"Even the most trained and honored athletes today are no match for ancient people," says Dr. Colin Shaw of the University of Cambridge.
In competition, ancient hunters would have easily defeated today's world and Olympic champions. The transition from gathering to agriculture thousands of years ago led a person to what he has now - obesity, osteoporosis and minimal physical activity.
According to The Daily Mail, referring to the description of Dr. Shaw's study published in Outside Magazine, scientists were pushed to such conclusions by studying the structure of the skeletons of ancient people found during excavations and comparing them with the bones of our contemporaries. According to Shaw, the state of the bones reflects the development of the muscles and the general physical condition of Homo Sapiens both today and thousands of years ago.
Dr. Shaw's colleague Alison McIntosh decided to collate bone lasers dating from 5300 BC. to 850 AD, and analyzes of the elasticity of the bones of Cambridge joggers. The results were almost the same - ancient male farmers were only slightly inferior to modern runners.
According to Mackintosh PhD, who recently published From Athletes to Sleepers: Humans After 6,000 Years of Farming, humans lost their physical skills as they transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming and growing crops and livestock. The tasks of men and women were divided, general physical activity decreased, and, as a result, physical endurance began to decline with each generation.
Basically, the changes affected men - they stopped running long distances, stopped carrying heavy prey on their shoulders. Daily exercise has become much easier.
The relationship between the volume of bones and the weight of a person was established back in 1964 by the Soviet anthropologist Georgy Debets. It turned out that if you add up the volumes of the three bones of the limbs - tibia, femur and humerus - you get a value from which it is mathematically easy to calculate the average weight of living people in a given group. In order to make this conclusion, the scientist collected and processed data on peoples inhabiting different parts of the globe, from the Mesolithic time to the Middle Ages.
In total, Debets performed calculations for 2855 individuals - residents of Karelia and Siberia, Moravia and Greece, Denmark and the Pamirs, Norway and Africa. It turns out that the person who lived in Altai in the Bronze Age, according to his physical type, approached, according to Debets, middle weight lifters, and the Neolithic inhabitants of the Dnieper over the Dnieper region approached athletes. The tribes that lived in the Neolithic era in the Baikal region and Greece are close in body structure to modern people.
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