The tallest man in modern history was Robert Pershing Wadlow (1918–1940), from Illinois, United States, who was 272 cm (8 ft 11 in) at the time of his death. The tallest woman in medical history was Trijntje Keever of Edam, Netherlands, who stood 254 cm (8 ft 4 in) when she died at the age of seventeen. The shortest adult human on record was Chandra Bahadur Dangi of Nepal at 54.6 cm (1 ft 9+1⁄2 in). An anecdotal article titled "Ancient American Giants" from the 14 August 1880 edition of Scientific American notes a case from Brushcreek Township, Ohio, when Dr. J. F. Everhart supervised a team that discovered ancient clay coffins within a mound which were reported to contain skeletons of the following length: 8 ft 0 in (2.44 m) woman with a child 3.5 ft 0 in (1.07 m), a second coffin with a 9 ft 0 in (2.74 m) man and 8 ft 0 in (2.44 m) woman, a third coffin with a 9 ft 4 in (2.84 m) man and 8 ft 0 in (2.44 m) woman, and seven other independent skeletons measuring between 8 ft 0 in (2.44 m) and 10 ft 0 in (3.05 m). An image and stone tablet were found with the giants.Adult height between populations often differs significantly. For example, the average height of women from the Czech Republic is greater than that of men from Malawi. This may be caused by genetic differences, childhood lifestyle differences (nutrition, sleep patterns, physical labor), or both.
Baten and Blum (2014)  find that in the nineteenth century, important determinants of height were the local availability of cattle, meat and milk as well as the local disease environment. In the late twentieth century, however, technologies and trade became more important, decreasing the impact of local availability of agricultural products. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people of European descent in North America were far taller than those in Europe and were the tallest in the world. The original indigenous population of Plains Native Americans was also among the tallest populations of the world at the time.Some studies also suggest that there existed the correlation between the height and the real wage, moreover, the correlation was higher among the less developed countries. The difference in height between children from different social classes was already observed by age two.In the late nineteenth century, the Netherlands was a land renowned for its short population, but today Dutch people are among the worlds tallest with young men averaging 183.8 cm (6 ft 0.4 in) tall.According to a study by economist John Komlos and Francesco Cinnirella, in the first half of the eighteenth century, the average height of an English male was 165 cm (5 ft 5 in), and the average height of an Irish male was 168 cm (5 ft 6 in).