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Outside Magazine on-line: THE FIT LIST SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 2014, How Far Fitness Has Fallen, By: DEVON JACKSON
"If you were to cross paths with one of your farming ancestors (circa 7,500 to 2,000 B.C.), he'd shove you to the ground, kick sand in your face, and jog off into the sunset with your mate slung over his shoulder. And even with somebody else’s partner slung over his other shoulder, you’d probably never catch up to him. Such has been our musculoskeletal decline in only a handful of millennia.
Even our most highly trained athletes pale in comparison to these ancestors of ours," says Dr. Colin Shaw of Cambridge University’s Phenotypic Adaptability, Variation and Evolution Research Group. "We’re certainly weaker than we used to be." [^]
But, we know C#, and how to plug in a USB cable, and channel-surf ?
“I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.” Jorge Luis Borges
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BillWoodruff wrote: and how to plug in a USB cable
On the third try...
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Assuming you have the correct cable, USB 1.0/2.0 or 3.0 which for some stupid reason decided they needed to make the standard cable once more incompatible by putting a kinky connector instead of a square one. Aaaaaaaaaaaah!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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BillWoodruff wrote: If you were to cross paths with one of your farming ancestors
I would pull an Indiana Jones. "Bang. You're dead."
Marc
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Most of the replies feel the article itself is bunk, and make pretty good arguments to that point. I'm inclined to also doubt the author.
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And they only lived till the age of 20 or so.
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DaveX86 wrote: And they only lived till the age of 20 or so.
Yes, but even today our bodies are not really made (or better: didn't adapt yet) to live beyond the age of 35 to 40. One can tell from the fact that there are no competitive athletes over 40 and the high increase in chance one might get a serious disease past that age. The reason that humans in the first world usually live way longer than that is basically the unlimited food supply, hygiene factors, medical care, etc.
Now, maybe we can do C#, but what if you get lost in the wild for some reason and don't even know how to light up a fire without a match? How to make a knife (essential tool par excellence) if you don't have one? How to hunt for food and gut an animal? In some way, we've become a real dumbed down creature when it comes to low-level skills like that. Birds in a cage. Pretty sad, actually.
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That's why we have Boy Scouts...so we can learn those basic survival skills 
I saw an episode of Myth Busters or some such show where a guy made a fire by filling a soda bottle with pee and used it as a magnifying glass to focus the suns rays on some leaves and twigs...bet the hunter/gatherers wouldn't have thought of that!
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Right... but how many percent of the population is that? I'm from Germany and according to Wikipedia, there are about 260.000 Boy Scouts (population: 80M).
Nice one with the soda bottle, but what if you don't have one or it's a rainy day? 
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Well, I guess Boy Scouts will be in high demand in Germany when the apocalypse happens then
You can always use flint and steel like they did in the old days...
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BillWoodruff wrote: Even our most highly trained athletes pale in comparison to these ancestors of ours
Apparently he doesn't know about Carlo, the Natural Born Runner.
Veni, vidi, vici.
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But our superior intellect would trump his muscles.
---------------------------------
Obscurum per obscurius.
Ad astra per alas porci.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur .
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You...don't go to QA much, these days, do you? 
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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Oow!
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OK, OK, present company excepted! 
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. --- George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952)
Those who fail to clear history are doomed to explain it. --- OriginalGriff (February 24, 1959 – ∞)
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They weren't as stupid as we might think. Ancient technology like the antikythera mechanism shows this.
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He (or she - for early agrarian society was all hands on deck) would have been riddled with parasites, malnourished from early age and probably already injured from prior violent encounters.
Could still kick my backside, but not a superhuman as such.
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I've read both of the paleo books, and they make a good argument. The most annoying thing about the comments is that they equate paleo with the Fred Flintstone diet which has nothing to do with the paleo diet. Paleo is just a very very unfortunate name for something that really isn't out there.
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Saw a movie called "The Eagle" where "Scotts", I believe the tribe was called Briga(u)nts painted themselves blue and ran after the Romans who rode horses, to Hadrian's wall, the Brigans impaling, maiming and chopping off limbs as they went.
The blue guys were sober though, making me question the movies authenticity.
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No worries; I'm a hell of a lot better armed than any of my ancestors, or yours. I'll blow him away, keep my broad, and take his spare. 
Will Rogers never met me.
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I'm not really sure I believe that. There are plenty of modern humans who still live essentially the same existence as what we consider 'prehistory' in Europe, in many parts of the world. Even in the 'first world' most people lived like that through the medieval time.
Anyone who does physical work, whether it's a builder now or a Stonehenge-era farmer, would kick my arse, because I haven't physically trained and I don't use my strength on a daily basis. There's a lot of us in that position, so if you take some kind of average across the population then it will look like we have got weaker on a species level.
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Heck, no need to go back that far; most of us would not survived in medieval europe (even knowing it was a lot less violent than what is commonly known).
I'd rather be phishing!
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I'm afraid these people simply exaggerate - an they are not scientists either. When you look at the evidence it is clear they exaggerate a lot. It depends also what you mean by 'athlete'. Amateur powerlifters frequently have three to four times the strength of an average man and double to triple the muscle mass, pros may have five time sthe normal strength and can deadlift as much as they reckon a gorilla can. They also develop enormous bony attachments to support their large muscles. Even the Neanderthal was only reckoned to have about twice the average strength of today, for someone of the same height (they were quite short). Is he claiming that these farmers weighed 300 pounds or something? they would have to to exceed the best powerlifting athletes in musculoskeletal ability. Also muscle development does not correlate with jogging. This idea that muscle bound people can gallop at high-speed for miles is pure fantasy - distance running requires an endurance physique not large muscles. Bone density can also near or reach its maximum value of 2 in strength athletes, so these farmers could not have exceeded that either. These 'anthropologists' should study more basic physiology and try to be more critical and scientific.
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Another interesting one for you - the left arm bones of medieval archers were about 50% heavier than those in the right arm, which is itself quite well developed. I think maybe these people look at the wrong type of athlete.
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"She then cross-checked her findings with Shaw’s study of bone rigidity among modern Cambridge undergraduates"
Not exactly a representative sample. I suspect she'd have gotten rather different results if her modern sample set consisted of, say, construction workers, or infantry soldiers.
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