Five Strengths Today's "Inadequate Male" Has Over Our Hard Guy Ancestors

So there’s a new book out called Manthropology: The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male, by anthropologist Peter McAllister.  McAllister studies some of the athletic benchmarks set in today’s sporting world and scrutinizes them against fossil and anthropological evidence of man’s old-school feats of physical ability.  It makes us look bad.

Usain Bolt, for instance, hit a speed of 42 kph during his record-breaking 100m at Beijing last year, but fossil evidence shows that some guy in Australia 20,000 years ago was hitting 37 mph while chasing mammoths in the mud.  And that was just a guy, not the fastest guy in the world.  The average aboriginal hunter could probably have trucked at 45 kph with the right equipment.

Today’s man can’t even play ball with Neanderthal women:

McAllister said a Neanderthal woman had 10 percent more muscle bulk than modern European man. Trained to capacity she would have reached 90 percent of [Arnold] Schwarzenegger’s bulk at his peak in the 1970s.

Oh snap.  This all feels a little defamatory and insulting to me, personally (“inadequate??”), so I’ve gone ahead and made a short list of things we moderns can look to to restore our man-bravado, after the jump.  

1) Hidden Temple – Early Man did not possess the combination of physical dexterity and mental acuity to cross the Moat, answer Olmec’s trivia questions, and find the artifact in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey while using pendants to avoid the Temple Guards.  Modern man’s faculties are uniquely evolved to completing such challenges in under three minutes.

2) Feminine Side – Early Man’s knowledge of exfoliation was extremely rudimentary, and they had not yet evolved shirts that looked great on them, much less any understanding of fall colors vs. spring colors.  Modern man’s appetite for the mojito also outpaces that of the ancients.  Finally, Cro Magnons lacked shoes, as well as the pleasure chemicals we now associate with shopping for them.

3) Absorbency – Our paper towels are up to 50% more absorbent than the competition’s!

4) Projectile Weapons – Guns are faster than Homo Erectus.  They are like an extremely fast invisible person pushing a thimble into you.

5) Amp – We have Amp.