Manthropology Read online

  Acknowledgments

  No book would ever see the light of day without the dedicated efforts of a team beyond just the author. In Manthropology’s case those instrumental people include the wonderful staff at St. Martin’s Press, particularly Yaniv Soha, whose deft editing will undoubtedly receive the ironic but highest of accolades—it won’t be noticed. My sincere thanks go also to my agent, Peter McGuigan of Foundry Media, who saw the project through from beginning to end with unfailing faith and good humor. Gratitude is also due to the many people, expert and lay, who gave freely of their time in interview and conversation. I must also, finally, thank my good friend Richard Shapcott, without whose idle suggestion, made over coffee, this book would never have been written.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue: The Worst Man in History

  BRAWN

  BRAVADO

  BATTLE

  BALLS

  BARDS

  BEAUTY

  BABIES

  BABES

  Epilogue: We can be Heroes

  Bibliography

  Endnotes

  Index

  Prologue: The Worst Man in History

  If you’re reading this, then you—or the male you have bought it for—are the worst man in history.

  No ifs, no buts—the worst man, period.

  How can I be so sure? As a paleoanthropologist (Greek roots: palaeo = ancient; anthro = man; logy = science) it’s my job to study people, including men, from way back in our evolutionary past until today. It’s been my work for many long years to mark them, measure them, research them, and describe them—and those years have convinced me that all is not well with the male of our modern species.

  Not well at all.

  As a class we are, in fact, the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet. And, since any man reading this—or woman reading it about him—is by definition a modern one, I confidently repeat:

  You are—or he is—absolutely the worst man in history.

  I know, I know—such sentiments aren’t exactly helpful right now. In these times of masculine crises—of falling sperm counts, accelerating job losses, waning libidos, and fading masculine relevance—men are not looking to be challenged. They are looking for a messiah. A savior. Someone who will soothe their battered egos, restore their lost virility, and set them back up where they think they once belonged: at the top of the gender chain.

  Sorry. I am not that man.

  In the words of another man, one who really was a messiah, I have not come to make peace among you, but war. I have come to turn father against son, brother against brother, and friend against friend. I have come, with the sword of science in my hand, to demonstrate that every terrible little doubt you have ever had about yourself is completely and utterly true.

  I have come, in short, to rub it in.

  In my defense, it wasn’t always so. I didn’t set out to destroy the image of modern males when I started this book. Far from it. As a paleoanthropologist, and a man, I love my brother males—every single one of those who, like me, carry the mark of our stunted, mutant Y chromosome on their brows. It was that love, believe it or not, that started me writing. I read everywhere that my fellow men were suffering—from feminization, ornamentalization, emasculation—and I decided to help. I would use my research into the evolution of our species to prove that men today are not weak, contemptible commitment-phobes who can’t hold down their end of a meaningful conversation, let alone a snarling cave bear, but gods on earth whose heroic abilities would make Zeus himself sneak back to Mount Olympus to work out on his Abdominator in shame. I would write an ABC of the virtues of Homo masculinus modernus, comparing him to earlier men to prove that he is—we are—the crowning glory of humanity’s long evolutionary struggle up from our inauspicious beginnings as leopard food on the African savannah.

  As you will see, I failed.

  In fact, I didn’t even get past B. I discovered, to my horror, that it’s impossible to write a book about the superior achievements of modern males, because we haven’t made any. From battling to boozing, babes to bravado, there’s nothing we can do that ancient men, and sometimes women, haven’t already done better, faster, stronger, and usually smarter.

  Typically, that knowledge dawned on me slowly. Like any challenged male seeking to cover up a gnawing sense of inadequacy, I started by picking on a girl: a Neandertal girl, to be precise. I decided that demonstrating how strong modern men are compared to our ancient brethren (thanks to fitness science and superior nutrition) would make a great beginning, so I calculated the average upper-arm strength of several winners of the World Arm Wrestling Federation Championships since 2000 and compared it to that of the Neandertals who lived in Europe in the Upper Paleolithic roughly 40,000 years BCE (before current era). I must have already sensed I would need to stack the deck a little, since for some reason I decided to start with a Neandertal woman. That did me no good, however, for a troubling inconsistency quickly emerged.

  She was stronger.

  I checked and rechecked the data, but there was no mistake. Incredibly, it seemed that even a random, anonymous Neandertal female would slam the big men of the WAF to the table every time.

  That, admittedly, was disturbing, but I felt that it had to be a statistical anomaly, what scientists sometimes call an outlier. So I moved on confidently to a surer field of inquiry: sports. Competitive athletics are widely considered the proving ground of modern physical superiority—witness the succession of smashed Olympics records last century, culminating in the dizzying, drug-fueled heights of the 1980s and 1990s. A rough calculation shows over 80 percent of current Olympic athletics records were set between 1984 and 2000, and have remained unbroken since. Surely modern men of the track and field would leave their ancient rivals trailing in the strength, speed, and agility stakes?

  To my intense disquiet, the answer was no. As I went deeper into the research I uncovered a succession of startling facts. I found Mongol bowmen in the twelfth century who shot with higher accuracy than modern Olympic archers, over distances six times greater, and from galloping horseback to boot. I found ancient competitors in the Greek Olympics who won three grueling events on a single day’s competition, in one case repeating the feat at four successive Olympics. I found other Greek athletes who set long jump and triple jump records, unassisted by modern technology, that would have stood until the 1952 Olympics. Not to mention the bravery and commitment of competitors such as the boxer Eurydamas of Cyrene, who swallowed his smashed teeth during a match to disguise his injuries from both his opponent and the judges.

  The further back I went the more calamitous the news became. Archaeological research from a fossil footprint site in the Willandra Lakes region of southwestern New South Wales shows that twenty thousand years ago Australian Aboriginal men regularly ran at speeds rivaling, and probably exceeding, the top speed of the current one-hundred-meter world record holder, Usain Bolt. Going back beyond the dawn of our own species, the picture is bleaker yet: even female chimps, gorillas, and bonobos, our closest living relatives, not only carry much higher ratios of lean muscle to body mass than modern men, their individual muscles are up to four times stronger than those of any male Homo sapiens.

  By this time I was seriously shaken. In desperation I widened my focus; if we modern males couldn’t compete on speed and strength I would simply find a field in which we could—such as brains, or beauty, or even the bardic arts for God’s sake. But it was no good. Wherever I turned I found humiliatingly high historic and prehistoric achievers. In the manufacture of their intricate “Levallois” spear points, Neandertal flintknappers from the Lower Paleolithic display an understanding of stone fracture mechanics beyond that of mo
st modern-day geology graduates. The beautification routines of modern metrosexuals wouldn’t get them into the starting line-up of a Wodaabe male tribesmen’s “Gerewol” beauty pageant. The wittiest and most grueling freestyle battle rap between superstars such as Kanye West and 50 Cent couldn’t match the drama and duration of a traditional Eskimo song duel, let alone the poetic feats of medieval Slavic bards who frequently free-rhymed for days on end. The final straw came when I read of the extraordinary parenting feats of Aka Pygmy fathers in Central Africa (who spend 47 percent of their waking time in close physical contact with their children and even sometimes grow breasts to suckle them). That was it. Suddenly even the very last refuge of the modern incompetent male—being good with the kids—was no longer safe.

  It was then that I crossed over to the dark side.

  If I couldn’t write about the virtues of Homo masculinus modernus, I would instead record his failures. I would document in meticulous and humiliating detail every modern male weakness, inadequacy, or vice. I would lay Homo masculinus modernus bare to the world in all his feeble, cowardly, and unlovely lack of glory.

  An extreme reaction, to be sure, but in my defense it was driven as much by my shame as a scientist as by my shame as a man. The statistics quoted here have mostly been available for years (in some cases centuries), and it strikes me that many a male researcher before me must have drawn the same conclusions from them as I did, but then recoiled in horror. No doubt they dumped them deep in some dusty, forgotten cabinet drawer to grow moldy and never ever assault us with their appalling implications again, just like I was tempted to. But some last shred of self-respect, a rebellious desire to prove that if nothing else one of our pathetic breed could at least once look the truth squarely in the eye, like a man, stayed my hand.

  Here, then, are the grim fruits of my inquiry into the life and times of Homo masculinus modernus, the infuriating, insulting, demeaning, and ultimately fascinating conclusions of a new science of masculine inquiry; a science I call manthropology.

  Brawn

  If you really want to see the trouble modern men are in, just drop in on an action figure (definitely not action doll) convention such as, say, “JoeCon 25”—the 2007 gathering for collectors of Hasbro’s G.I. Joe. The pointers aren’t so much in the audience—those grinning Gen-Xers from across the country who bought the “American Hero” registration package and have now packed into the Atlanta Marriott atrium to await the forty-seven-floor parachute drop of three hundred eight-inch Cobra Red Ninja figurines. The trouble lies with Joe himself.

  A series of scientific papers at the turn of the millennium unearthed a disturbing fact about G.I. Joe: he’s growing steadily, absurdly hypermuscular. The modern G.I. Joe “Sgt. Savage Extreme” figure, for example, is three times as muscular as his 1982 counterpart. The trend is particularly striking when “Sgt. Savage” is compared to real, living males. The average modern man has a biceps circumference of about eleven-and-a-half inches. If the 1982 “Sgt. Savage” had been scaled up to a living man’s height his biceps circumference would have more or less equaled this, at just over twelve-and-a-half inches. The biceps of “Sgt. Savage Extreme” in 1998, however, would have ballooned to almost forty inches if he had been likewise supersized. Not even steroid abusing bodybuilders ever get this big: the largest biceps in the modern world belong to bodybuilder Greg Valentino, who ’roided his up to a grotesque, but comparatively meager, twenty-eight inches. Even such not-so-hyper-masculine figurines as Luke Skywalker and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers now equal this. Mattel’s Ken—to quote one final, humiliating example—has not escaped unpumped either. Barbie’s inoffensive arm candy now sports a chest circumference attainable by just one in fifty real men.

  G.I. Joe’s bulging biceps are a testament in ABS plastic to our accelerating obsession with male muscularity, and he’s not alone. Another scientific paper found that the nude male centerfolds of Playgirl magazine have gained an average 26.4 pounds of muscle over the past quarter-century, and lost 12 pounds of fat.1 A survey of American male university students found that most wanted to emulate these magazine man-muffins, stating a preference for 24 pounds more muscle and 7.5 pounds less body fat than they actually had.

  All across the Western world men are packing into gyms, pumping iron, and swallowing ever greater quantities of legal and illegal supplements in the quest for buffed, bulked physiques. The number of weight-training gyms has ballooned and legal muscle-building supplements are now a $1.6 billion per year industry. Illegal steroid use is rife, too, with 70 percent of bodybuilders, and 12 percent of American high school boys, admitting to taking them. This has led to a predictably dramatic explosion in male musculature: one scientific paper found that Mr. America winners from the pre-steroid era averaged a fat-free muscle mass (total body weight minus fat, bones, and connective tissue) of 158 pounds, while bodybuilders in the post-steroid era average 176 pounds. (This doesn’t sound like much, but an extra eighteen pounds of pure muscle is a big increase.)2 Even this, however, doesn’t seem to satisfy us. A recent article in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry estimated that a million American men now suffer from Body Dysmorphic Disorder—a syndrome whose major symptom is the obsessive desire for a more muscular body.3 Even women are not immune: several surveys of American university women found that the majority of them secretly wished their boyfriends were more muscular.

  * * *

  Rock of Ages

  The ground shook figuratively, as well as literally, when Iranian weightlifter, Hossein Rezazadeh, slammed down the 580-pound barbell after winning gold in the clean-and-jerk event at the 2004 Olympics. Not only was it an Olympic record, Rezazadeh also won, by popular acclaim, the title of “Strongest Man in the World.” A little history, however, shows the title to be too late—twenty-six hundred years too late, to be precise.

  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.4

  Nor is that the only superior ancient weightlifting feat. Another sixth century BCE boulder, this time a 315-pound stone found at Olympia, bears an inscription to the effect that an athlete called Bybon lifted it overhead, one-handed, and threw it. No modern weightlifter has been able to even lift this weight overhead one-handed since the German strongman, Arthur Saxon, in the late nineteenth century—and not even Saxon managed to throw it.

  * * *

  But if we modern Hercules so easily outmuscle the men of fifty years ago, how might we fare against males of the truly distant past: those ancestral members of our genus Homo, such as Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis, who have populated the world at various times over the past 2 to 3 million years? As a paleoanthropologist, that was my burning interest, so I decided to test it. Since the focus of our current obsession with muscularity seems to be on the arms (one paper found that almost 75 percent of tenth and twelfth grade American schoolboys specifically desire bigger biceps5), I decided to compare upper arm strength between modern and ancient humans. In the interest of a fair fight, I decided to have them slug it out in the one modern sport in which arm muscles are undeniably king: world championship arm wrestling.

  Competitive arm wrestling is a surprisingly popular sport these days. In the pantheon of modern strongman events—such as truck pulling, refrigerator carrying, and car wheelbarrowing—arm wrestling has been near the pinnacle ever since Sly Stallone’s 1987 movie Over the Top showed a down-at-heel trucker, Lincoln Hawk, arm-wrestle his way into hi
s son’s heart and win the world championship along the way. The World Arm Wrestling Federation boasts 85 member countries and hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic participants in events such as “Arm Wars X” and the annual “Riverboat Rumble.” The big names, however, are the winners of the world championships—men such as Travis Bagent, premier left-arm wrestler in the world, and multiple world championship winner, John Brenzk (who actually wrestled in Stallone’s movie). To represent Homo masculinus modernus in this matchup, however, I’ve chosen one of the biggest, strongest men to ever bend the arm in professional combat: 2004 World Arm Wrestling Federation champion, Alexey Voyevoda. At 255 pounds with a 22-inch bicep (10 percent bigger again than those of Arnold Schwarzenegger at his peak), Voyevoda is the man to give Homo masculinus modernus his best shot at claiming the title in this interspecies grudge match. We’re going to need him, too, because for Voyevoda’s opponent I’ve chosen the toughest, most muscular species of ancient human to ever walk the earth.

  The Neandertals.

  The Neandertals were a type of human (or hominin, as all such member species of our genus Homo are called) who flourished in Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia between three hundred and fifty thousand and twenty thousand years ago. Homo neanderthalensis males and females were comparable to us in brain size (in fact, some Neandertal brains were much larger), but their bodies were far more muscular. Neandertal males, for example, though they averaged a mere 55 in height (around four inches smaller than modern male Homo sapiens) are thought to have carried 20 percent more muscle than modern men. One possible reason is their cold environment—a thermoregulatory principle known as Bergmann’s law predicts that people who live in arctic environments, such as modern Inuits, or Eskimos, will have greater mass and more spherical body shapes to reduce surface area and retain heat. Another possibility, however, is that hypermusculature was an adaptation to the violent lives Neandertals lived. Thirty percent of all male Neandertal skeletons found, for example, have traumatic head and neck injuries, a level reached only by rodeo riders among modern populations. It’s probable the Neandertal men received their injuries from the same source the riders did—close encounters with enraged bulls and beasts—since the archaeological evidence shows, incredibly, that they hunted prey as big as woolly rhinos by ambushing them up close with thrusting spears.