The Tragic Life Of Lucia Zarate: The Smallest Woman Ever | Random Thursday

last fall I did a video on human oddities specifically on the sideshow circuit of the early 20th century everything from a guy who smoked with his eyeballs to the tallest man of all time Robert Wadlow but one person I forgot to talk about was the smallest person of all time Lucia Zarate the human doll growing up I was always the smallest kid in my class which I guess kind of gave me a little bit of a soft spot for little people like when I was a kid my hero was spud Webb because I played basketball but I was a little short dude spud Webb played pro basketball he was only 5 foot 7 which is actually shorter than I am right now but it's not just that he was short dude could dunk in fact he won the NBA slam dunk championship in 1986 and watching him dunk was just like a thing of beauty cuz like his his vertical leap was insane like when he jumped up he just kind of like kept going like way past the part where most people would stop it was it was amazing to watch and it gave a lot of Hope to a short small-town kid like me so spud Webb I salute you by the way here he was just a few years ago 47 years old he's still able to dunk he's wearing a business suit Legend anyway this video is not about spud Webb he was small but lúcia Zarate was much smaller she was she was closer to the size of the basketball Lucy was born in 1864 in San Carlos Nevada llaman in Mexico and reportedly she was only 8 ounces when she was born although it needs to be pointed out that like most sideshow performers of her day her backstory is a mix of legend and truth because they tended to hype up their backstories quite a bit back in the day so some of this might not be completely right might be amped up for dramatic effect actually feel free to apply a healthy level of skepticism to everything I say here because scishow but the story goes that she stopped growing at the age of 1 and topped out at 24 inches according to the Guinness Book of World Records and she only weighed 4 point 7 pounds as an adult we see a head of form of primordial dwarfism called Majewski osteo dysplastic primordial dwarfism type 2 now there are a lot of different types of dwarfism but the most common dwarfism that you see out there is people who actually have a normal-sized head and torso it's just that their arms and their legs are stunted so their torso disproportionate to their limbs but in primordial dwarfism the torso and the head are also smaller so it's proportionally the same which makes him look just like a kind of shrunk down normal sized person or a normal-sized person standing really far away okay for perspective it was said that Lucy his calf was only slightly thicker than a normal man's thumb anyway Lucy and her family emigrated the United States and entered the sights show circuit and when she was only 12 years old and she was first exhibited in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition where she was billed as the human doll they dressed her an elaborate doll clothing and they usually displayed her standing on a table where people would marvel at the fact that this you know doll could talk back to them she was a major hit and became one of the biggest sideshow attractions everyday touring around mostly on the East Coast for a few years then she actually did a tour through Europe where she actually met Queen Victoria in 1881 she continued touring over the next ten years until her life was tragically cut short people with primordial dwarfism generally don't live to very old age most of them die before the age of 30 but we see it passed away in 1890 at the age of 26 while traveling to a show on the west coast the train she was on got stuck in a massive blizzard in the Sierra Nevada mountains under 25 feet of snow this was actually kind of a major event that stranded 12 trains for two weeks in those mountains it became known as the Great Train blockade of 1890 after ten days of this food rations ran out and with the nighttime temperatures getting down as low as negative 20 degrees Lucia eventually succumbed to hypothermia and she passed away on January 15th the cieth legacy does live on the Guinness Book of World Records as the lightest human adult ever recorded but not the shortest that actually gets weirdly complicated even in her own time Lucia wasn't the shortest person ever she actually shared that designation with Pauline musters who was also a sideshow performer and she also measured it 24 inches by the way the current shortest woman in the world according to Guinness is G OD MJ who measures twenty four point six inches she's from India and she's an actress she's appear in several Bollywood films and she appeared in the American Horror Story franchise but the shortest person of all time according to Guinness is Chandra Bahadur donkey of Nepal who's only twenty 1.5 inches he actually passed away in 2015 which makes the shortest person in the world currently John Dre following of the Philippines it 23.6 inches tall by the way for those of you who are looking at this picture and saying well duh he's a toddler guys 25 years old although he does have a bit of an asterisk by his name because generate is actually non mobile he can't walk the current shortest mobile person in the world it's good gendereth up and Megara of nepal at 26 inches tall not sure why DePaul is so over-represented here but anyway like I said before it it gets it gets weirdly complicated to figure out who the shortest person in the world is this is where spud Webb walks in is like yeah but can they dunk anyway if for whatever reason you always wonder what the match nations were behind figuring out who was the shortest person on the world there you go you can sleep well at night and in honor of Lucy Azhar at a short stature and tried to quit short life I will make this a short video thanks for watching a little bit off-topic but I thought you guys might enjoy it if this is your first time here I invite you to check out this video cuz Google thinks you might like it or any of my other videos and if you do like them I encourage you to subscribe because I'll come back with videos just like this every Monday and every Thursday t-shirts available in the store dancers with Joe Kahn / shirts I have actually a branded shirt on today that I'm wearing there's also mugs with this and posters and hoodies and all kinds of stuff if you want them you can go check them out answers with Joe calm / shirts Thanks alright I'll leave you guys for now thanks again for watching you guys go out have an eye-opening rest of the week and I'll see you on Monday okay guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 131,666

Rating: 4.9586029 out of 5

Keywords: Answers with Joe, random thursday, lucia zarate, sideshow performers, human oddities, shortest person in the world, shortest person of all time, guinness book of world records, Pauline Musters, Jyoti Amge, Chandra Bahadur Dangi, primordial dwarfism

Id: jR-GR0G9DJM

Length: 5min 47sec (347 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2019