change over time. Well, we are sentient enough to
be able to see the changes in modern humans, as
they happen, if we're not too wed to tv/Net
diabetic-inducing food, alcohol/drugs or
overwork.
It's obvious that, if you stop doing an action, your
body becomes less able to do it. So, we no longer
hunt with primitive weapons, so we no longer
are able to hunt. That also means we have less
strength, despite what wonders steroids have
brought us.
I've noticed in only one generation of my family
what differences life brings to the architecture
and functioning of a human. My father's family were
subsistence farmers. My dad, although he didn't
show off, was built like an ox, and my uncles
too, except for one. They had to be. Simple diet,
hard life, many chores. bam.
I have been a gym goer most of my life, and I'll
never be that strong. Life did not demand
much from me, physically. I was raised as
a Western suburban human.
I'll briefly recount a night of stupidity that I
caused, that showed me the difference. I took
my father's car to town, drove like an idiot and
got into a minor fender-bender. The crash
meant that the right front wheel was rubbing the
tire when I turned in any direction.
So, I tried to bend it back to no avail and drove
it with the tire grinding every time I turned.
I took the car home. In two tugs, the father
unit had fixed it, with my friend as a witness.
And I mean 1970 heavy Chevy, not the modern
crap.
We're also losing memory capacity with mobile-
phone -cum secretary. Of course, that started
with the written word, as Socrates had warned.
[I'll find that later]
Anyway, we also don't like cooking. Pretty soon
we'll be unable to avoid starvation if convenience
stores close for a month, or if the superstore which
is your only source of food decides they can't make
money any more, and closes shop. See the
'canuck' blog soon.
["you're all worthless & weak" check 2:15 onward]
Checkit: Independent
Modern
man 'a wimp', says anthropologist
Reuters
Many
prehistoric Australian aboriginals could have outrun world 100 and 200 metres
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.
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.
... 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.
"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.
... 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.
... "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."
