In this chapter we are concerned with a third major group of peoples, here designated ‘Asiatics’. We employ this name to refer to the groups of peoples originating in the Far East: we include the classical Mongols of Mongolia, Tibet and northern China; the Arctic Eskimos; the American Indians or Amerindians who, although inhabitants of the Americas, originally migrated from Asia (MacNeish, 1971); and the Indonesian- Malays. The last group probably has had a varying amount of admixture with Indo-Mediterranean and African peoples (Montagu, 1960). Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos and Thais are some of the populations designated as Indonesian-Malay. There is great diversity in adult Asiatic populations, and this is reflected in the growth of the children.

The growth studies

A description of the recent growth studies we have selected is given in Table 6. There are two studies on growth in Tibetan children in Nepal (Beall, 1981; Pawson, 1977). We have one new study only on Alaskan Eskimos; this is on a small group on St Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea (Johnston et al., 1982).

There are a number of new studies on Amerindian and mestizo populations; notable among them are the various high-altitude projects in the Andes. Mueller and his colleagues have reported on the Multinational Andean Genetic and Health Program which consists of multidisciplinary studies of the Aymara in Chile and Bolivia (Mueller et al., 1978a,b; 1980; 1981). Stinson (1980; unpubl.) also has been studying the Aymara in the Lake Titicaca region outside La Paz and, with Frisancho, the Quechua in highland and lowland towns in Peru (Stinson & Frisancho, 1978).