Modern Man a Wimp, According to Anthropologist
I saw this article in Reuters by John Mehaffey and I thought this would be a great one to post here:
LONDON (Reuters) – Many prehistoric Australian aboriginals could have outrun world 100 and 200 meters record holder Usain Bolt in modern conditions.
Some Tutsi men in Rwanda exceeded the current world high jump record of 2.45 meters during initiation ceremonies in which they had to jump at least their own height to progress to manhood.
Any Neanderthal woman could have beaten former bodybuilder and current California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in an arm wrestle.
These and other eye-catching claims are detailed in a book by Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister entitled “Manthropology” and provocatively sub-titled “The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male.”
McAllister sets out his stall in the opening sentence of the prologue.
“If you’re reading this then you — or the male you have bought it for — are the worst man in history.
“No ifs, no buts — the worst man, period…As a class we are in fact the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet.”
Delving into a wide range of source material McAllister finds evidence he believes proves that modern man is inferior to his predecessors in, among other fields, the basic Olympic athletics disciplines of running and jumping.
His conclusions about the speed of Australian aboriginals 20,000 years ago are based on a set of footprints, preserved in a fossilized claypan lake bed, of six men chasing prey.
FLEET-FOOTED ABORIGINALS
An analysis of the footsteps of one of the men, dubbed T8, shows he reached speeds of 37 kph on a soft, muddy lake edge. Bolt, by comparison, reached a top speed of 42 kph during his then world 100 meters record of 9.69 seconds at last year’s Beijing Olympics.
In an interview in the English university town of Cambridge where he was temporarily resident, McAllister said that, with modern training, spiked shoes and rubberized tracks, aboriginal hunters might have reached speeds of 45 kph.
“We can assume they are running close to their maximum if they are chasing an animal,” he said.
“But if they can do that speed of 37 kph on very soft ground I suspect there is a strong chance they would have outdone Usain Bolt if they had all the advantages that he does.
“We can tell that T8 is accelerating toward the end of his tracks.”
McAllister said it was probable that any number of T8′s contemporaries could have run as fast.
“We have to remember too how incredibly rare these fossilizations are,” he said. “What are the odds that you would get the fastest runner in Australia at that particular time in that particular place in such a way that was going to be preserved?”
Turning to the high jump, McAllister said photographs taken by a German anthropologist showed young men jumping heights of up to 2.52 meters in the early years of last century.
STARK DECLINE
“It was an initiation ritual, everybody had to do it. They had to be able to jump their own height to progress to manhood,” he said.
“It was something they did all the time and they lived very active lives from a very early age. They developed very phenomenal abilities in jumping. They were jumping from boyhood onwards to prove themselves.”
McAllister said a Neanderthal woman had 10 percent more muscle bulk than modern European man. Trained to capacity she would have reached 90 percent of Schwarzenegger’s bulk at his peak in the 1970s.
“But because of the quirk of her physiology, with a much shorter lower arm, she would slam him to the table without a problem,” he said.
Manthropology abounds with other examples:
* Roman legions completed more than one-and-a-half marathons a day carrying more than half their body weight in equipment.
* Athens employed 30,000 rowers who could all exceed the achievements of modern oarsmen.
* Australian aboriginals threw a hardwood spear 110 meters or more (the current world javelin record is 98.48).
McAllister said it was difficult to equate the ancient spear with the modern javelin but added: “Given other evidence of Aboriginal man’s superb athleticism you’d have to wonder whether they couldn’t have taken out every modern javelin event they entered.”
Why the decline?
“We are so inactive these days and have been since the industrial revolution really kicked into gear,” McAllister replied. “These people were much more robust than we were.
“We don’t see that because we convert to what things were like about 30 years ago. There’s been such a stark improvement in times, technique has improved out of sight, times and heights have all improved vastly since then but if you go back further it’s a different story.
“At the start of the industrial revolution there are statistics about how much harder people worked then.
“The human body is very plastic and it responds to stress. We have lost 40 percent of the shafts of our long bones because we have much less of a muscular load placed upon them these days.
“We are simply not exposed to the same loads or challenges that people were in the ancient past and even in the recent past so our bodies haven’t developed. Even the level of training that we do, our elite athletes, doesn’t come close to replicating that.
“We wouldn’t want to go back to the brutality of those days but there are some things we would do well to profit from.”
(Editing by Clare Fallon; To query or comment on this story email sportsfeedback@thomsonreuters.com)
© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved
Now, our article offers no reasons for the difference, but let me suggest some possibilities for you. Dr. Weston Price toured the African Sub-Sahara and got to witness populations first-hand. This is what he had to say:
These (the Masai of Tankanika, Chewya of Kenya, Muhima of Uganda, Watusi of Ruanda and the Neurs tribes on the western side of the Nile in the Sudan were all cattle-keeping people) meat-eating tribes were noted for their fine physiques and great height-in some groups the women averaged over 6 feet tall, and many men reached almost seven feet. Examinations of their teeth revealed very few caries, usually less than 0.5%. Nowhere in his travels had Price yet found groups that had no cavities at all, yet among the cattle-herding tribes of Africa, Dr. Price found six tribes that were completely free of dental decay. Furthermore, all members of these tribes exhibited straight, uncrowded teeth.
Largely vegetarian Bantu tribes such as the Kikuyu and Wakamba were agriculturists. Their diet consisted of sweet potatoes, corn, beans, bananas, millet and Kafir corn or sorghum. They were less robust than their meat-eating neighbors, and tended to be dominated by them. Price found that vegetarian groups had some tooth decay-usually around 5% or 6% of all teeth, still small numbers compared to Whites living off store-bought foods. Even among these largely vegetarian tribes, however, dental occlusions were rare, as were degenerative diseases.
Price saw it similar to the graphic above. And one more. This was an exchange between the Ethiopian and Persian Kings, from the book, “Life Without Bread.”
One thing about modern man: he’s experiences more *mental* stress than his ancestors. This isn’t good for the body or its development. Maybe it’s part of the reason for our addiction to carbs — we live in a stress-based civilisation and such food is on the menu of available tranquilisers.
And it’s not like the Aboriginal or Native American cultures could protect us from this. Their remaining descendants suffer disproportionately from obesity and alcoholism from what I gather.
I disagree. When insulin is high, cortisone and adrenaline are unable to do their job and calm us in the way they are supposed to. One of the first things that people report on a high-fat diet is the increased calm and sense of well-being that they experience. It’s almost unanimous in my experience. We are so stressed out because of the way we eat. These foods affect our immune system and every other system in the body adversely.
Their descendants suffer because we have hoarded them on reservations and we feed them a high-carbohydrate diet. The PIMA are the most sickly of all and their diet is very Western. They suffer the highest rate of diabetes, heart disease and obesity on the planet. Is there any wonder? This was a very proud and powerful people until the river they relied on was stopped up in order to support agriculture.
Don’t get me started.
For more on the plight of the Native American, read articles on this blog. We have Nobel prize winning authors such as Albert Schweitzer who reported on their conditions. Government rations are obviously not the healthiest.
Thanks for reading,
Charles