| >My point is, Wadlow's death was effectively a matter of poor luck - a blister popped up and went septic that he didn't notice soon enough, but others had previously been spotted and dealt with. It wasn't a matter of luck, it was because of his condition that he couldn't feel his feet and thus developed blisters.
It was just a matter of time until one of his blisters or other feet injuries got infected. And in the bronze age with no knowledge of germ theory, much less antibiotics, these infections would likely prove lethal. Robert Wadlow wouldn't have lived very long in a tribe in ancient France with a condition that caused chronic blisters and foot wounds. Furthermore gigantism causes extremely high blood pressure leading to varicose ulcers in the legs and again, infection. However, the blister alone wasn't what killed him, he had an autoimmune problem caused by his disorder that contributed to his death, and he had an enlarged heart and was generally unhealthy. >Who's to say that no Iron Age 20 year old could possibly do better? It's not do better, it's significantly better with vastly inferior medicine. Even if his growth rate remained at the rate it was during the last few years of his life he would have to have lived almost 20 more years to grow another 3 feet. In addition his growth rate most likely would have slowed or stopped eventually. If he had continued growing the strain on his skeleton and circulatory system would have killed him way before he got to 12'. This kind of gigantism is a disorder that causes immense strain on the body, humans just aren't build to handle that level of growth hormone. Have you noticed that there are only 3 people in all of recorded history who reached 8.5' tall. The reason is because that is basically the upper limit of what is survivable. Even if it were possible for a 12' tall man to live, given a population 10 times larger (all the people who ever lived compared to all those born in the 20th century) what's the chance that this population produced a man 3 feet taller than the tallest in recorded history--Keeping in mind that people with this disorder would have been likely to die even earlier than the giants of the modern era due to the lack of any semblance of modern medicine. |