[radicalbyte]

It could simply be an outlier.

Given a group of populations of various size, small populations tend to fill the outlier positions. You see this with schools - almost all of the top ranking schools are tiny. As are the bottom. They all pretty much return to the mean over time.

[jules]

Yea...no. The population of the Netherlands is 17 million. There is absolutely no way this is a statistical outlier.

[the_cat_kittles]

its pretty simple to see how likely the population's mean height is explained by randomness alone (your hypothesis)... my guess is that the sample size is so large that the probability is vanishingly small