Kind of rare, but not exactly unheard of. Kinda like anyone taller than 6’ 8" these days. If you saw them, you might think “Wow, they’re tall” but you wouldnt think of them as freakish.
Combine that with this being a Roman fort, and the fact that being a soldier was probably a pretty common job for big/strong men, and it’s really not that surprising. Kind of a nothing story really. Imagine a bunch of future archeologists scratching their heads over finding a bunch of large shoes in an NBA locker room.
They also lived shorter on average. Some of them still reached a very old age. The average really doesn‘t tell us that much about the extremes that existed.
That’s because of high infant/childhood mortality rates skewing the average. If you take away anyone who died before age 5, the average age shoots up to like 70+ in most places. Not too different from today.
Yes, I know. The problem is that most people see an average stat and think it‘s a universal law. That goes for life expectancy, height and even GDP per capita among other things. In reality no one is perfectly average and extremes exist everywhere.
Yeah I work in a place that sells shoes and I can tell from the thumbnail image that shoe is much, much bigger than a size 14. Nowhere that sells normal shoes for people to actually wear will sell shoes that big.
One of my sons wears size 14, despite not being freakishly tall (he’s 6’2" and strongly buit). He usually has to put in a special order. His hands are also massive. We’ve never had a conversation about cock size, though I’m somewhere in the normal range, whereas my wife’s dad was reputed to be a tripod, so it could go either way, or somewhere in-between.
That is smaller than my shoe size, those scientists have a dumb frame of reference.
Not my fault everyone else has weird and tiny feet.
Considering 6’ people were rare 150 years ago, I’d imagine a size 14 would have been crazy 2,000 years ago.
Kind of rare, but not exactly unheard of. Kinda like anyone taller than 6’ 8" these days. If you saw them, you might think “Wow, they’re tall” but you wouldnt think of them as freakish.
Combine that with this being a Roman fort, and the fact that being a soldier was probably a pretty common job for big/strong men, and it’s really not that surprising. Kind of a nothing story really. Imagine a bunch of future archeologists scratching their heads over finding a bunch of large shoes in an NBA locker room.
They were also shorter on average than modern humans. https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/17072/what-was-the-average-height-of-roman-men-and-women
They also lived shorter on average. Some of them still reached a very old age. The average really doesn‘t tell us that much about the extremes that existed.
That’s because of high infant/childhood mortality rates skewing the average. If you take away anyone who died before age 5, the average age shoots up to like 70+ in most places. Not too different from today.
Yes, I know. The problem is that most people see an average stat and think it‘s a universal law. That goes for life expectancy, height and even GDP per capita among other things. In reality no one is perfectly average and extremes exist everywhere.
It’s not size 14.
12.6 inches is roughly size 38 in UK sizes
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barleycorn_(unit)
Yeah I work in a place that sells shoes and I can tell from the thumbnail image that shoe is much, much bigger than a size 14. Nowhere that sells normal shoes for people to actually wear will sell shoes that big.
One of my sons wears size 14, despite not being freakishly tall (he’s 6’2" and strongly buit). He usually has to put in a special order. His hands are also massive. We’ve never had a conversation about cock size, though I’m somewhere in the normal range, whereas my wife’s dad was reputed to be a tripod, so it could go either way, or somewhere in-between.