A photo from open sources
“Even the most trained and honored athletes today are not are no match for ancient people, “says the doctor Colin Shaw of the University of Cambridge.
At the competitions, ancient hunters would easily defeat today’s World and Olympic champions. Going from gathering to agriculture thousands of years ago led man to what he has now – obesity, osteoporosis and minimal motor activity.
According to The Daily Mail, citing a published in Outside Magazine study description of Dr. Shaw, to such findings of scientists pushed the study of the structure of the skeletons of ancient people found during excavations, and their comparison with the bones of our contemporaries. By Shaw’s opinion that the state of the bones fully reflects the development of muscle and the general physical condition of Homo sapiens today as well as thousands years ago.
Dr. Shaw’s colleague Alison Mackintosh decides to match data laser scanning of bones dating back to 5300 BC. Until 850 CE, as well as analyzes of bone elasticity Cambridge jogging students. The results were almost the same – ancient male farmers only a little inferior to modern runners.
According to Ph.D. Macintosh, who recently published a paper titled “From Athletes to Bedridden: People After 6,000 Years agriculture, “people lost their physical skills at that the moment when we switched from hunting and gathering to cultivation land and growing crops and livestock. Tasks of men and women were divided, overall motor activity decreased, and, as a result, physical endurance began to fall with each generation.
Basically, the changes affected men – they stopped running on long distances, stopped carrying heavy prey on the shoulders. Daily exercise has become much easier.
The relationship between bone volume and human weight has been established in 1964, the Soviet anthropologist George Debets. It turned out that if you add the volumes of three limb bones – the tibia, femoral and humeral, then we get the value from which mathematically easy to calculate the average weight of living people given groups. In order to draw this conclusion, the scientist collected and processed data on the peoples inhabiting different corners of the globe, starting from the Mesolithic time and ending with the Middle over the centuries.
In total, Debets performed calculations for 2855 individuals – residents of Karelia and Siberia, Moravia and Greece, Denmark and Pamir, Norway and Africa. It turns out that the man who lived in Altai in the Bronze Age, in its physical type was approaching, according to Debec, to weightlifters of average weight, and Neolithic residents Dnepr rivers – for athletes. The tribes who lived in the era Neolithic in Baikal and Greece, close in body structure to to modern people.
