Geneticist and paleoanthropologist John Hawks tackles arguments from a new book claiming that modern men are wimps. (It’s called Manthropology: The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male so there you go.) Anyway, Hawks says there’s a couple of yes-buts in there.

it is entirely true that our bone cross-sectional areas have greatly reduced, with consequent reductions in compressive and torsional strength. We don’t suffer the stresses of the past, and our bones are weaker than ancient peoples’ — at least in comparison to our mass.

That’s the complicated part of any comparison — men in Westernized nations today tend to be bigger than many ancient groups of people. If you’re going to compare “wimpiness” between Neandertals and living men, you have to understand the relative masses.

Read the quote in context here.

Americans aren’t just taller, we’re bigger than we were 200 years ago.

Did Neandertal women really have 10 percent more muscle bulk than modern European men? At 60-80 kg in mass, Neandertal women were between the 5th and 50th percentiles for American white men (link).

Hawks also puts an assertion about the running speeds of Australian aboriginal from 20,000 years ago: estimates based on preserved footprints of six men running down prey suggest the fastest was able to sprint… about as fast as a good high-school track star: a little bit faster than a modern high-school girl, slower than a modern high-school boy.

Now I’m not saying that 37 kph isn’t an impressive speed — there’s no way I could run that fast, even if I were being chased by a Sasquatch. My point is just that there isn’t very much time separating a good high school athlete from the World Record. Sprinters spend an intense effort training to shave a miniscule fraction off their times.

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But it’s hardly a knock against “modern males” to say that ancient footprints would have crossed the finish line a second slower than the fastest Wisconsin boys.

I don’t really have a lot of patience with “it’s been all downhill ever since.” Humans are very, very good at adapting to niches. We were great at it 20,000 years ago in Australia. We were really great at it in the wilds of Borneo. We were really good at it in the slums in London and New York. We were really good at it in deserts. We were really great at it in Tierra del Fuego even when we’d lost the technology for both fire and clothing (but not, significantly and not surprisingly, body decoration.) We’re also really great in suburbia, in war zones, in agrarian societies, in riparian ones, in hunter-gatherer ones, in nomadic ones, in monument-building ones, and even in darkened-surrounded-by-empty-cheetoz-bag ones.

And the funny thing is that more or less, if you dropped 100 modern human children into pretty much any human society (that would tolerate them) over the last maybe 1,000-100,000 years anywhere on the planet they’d almost certainly survive at… roughly the same survival and acculturation rates as the local children would. But also grow to roughly the same height, live only about as long, and accomplish about as much as their “ancient” peers. Same if you were to drop 100 “ancient” children from back there and then into any society today (that would tolerate them.) And, for that matter, run the 100-meter dash in roughly average time. On the other hand, drop 100 adults from either situation into either situation and either way they’d almost certainly have a rougher time of it.

It’s not that we’re not evolving, at all. (Hawks is a strong proponent of the still-evolving school of thought.) It’s that in evolutionary terms millennia are still pretty short intervals. And though culture has changed considerably from place to place and time to time, the culture in general has been a huge factor in whether and how we survive to reproduce for a very long time.