Our Fancy Modern Athletes Have Nothing on Prehistoric Subhumans

When people compare athletes of today to those of bygone eras, you immediately hear the notion that athletes of today are bigger, stronger, more sophistically trained and provided with better equipment than those of yesteryear. While those are true when discussing the differences between current athletes and those of a few generations past, the abilities of early humanoids apparently dwarf anything we pampered modern folk could ever hope to do.↵↵⇥Peter McAllister, the author of Manthropology: the Science of Inadequate Modern Man, described today’s males as the “sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet.”↵⇥↵⇥By analysing sets of footprints preserved in a fossilised claypan lake bed, Mr McAllister concluded that Australian aboriginals 20,000 years ago reached speeds of 23mph on soft, muddy ground.↵⇥

↵⇥↵⇥Bolt, by comparison, reached a top speed of 26mph at last year’s Beijing Olympics during his then world 100 metres record of 9.69 seconds.↵⇥

↵⇥↵⇥Mr. McAllister claims that with modern training, spiked shoes and rubberised tracks, aboriginal hunters might have reached speeds of 28mph - faster than Bolt’s record-breaking 100m performance at the World Championships in Berlin this summer.↵⇥

↵⇥↵⇥Turning to arm wrestling, he said that research indicates that Neanderthal women had 10 per cent more muscle than modern European men.↵⇥

↵⇥↵⇥Trained to capacity, a Neanderthal woman would have reached 90 per cent of Schwarzenegger’s bulk at his peak in the 1970s.↵⇥

↵⇥↵⇥However, because of the quirk of her physiology, with a much shorter lower arm, he believes a Neanderthal woman would have been able to “slam him to the table without a problem”.↵⇥

↵↵↵Yeah, but could Neanderthals have written blog posts as punchy and amusing as the ones you find on this site? Pfft. Hardly. Can they type 100 words a minute? Unlikely. No digit dexterity at all.↵

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