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TALLEST HUMANS on Earth (South Sudan)

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Drew Binsky just found a country where 6-foot-3 makes you average, not tall.

The travel vlogger’s latest stop is South Sudan, and the hook writes itself: the Dinka people, one of the tallest ethnic groups on the planet, walking around markets and villages at heights that would get them scouted by an NBA team back home. Binsky’s video, “I Met The World’s Tallest Humans (7.5 Feet),” spends its runtime doing what his channel does best — putting a camera and a tape measure (figuratively) next to ordinary people doing ordinary things, and letting the numbers speak for themselves.

• Anthropometric surveys by D.F. Roberts and D.R. Bainbridge in 1953-1954 recorded average adult male heights of 182.6 cm (5 ft 11.9 in) among the Dinka Agaar and 181.3 cm (5 ft 11.4 in) among the Dinka Ruweng.
• Modern cultural discussions cite average adult heights of roughly 6 feet to 6 feet 3 inches for Dinka men and 5 feet 9 inches to 5 feet 10 inches for Dinka women, with select individuals in Binsky’s video approaching or exceeding 7 feet.
• Later studies among Dinka war refugees noted a slight decline in average height, attributed to conflict-related undernutrition rather than any change in genetics.

The Origins of the Dinka People

The Dinka are a Nilotic ethnic group concentrated in the Nile Basin of South Sudan, traditionally organized around cattle herding rather than settled farming. Binsky’s footage leans into that pastoralist backdrop — cattle camps, riverside villages, and a diet built heavily around cow’s milk, dairy products, and sorghum, which researchers point to as one of several drivers behind the population’s height alongside genetics and Nilotic body proportions adapted for a hot savanna climate. It’s the same broad ethnographic curiosity that runs through Binsky’s earlier stop with an isolated community in Papua, Indonesia, where diet and environment shape a population in equally visible ways.

The Numbers Behind the Height

The Roberts and Bainbridge data from the early 1950s remains the most-cited academic baseline: 182.6 cm for the Dinka Agaar and 181.3 cm for the Dinka Ruweng, both comfortably above the global male average of the era. Present-day estimates put Dinka men between 6 feet and 6 feet 3 inches on average, with women averaging 5 feet 9 inches to 5 feet 10 inches — figures that make the “over 7 feet” individuals Binsky films outliers even within an already-tall population, not the norm.

Everyone on the street is well over 6 feet tall, and many are over 7 feet — it’s one of the most unbelievable features of mankind I’ve ever seen anywhere on this planet.

Genetics, Diet and Decades of Conflict

Researchers who’ve studied the Dinka attribute their stature to a mix of inherited genetics and lifestyle: a pastoralist diet centered on cattle milk and sorghum, combined with Nilotic body proportions — long limbs, lean frames — that evolved for dissipating heat in the savanna. That said, the trend hasn’t been uninterrupted. Studies of Dinka refugees displaced by South Sudan’s civil wars documented slightly reduced average heights, a shift researchers linked to conflict-driven food insecurity rather than any genetic change, underscoring how decades of hardship have touched even a population defined by physical size.

A Young Nation Binsky Wants on the Map

South Sudan only became the world’s newest country in 2011, and much of the global coverage it’s received since has centered on civil conflict rather than culture. Binsky’s video leans the other way, framing the Dinka’s height as a point of national pride and contrasting everyday South Sudanese citizens with the Dutch — long treated as the global height benchmark — to make the case that South Sudan deserves attention for something other than hardship. It’s the same instinct that’s sent him and other creators into places rarely covered by mainstream travel media, from a single day of reporting in Somalia to deep dives into overlooked corners of the globe filed under Cultures Around The World.

Binsky doesn’t put a number on how many South Sudanese he actually measured against the Dutch average in the video — it’s more show-and-tell than survey — but the point lands anyway: a country still rebuilding after years of civil war has, on a per-capita basis, some of the tallest ordinary citizens on Earth, and nobody outside a handful of anthropology papers had been talking about it.