is now an article of the Republic, which is linked somehow the theory of Lieberman and Dennis Bramble . 'Bolt? Any Aboriginal prehistory would have outperformed. The world record high jump was, at least until a century ago, the reach of most young Tutsi of Rwanda, which in the ceremonies of initiation into adulthood jumped 2.50 meters or more, compared with 2, 45 of Sotomayor. These and other examples can be found in a book Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister , entitled Manthropology , where the student systematically debunked the myth of physical and athletic progress of our species, and in particular the male gender.
The subtitle, that sounds like "The inadequacy of modern science" is itself an eloquent introduction of the thesis of the scholar: the male half of our day is a cartridge. "If you're reading this book - McAllister writes in his preface - or if you're the 'it' that someone has bought this book, you're the worst male history. No 'ifs' and no 'but': the worst period of the male : as category, in fact, we are the most painful cohort of male Homo sapiens to have walked the planet Earth. "
Drawing on a wealth and variety of sources, the scholar has found, he says, evidence proving the inferiority of modern man than his predecessors in many fields. Among these, some athletics disciplines. His conclusions about the speed of the Australian Aborigines lived 20 thousand years ago are based on some tracks, found a fossilized land in his country. The tracks belong to six men, and it was found that these are individuals who wanted to catch a prey animal. But McAllister went further and, by analyzing the tracks of a single man, known as T8, has proved that he had to run at a speed of 37 mph. Bolt during his world record achieved in Berlin, has exceeded 44, but it is a top speed of an athlete running on a perfect terrain with ultraspecializzate shoes and cleats attached. The researcher speculates that the particular aboriginal, running barefoot on a ground "soft", have also been able to reach 45 hours. And it was not necessarily the Bolt of his time ...
"We can say that T8 has accelerated to the end of its run, and make certain that ran for close to its limits, since chasing prey - McAllister said in Cambridge, England, where he temporarily lives and works - . But he did so under very different conditions from those that manage to create a running track. Besides, there is no reason to think that many of his contemporaries were not able to run just as fast: fossilizations such as that on which they were performed tests are so rare that the probability of having found the right man Australian faster than his time (and the fastest in the world) are extremely rare.
McAllister goes further and says that photos taken by a German anthropologist at the beginning of the twentieth century show young Tutsi who jump up to 2.52 meters. Even here, of course, no cleats, and without Fosbury ... "This is an initiation ritual, which was to jump at least your height. I had to do all to adulthood - -. says McAllister were jumping from the earliest years of life to be ready for that appointment, developing great athletic ability and technical specification. "
McAllister cites other comparisons. Aborigines threw spears of hard wood to 110 meters, 98.48 meters against the current world record for the javelin. 'It is true that they are different instruments (plus the javelin was weighed down gradually over the years because the cast is too long compared to the stages ed) -. But we are still faced with another evidence of the enormous athletic skills of the ancient Aborigines, such that, if some of them absurd could be done to participate in a modern javelin competition, I would be surprised to see him eliminated after the first run ".
Again, the Roman legions could walk a marathon and a half per day (over 60 km) wearing equipment that weighed about half of them, Athens had 30 thousand rowers in his army that they could outperform the various Abbagnale and Redgrave. A Neanderthal woman (here the truth is of another species, living in parallel to ours) had 10 percent more muscle mass in the best Schwarzenegger.
short, a sharp and unstoppable physical decline, against which nothing can - it seems - the criteria for training to the limits of fiction in modern man, and he alone, is in possession (and, apparently, even doping, where applicable). With only one explanation. "In these times, we are terribly inactive, we are since the Industrial Revolution - McAllister says - Before that time, the man was much more robust and muscular. We see the progress of athletics in the last century, and the last 30 years in particular, the result of technological and scientific improvements in the ability to train the human body. But if we could go back, things would change. "
" The statistics on how the man worked more than today pre-industrial revolution are well known - continues the author of 'Mantropologist' - We have lost 40 percent of the shaft, the central part of the long bones because we have much less muscle mass placed on those bones. Simply, we are not exposed to the same workload, the same challenges every day the men of old had to support and address, and as a direct result our bodies are less developed. Even the level of training of a superatleta is obviously able to replicate those workloads.
An invitation to return to the past? "Anything - concludes, a bit 'laconically McAllister - No one wants to repeat the brutality of those days, but there are things we could do better, and make a profit. "'
Source: The Republic
Manthropology addition to the book by Peter McAllister (ISBN: 9780733623912) These are other readings related to the topic (in English):
