Settle a debate with DH on skeletons and body size!

[whydoesitalwaysrainonme82]

DH said everyones skeleton is pretty much the same size. I said but everyone has different frames. It started because I was saying that even when I am at my slimmest my waist doesnt get smaller than 30inches, my body frame isnt that small, I am also quite wide on the shoulders, think swimmer type frame. DH said its to do with muscle mass not bone size and if you had 3 men skeletons in a row of same height , they wouldnt really differ from each other even if in real life they were all different frames.

Thoughts? I know this is probably something I should know by now so dont flame me down!!

@fishonabicycle

I've just been looking this up! It says skeleton 'widths' are mostly very similar - 15% are wider than average and 15% are narrower. So 70% of us have the same size skeletons (proportional to our height). Wider hips on women are generally because lots of women carry fat there.

So he is right then!

@FenellaVelour

Weirdly, my wrists and fingers are tiny, but even when I was a size 8 I always weighed quite a lot. Not sure what that says about my strange body.

That is a symptom of foetal alcohol syndrome, when your wrists and hands are disproportionately small compared to rest of your skeletal frame.

But he is saying that if you had two 5ft female skeletons side by side, they would be pretty much the same even if when they were alive they appear to have very different physiques

He’s then correct and you didn’t explain that in your op, you just said he thought everyone had the same size skeleton.

And he’s also right your waist measurement is not about your skeleton.

If we all had the same skeleton size wouldn't that mean all men would be the same height, and all women?

Your dh is wrong. I am tall, I have wide hips and broad shoulders no matter what weight I am, and I don't have a lot of muscle on my top half. I have a friend who is only a couple of inches smaller than me. She has very narrow hips and average size shoulders. If she was the same height as me, I doubt her figure would change to the same shape as mine.

Sorry just caught up!

I doubt the ops dp is talking about height of a skeleton, pretty sure he means the shape.

To an untrained eye, the skeletons of same sex, same height person would look very similar. Similar enough that if you jumbled two skeletons togetherness, you’d probably to mix and match the bones to the wrong person.
To an osteologist or forensic anthropologist trained to look for minute differences in bones., there would be enough differences to be able to sort the bones out into the correct individual skeletons. They don’t do it all by eye. There is measuring and weighing of the bones so you get the correct right femur matched to the correct left femur. You can look at the pubic symphysis on the left front of the pelvis and by whether the surface is smooth or degree of pitting tell which is correct right of pelvis from the same person. The pitting is also one of the signs of childbirth because during childbirth the pelvic cradle seperates causing tendons to stretch (causing bits of bone to tear away with the muscle fibres causing the pitting). So after birth, if you have wide hips, your bones haven’t changed size, it’s that the tendons that hold your pelvis together are a bit stretched out and no longer holding the bones right up against each other.

DH is more or less correct. There men of the same height will have similar skeleton sizes. Three women will also have similar skeletons, although I think pelvis size is more variable between women than between men.
However, exercise can have an impact. Have a look around the Marie Rose museum in Portsmouth. The bones themselves were shaped by the activity sailors did. But that is at extreme levels of exertion often from a young age. The average person will show very little variation. I hate to break it to you, but if you were in a famine, your waist size would quite definitely be smaller than 30 inches.

@Wewearpinkonwednesdays

I doubt the ops dp is talking about height of a skeleton, pretty sure he means the shape.

Yes, not the height. I should have been clearer in my OP

@Tootletum

DH is more or less correct. There men of the same height will have similar skeleton sizes. Three women will also have similar skeletons, although I think pelvis size is more variable between women than between men. However, exercise can have an impact. Have a look around the Marie Rose museum in Portsmouth. The bones themselves were shaped by the activity sailors did. But that is at extreme levels of exertion often from a young age. The average person will show very little variation. I hate to break it to you, but if you were in a famine, your waist size would quite definitely be smaller than 30 inches.

Well, yes but some women naturally have smaller waists than others. I guess maybe its just where people naturally carry their muscle fat then.

I can see this in my children- my DD is shaped physically like her father- a cross section through her waist (looking from top down) would be rectangular (albeit with rounded ends, like a bloomer loaf), whereas DS is physically my shape, and a cross section would be far more circular, more like a fat oval (or a cottage loaf ).
They're both slender, but DS currently is about four inches less wide than DD at the same height.

When pregnant and at a scan, they measured the baby's head size. So I asked whether all babies have the same head size. I was told that mainly yes, except for different races. ie South American may be marginally smaller, etc.
There are definitely differences in height between adults, and obviously differences between make and female. Experts can generally determine sex by the look of the skeleton, before testing.
When they dug up Richard III from the car park, his skeletal remains were described as 'gracile', (ie slender), whereas presumably most men would have a greater bone density. So that's a difference for a start.

Depends on the meaning of the word 'really'.

Apparently my skeleton should weigh about 21 lbs, and the range for a woman my height (healthy weight) would be 18-24 lbs. 18-24 seems pretty like 'not really' much variation, tbf.

Yes they do. Not so sure about weight on average heights now. My old boss was a strong built lady she had a gastric band she is so slim now. I never thought her body shape would be so slim judging by her old broad shoulders and hips.
Look at Adel too. I'd have said a year who she was big boned.

@whydoesitalwaysrainonme82 Yes, but the variation in waist size is also connected to oestrogen levels, hence women have smaller waists in proportion to their hips. Your skeleton and waist size don't have a high degree of correlation. Muscles, fat and hormones do. It's an interesting topic!

I really doubt they're all the same size. My ankles are extremely sturdy, when I was young ankle chains were fashionable and my boyfriend gave me one and it didnt' fit .
I was very slim, I didnt' have fat ankles just thick and bony. Weirdly my shoulders are quite narrow.

Of course there are different frames, but the waist is not bone is it so I don't understand why you say your waist has a minimum size. I can understand that for hips. Someone might have wide hips that's just bone, but I don't get it for the waist.

Also, when people I've heard claim to be 'big boned' you can tell just by looking at them that it's fat and not bones.

They vary. Eg, 2 male skeletons the same height - one could be thickset, the other gracile - their bones would give a good indication of their build in life. Think of the Mary Rose archer skeletons - their arm bones developed differently because of the constant forces on their bones from pulling a longbow.

I'm sure there is a difference. My Ex has a very broad chest, he is a bit overweight but you can still see his ribcage and it's definitely bigger than in a smaller/ more slender man. Wrists too - his are literally twice the size of mine, neither of us has any fat on our wrists.

On a side note I find the correlation between weight and clothing size/ appearance interesting. I'm a size 12. Most people think I weigh 9 stone ish. I actually weigh nearly 12. People normally guess my Ex weighs about 16st rather than his actual weight which is about 3st more.

Is the argument not that (say) three people of the same height will have almost identical skeleton sizes?

I would say "no" because people have different "frame" sizes. So one could have broad shoulders and heavy bones, and another be much finer in build. And we also know that exercising can build bone mass and density, as well as muscle mass, so that alone tells us that skeletons (or "skellingtons" as I prefer to call them ) vary in size. The bones in our dominant arm are heavier than the bones in our non-dominant arm - this is particularly noticeable in sportspersons such as tennis players and archers.

That said, while I think some people are "bigger-boned" than others, I don't think that "big bones" accounts for someone who is 20 stones being heavier than a 12 stone person of the same sex and height. A bit might be bones. Most will be fat.

On a side note I find the correlation between weight and clothing size/ appearance interesting. I'm a size 12. Most people think I weigh 9 stone ish. I actually weigh nearly 12. People normally guess my Ex weighs about 16st rather than his actual weight which is about 3st more.

Same here - I have a very small frame (I'm 5'3", wrist measures just over 6", shoe size is a 3) and people are always surprised by how much I actually weigh. Appearance is deceptive.

@Gwenhwyfar

Of course there are different frames, but the waist is not bone is it so I don't understand why you say your waist has a minimum size. I can understand that for hips. Someone might have wide hips that's just bone, but I don't get it for the waist.

Also, when people I've heard claim to be 'big boned' you can tell just by looking at them that it's fat and not bones.

I'm just saying if I lose weight and am at my slimmest my waist doesnt ever measure particularly small, possibly 29in its gone down to. Obviously if I was severely underweight it would become a bit smaller. But I have a friend who has a 26in waist, wider hips and weighs a lot more than me.

There are still organs and muscles in the vicinity of the waist though, so they must of necessity take up a certain amount of space. Obviously muscle size can vary. Does organ size, beyond just larger humans having larger organs anyway? As in, I assume an adult who's six four has a bigger pancreas than one who's five two, but would two adults who are five two both have the same pancreas size if everything was normal or would there be some variation expected, in the same way as two women who are both five two might have naturally different sized pelvises?

Hmm 🤔