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Anthropologist to modern men: ‘You’re not the best'

Posted by CaribShout on October 18, 2009 at 7:30pm

By John Mehaffey LONDON -- Many prehistoric Australian aboriginals could have outrun the 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 metres during initiation ceremonies in which they had to jump at least their own height to progress to manhood. Any Neanderthal woman could have beaten Arnold Schwarzenegger, the California governor and a former bodybuilder, in an arm wrestle. These and other eye-catching claims are detailed in Manthropology: The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male, a book by Peter McAllister, an Australian anthropologist. The author 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,” he writes. “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, Mr. McAllister finds evidence he believes proves 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 clay-pan 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 kilometres per hour on a soft, muddy lake edge. Mr. Bolt, by comparison, reached a top speed of 42 kph during his then-world 100-metres record of 9.69 seconds at last year’s Beijing Olympics. Mr. McAllister estimates aboriginal hunters might have reached speeds of 45 kph if they had the benefit of modern training, spiked shoes and rubberized tracks, “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.” Turning to the high jump, Mr. McAllister said photographs taken by a German anthropologist in Rwanda showed young men jumping heights of up to 2.52 metres 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.” The researcher said a Neanderthal woman had 10% more muscle bulk than modern European man. Trained to capacity she would have reached 90% of Mr. 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. He attributes the decline to increasing lack of exercise over the past 200 years. “We are so inactive these days and have been since the Industrial Revolution really kicked into gear,” he said. “These people were much more robust than we were. Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/posted/archive/2009/10/15/anthropologist-to-modern-men-you-re-the-worst.aspx#ixzz0UKjre5Lg
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