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Modern man a wimp says anthropologist
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-10-14 14:24 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. "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." "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."
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