Building on soaponarope1's comment in the other thread

Modern humans are incredibly gracilized and domesticated. We're less sexually dimorphic, lacking the secondary sexual characteristic development of the ancients.

[QUOTE]In the fourth century B.C., Greek solider and author Xenophon wrote that an oar-powered Athenian warship, a trireme, could row from Byzantium to Heraclea -- 236 kilometers away -- in a day.

This means Athenian oarsmen averaged seven to eight knots over a 12 to 16 hour trip. Xenophon wasn't boasting; he simply mentioned the figure in passing, meaning his estimate is almost certainly true.

In 2007, exercise physiologists thus attempted to duplicate the feat, but were astonished to find trained modern rowers could manage just six knots, and then only for an hour.

They simply couldn't reach the VO2 max (the benchmark of oxygen use and energy output) needed. Since the city of Athens alone had over 30,000 of these oarsmen, the implication is that even ordinary Greek galleymen were as fit as, or possibly fitter than, modern elite athletes.[/QUOTE][QUOTE]mid-19th Century Australian Aboriginal man, a whaler called Thomas Chaseland, who was said to have extraordinary physical capabilities -- particularly eyesight. Chaseland's shipmates claimed he could see land from 30 miles out to sea, spot whales surfacing outside of telescope range and see a full mile underwater.

A huge man of apparently prodigious strength, Chaseland also survived several shipwrecks at the hands of thrashing whales, on one occasion swimming six miles through freezing waters that killed his fellow whalemen. But the attribute that stands out is his vision.

Could it really be true, I wondered, that this Aboriginal man's eyesight was so much better than that of his European shipmates?

It was hard to believe, for several reasons. Chaseland's reported eyesight was, for a start, better than most scientists thought theoretically possible.

There was also the problem that the stories had something of the "noble savage" myth about them: the hardy native whose "wild essence" gives him superhuman powers.

A little research, however, showed Chaseland's shipmates were probably right. Aboriginal men, even today, do have eyesight four times as good as men of European ancestry. A 1980s survey of Aboriginal eye health proved it.[/QUOTE][QUOTE]even ancient men of our own species were apparently capable of remarkable athletic feats.

Those footprints, indelibly pressed into the soft mud of a shallow temporary lake by Aboriginal hunters, allowed archaeologist Stephen Webb to calculate that one of the men, a 194 centimeter giant named T8, reached speeds of 37.3 kilometers per hour.

This is only slightly slower than Usain Bolt at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and probably indicates T8 could have run even faster if he was put on a rubberised track in spiked shoes.[/QUOTE][QUOTE]Nineteenth-century archaeological excavations on the Greek island of Thera uncovered a 1,058-pound boulder, dated to the sixth century BCE, bearing the inscription “Eumastas, the son of Critobulus, lifted me from the ground.”

This is classified as a deadlift, in which event Rezazadeh has recorded a lift of 836 pounds (the world-record deadlift, 1,006.5 pounds, is held by powerlifter Andy Bolton).

True, Eumastas probably didn’t lift the boulder up to groin height, as modern deadlifters do, but weightlifting historian, David Willoughby, points out that the difficult grip of a boulder, compared to the ease of a barbell, renders the feat probably unattainable by almost any modern weightlifter.[/QUOTE][QUOTE]In 2003 archaeologists from Bond University discovered a series of human footprint trackways preserved in a fossilized claypan lake bed in the Willandra Lakes region of New South Wales, Australia.

The twenty-three trackways date back twenty thousand years and feature almost seven hundred individual footprints. The most interesting are those of six adult men, probably hunters, who seem to have been running to outflank a prey animal.

An analysis of the men’s speed (calculated from their stride length) shows that all were running fast, but that the outside individual, the 6'5" “T8,” was achieving incredible speeds.

The record of his athleticism, written into the dried hardpan of an Ice Age Australian lake bed, raises serious doubts that any modern sprinter can honorably claim the title “Fastest Man on Earth”... T8 ... was sprinting barefoot through a shallow, soft, muddy lake edge, with nothing but a possible meal of kangaroo or waterbird to spur him on, and he still managed to clock 23 miles per hour.

Since the energy cost of running through mud or sand is 1 to 2 times that of running on a solid surface (let alone a rubberized track) this implies T8’s real speed was around 27.6 mph.

Given that this may not have been his top speed (his lengthening strides show he was accelerating) and that he was just one of possibly 150,000 Aboriginal men alive at that time (and probably not even the fastest), it seems likely there were many prehistoric Australian males who could, if they trained, have regularly clocked 28 miles per hour and taken out every Olympic sprint in which they competed.[/QUOTE][QUOTE]Greek triremes were 132-foot wooden warships driven by the oars of 170 rowers arranged vertically on three decks. Thucydides, the famous Greek historian, records that in 427 BCE the Athenian Assembly hot-headedly ordered that the men of Mytilene, a colony 211 miles away on the Aegean island of Lesbos, should be put to death, and dispatched a trireme with the command.

The next day they repented, sending another trireme to rescind it. The first trireme had a whole day-and-a-half start, but Thucydides records that, by rowing for 24 hours straight, the second ship caught up with the first and canceled the murderous order.

Even allowing for exaggeration on Thucydides’ part, this puts the second trireme’s sustained speed in excess of 7.5 miles per hour, or almost 7 knots. This is an impressive pace, but one that was, according to other Greek writers, commonly maintained by even mediocre trireme crews.

Such statements have caused many a modern historian to wonder—could today’s oarsmen achieve such speeds? Thanks to a British exercise physiologist, the Greek navy, and a dash of Olympic nostalgia, we now know the answer.

They can’t.

As part of the opening ceremony for the 2004 Athens Olympics, the Olympic flame was towed into the Athenian port of Piraeus by a trireme named Olympias, which was reconstructed by the Greek navy in 1987 from pictures of triremes on ancient lamps and paintings.

Harry Rossiter, an exercise physiologist from Leeds University and a racing oarsman himself, took the opportunity to test the endurance of trained modern rowers in a real-life trireme.

The results were dismal.

Rossiter reported that the modern rowers could, after several months of training, get Olympias up to nine knots for a brief spurt; but they couldn’t maintain that speed, or even just seven knots, for any sustained period.

Rossiter measured the rowers’ metabolic rates and discovered the reason: the modern crew just wasn’t physically capable of the sustained aerobic effort required.

“The Athenian oarsmen’s endurance was extraordinary,” said Rossiter’s coresearcher, historian Boris Rankov. “In that respect, compared to anybody you could find today they were super athletes.”

What makes the ancient Greek rowers’ achievements even more remarkable is that they were small men. Champion rowers today average 6'3", giving them a reach advantage with the oars, but ancient Athenian males averaged a mere 5'6".

Remarkable, too, is the fact that Athens seemed to have so many of these superb athletes, at one stage fielding a thirty-four-thousand-strong army of rowers for the city’s two-hundred-trireme fleet. The rowers were apparently paid and fed well, but their diet was nothing special, consisting of simple barley meal kneaded with olive oil and wine.[/QUOTE][QUOTE][Ancient people's] incredible athleticism was not genetic, but ontogenetic. Ontogeny is the process by which an organism grows by interaction with its environment. While genes might fix the limits of its potential development, whether or not it reaches them is governed by the environmental stresses placed upon it.

Effectively, therefore, those historic and prehistoric men were superb athletes because of the working toughness they had developed over harsh and demanding lives. Not only was the Athenian trireme rowers’ training drastically tougher than that of modern oarsmen, their work as shepherds and farmers formed a grueling, lifelong program of bone, muscle, and tendon toughening.

Ice Age Australian runners, similarly, probably trekked and ran substantial distances daily. (Studies of a comparable hunting population, the Kalahari Desert Kung, have found that male Kung hunters run an average of 18.6 miles on every antelope hunt.)

Importantly, both groups probably also began this constant exercise from a very early age, a crucial help in developing bodily toughness.

Those scientific studies documenting bone thickening in modern tennis players, for example, found that the greatest expansion took place between the ages of eight and fourteen.

Examples of how much working toughness historical men had compared to Homo masculinus modernus are available even closer to home.

Laborers in the rip-roaring early days of the Industrial Revolution, for example, often performed feats unthinkable today. One New Scientist correspondent reported that[b]bridge builders in the mid-nineteenth century toiled all day with forty-pound sledge-hammers; today’s hammers weigh fourteen pounds.[/b]

English railway navvies in the 1850s were expected to shovel, by hand, twenty tons of earth daily.

In the Sheffield steel mills men chained themselves in gangs of forty to drag glowing iron plates weighing twenty-five to thirty-five tons from the furnace to the “Demon Hammers” for stamping, draping themselves in wet sacking to survive the hellish heat.

Remarkably, these super-strong working men were also much smaller—at an average 5'6, around four inches shorter—than their weakling modern counterparts, who, as we have seen, now average 5'10 in height.

Again, an early start to a tough working life seems to have made the difference. Young boys employed as runners in British glass-works apparently ran between 13 and 17 miles a day, ferrying blown bottles to drying rooms.

Lads with the unenviable job of “pusher-out” in a brickworks (dragging cartloads of bricks from the moulder’s table to the kiln) were thought to shift between 12 and 25 tons a day.[/QUOTE]Testosterone levels are also way down, as most know

[QUOTE]Studies show that men’s testosterone levels have been declining for decades. The most prominent, a 2007 study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, revealed a “substantial” drop in U.S. men’s testosterone levels since the 1980s, with average levels declining by about 1% per year.

This means, for example, that a 60-year-old man in 2004 had testosterone levels 17% lower than those of a 60-year-old in 1987. Another study of Danish men produced similar findings, with double-digit declines among men born in the 1960s compared to those born in the 1920s.[/QUOTE][img]http://www.ourstolenfuture.com/Images/graphs/2006/2006-1210testdecline.png[/img]
[img]https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/56951f1fb204d55ac19b424c/1467659593511-JB0N3DKXKFDESHWERXX7/image-asset.png[/img]

Grip strength is down too

[QUOTE]In a 2016 study, the average 20- to 34-year-old man could apply 98 pounds of force with a right-handed grip, down from 117 pounds by a man of the same age in 1985.[/QUOTE]

I guess this is true in modern countries.

My guess is that it's due to lifting less weights around.

this is demonstrably false.

we have only just reached the pinnacle of strength