to a similar size as Homo floresiensis, a dwarfed Homo erectus that underwent a process of insular dwarfism on Flores, Indonesia. Although the remote region around Makhunik is not an island, its isolated location made interaction with people from other villages very difficult, if not impossible. Genes inclined for small size could not have travelled far and local conditions may have stimulated these genes to be expressed towards small size. Apart from pathological forms of dwarfism the people of Makhunik would be the first and definitely the most recent example of a 100cm Homo sapiens. Perhaps it’s an indication of a genetically embedded ‘natural’ ceiling to how short we could become, under the right conditions. If that’s 100 rather than 50cm I suppose we’d be happy with that.