Do you, like me, lead groups of people from time to time around old mines and quarries? And do you get informed, as I do, with monotonous regularity that "people were shorter in those days"?
It doesn't annoy me, but I do get totally bemused by it. Having spent 5 minutes explaining carefully how the geology has determined the height of the passages, (in my case old quarry workings where the roof and floor stones provide the natural and obvious boundaries for extraction) I then have it explained back to me that maybe the passages are only 5 ft high because 'people were shorter in those days'.
Maybe all your mines are big and spacious. Maybe I'm just no good at getting the message across.
And, were people really so much shorter in those days? Maybe they were! And if so, by how much?