Neanderthal woman could whup Schwarzenegger
Modern man is big wuss, claims anthropologist
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An anthropologist has described modern man as “the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet”, with even Arnold Schwarzenegger at his muscular peak no match for a Neanderthal woman in the arm-wrestling stakes.
According to Peter McAllister, in Manthropology: the Science of Inadequate Modern Man, so completely wussy have we become that were Usain "Lightning" Bolt to go head-to-head with an ancient Australian aboriginal, it'd be silver medal position for the Jamaican sprinter.
The prologue of McAllister's book warns blokes just how much of a humiliation they're in for, opening with: "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.”
Chaps are then reminded that a Roman soldier was able to march one-and-a-half marathons in a single day, Rwandan Tutsi men could jump higher then the current world record of 2.45 metres, and Huichol Indian dads in Mexico tied strings to their 'nads so that their other half could give a quick tug during labour enabling them to share the childbirth experience.
Regarding the inadequacy of Schwarzenegger, McAllister studied the remains of "La Ferrassie 2", a Neanderthal lass discovered in a French cave in 1909. She boasted ten per cent more muscle than modern European men, and her upper arm strength was more than enough to "slam him to the table without a problem”.
Usain Bolt's nemesis, meanwhile, was an aboriginal man running barefoot on the shore of a lake in New South Wales around 20,000 years ago. His footprints, preserved in the soft mud, show he was sprinting at 37 km/h - not as fast as Bolt's top speed of 42 km/h, but without the benefit of "spiked shoes, a special track, a strict training regime, and money and glory to spur him on", as the Sydney Morning Herald puts it.
The reason for our decline is pretty obvious: general inactivity and a lack of hard graft. McAllister notes: "We are so inactive these days and have been since the industrial revolution really kicked into gear. 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 per cent 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."
Those parents wishing to restore the male of the species to his former glory have a few options available: start your son firing arrows from galloping horses at the age of two, the better to emulate deadly accurate 12th century Mongol bowmen; train your offspring to throw an aboriginal hardwood spear 110 metres plus (as did the original Down Under locals, putting the current javelin world of 98.48 metres into perspective); or reserve him a seat on an Athenian oar-driven vessel, whose crew could easily out-row modern oarsmen. ®
COMMENTS
You should welcome your wimpy 49 year old overlord.
The truth is out there.
"The most impressive track in terms of speed is T8. These footprints are 295 mm long
and 100 mm wide; the estimated height of the person who made the tracks is 1.94 ±
0.15 m (~ 6.4 ft), close to that of the T1 individual. The tracks indicate that this
individual was running the fastest of any person at the site. Pace length increases from
1.8 to 1.9 m over 11 m, indicating acceleration, and speed is estimated at ~ 20 km hr -1."
20 kph is a hell of a lot slower than Bolts 42 kph. If my math is correct that's a bit under 6 m/s. As a wimpy 49 year old I can do that easily for a short distance, say a quarter of a mile.
Clearly I am some kind of superman being able to beat these prehistoric athletes at my advanced age.
Wake up and smell the buls**t
As several have noted Neanderthal man ( woman ) was a different species and would have been completely swatted by a gorilla, or a chimpanzee for that case. I note from elsewhere on the net that "whupping Arnie" involved the Neanderthal being trained to modern standards, fed on a modern diet and then taking advantage of shorter levers to win the arm wrestle despite having smaller muscles. Still, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
The tall ( sorry ) tales about the Tutsi leaping 2.5m+ are just silly. The world high jump record a hundred years ago was under 2m. If the Tutsi could really do this jump they would have been shipped off to Europe by their Colonial "betters" to demonstrate their party piece. Probably followed by the abolition of the high jump as a competitive event as it was clearly not a fit pursuit for white men. There are so many holes in this idea that I could write a book but surely sexual selection would ensure that Tutsi men would gradually get shorter. It's got to be easier for a 1.5m tall man to jump 1.5m than a 2.5m man to jump 2.5m. Since the Tutsi are IIRC among the tallest groups on Earth that doesn't seem very likely.
Which comes on the question of the kit carried by Roman soldiers, Medieval Knights and modern combat troops. And our jury says " the same". For the past 2,000 years or so soldiers have carried the same weight and slogged about the same distance per day. It seems quite likely that Homo Sapiens basic ability hasn't changed much in the past 50,000 years.
There can be no doubt that most people worked physically harder in the past and the typical level of strength and fitness was greater. The price was paid in crippled joints and years of pain starting in the early thirties.
On the other hand Homo Sapiens a few tens of thousands of years ago were ( I suspect ) just as intelligent as they are in the present day.
The whole premise of the book, that modern man is a degraded form of humanity is, ridiculous. People are people, good, bad and, mostly, indifferent just as they always have been.
Is this book published?
Is this book actually available anywhere? It doesn't appear to be on Amazon?
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