Bringing Home the Gold

As the Olympic athletes come home with their medals, cheered and celebrated, it strikes me that they are like a modern-day incarnation of a successful hunting party returning to their clan carrying heavy loads of fresh meat.  Consider how many of the Olympic sports reflect the skills needed for a successful hunt using Stone-Age tools.  Imagine a 15-year old Cro-Magnon sprinting over a cataract on a narrow log, leaping onto the back of startled buck, bringing it down, and somersaulting to land on his feet, javelin still in hand - whooping with triumph as the others cheer. 

Then, more often than not, there’s the hunting party that returns empty-handed to their hungry village, one youth being carried with a broken leg, a seasoned hunter missing his front teeth - campfire tales of the one that got away as they munch on acorn gruel and fashion new spears for the next day.

Modern pentathlon-After 100 years, sport looks ahead

Perhaps a true modern pentathlon might be made up of the following events:

Video gaming
Driving a car through peak hour traffic
Treadmilling
Karaoke
Mall shopping with wife

cunjevoi - 12 August 2012 04:08 PM

Perhaps a true modern pentathlon might be made up of the following events:

Video gaming
Driving a car through peak hour traffic
Treadmilling
Karaoke
Mall shopping with wife

I like the idea of having karaoke, it’s new skills for a modern world…

Born To Run

Biomechanical research reveals a surprising key to the survival of our species: Humans are built to outrun nearly every other animal on the planet over long distances.

For direct evidence of endurance hunting, Bramble and Lieberman point to the observations of Louis Liebenberg, author of The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science, who has spent time on the traditional hunts of the Bushmen hunter-gatherers in the central Kalahari Desert in Botswana. Liebenberg ran with them when they chased down kudu antelope on two occasions. For eight other hunts he trailed them in his Land Cruiser, sometimes with a GPS device. The men attempted to run prey to exhaustion only when temperatures neared 100 degrees F, says Liebenberg. Three men would gulp a lot of water and head out together. Two initially did the hard work of tracking and pursuing over the arid grassland and woodland terrain, while the other held back. Eventually, the leaders dropped behind, leaving the third man to hound and spear the antelope when it reached its limit. “The animal will either just completely collapse, or it will actually slow down to a point where it just stands there . . . with sort of glazed-over eyes,” Liebenberg says. “Essentially, you’re pushing the animal to overheat.” The hunters would then walk home with the meat, enough to share—in small portions—with the tribe.

During a chase, Liebenberg noted that the men maintained speeds of around 4 to 6 miles per hour, for anywhere from two to six and a half hours, and traversed up to 22 miles of terrain. These stats fall well within the performance range of the world’s fastest competitive marathoners, who set a pace of roughly 12 miles an hour to cover 26 miles, albeit under far less harsh conditions.

MARTIN UK - 12 August 2012 09:45 PM

cunjevoi - 12 August 2012 04:08 PM

Perhaps a true modern pentathlon might be made up of the following events:

Video gaming
Driving a car through peak hour traffic
Treadmilling
Karaoke
Mall shopping with wife

I like the idea of having karaoke, it’s new skills for a modern world…

I was just reading that beavers will attempt to build dams even when it’s useless.  As kids, I remember the ‘unlearned’ satisfaction of building dens from whatever material was available . . . the satisfaction of throwing missiles - stones, fallen apples, lumps of clay . . . the satisfaction of making spears from sticks, pieces of fence, cattails etc. . . the attempts to catch fish by hand (“Oh, guddling,” my father said, “catch anything? . . . Finding birds’ nests . . .

We must have hundreds of instinctive behaviors that kids will manifest without adult prompting.  If not in a natural environment those instincts will manifest themselves just as you say - one way or another.

Karaoke?  I’ll bet we were doing it 50,000 years ago around the campfire, and that there were even hit songs and pop stars famous for miles around.

Mall shopping?  Someone once asked a Zen master what enlightenment was like.  He replied, “It’s just shopping with your wife without irritation.”  Fifty thousand years ago maybe it was being fitted with a new bearskin cloak, standing still without irritation as the women tugged and stitched, making fun of your anatomy, or admiring it.  “Ohhhhhh!  Look here!  He likes you!”

cunjevoi - 12 August 2012 04:08 PM

Perhaps a true modern pentathlon might be made up of the following events:

Video gaming
Driving a car through peak hour traffic
Treadmilling
Karaoke
Mall shopping with wife

using your cellphone to avoid any and all eye contact with real people.

‘I was just reading that beavers will attempt to build dams even when it’s useless’

Useless or futile? How do we know it would be useless to them? Why do they build damns anyway? To slow down the water and make a pond?

Anyway.

Epaminondas - 13 August 2012 12:42 PM

‘I was just reading that beavers will attempt to build dams even when it’s useless’

Useless or futile? How do we know it would be useless to them? Why do they build damns anyway? To slow down the water and make a pond?

Anyway.

“A beaver’s desire to build a dam is very instinctive.  Beavers in captivity will build useless dams just so they can build.”  (globio.org)

Consider a sport fisherman enjoying himself as though in paradise, wading in a river all day, even knowing anything he catches must be released.  Javelin throwers apparently enjoy the sport without reference to the 50,000 or 100,000 years this was a human survival skill.

Here’s my “TwentyFiveAThon”“

1.  100 meter dash
2.  200 meter dash
3.  400 meter dash
4.  400 meter hurdles
5.  1500 meter run
6.  10,000 meter run
7.  Marathon
8.  100 meter freestyle swim
9.  100 meter butterfly swim
10. 100 meter breast stroke swim
11. 100 meter backstroke swim
12. 1 mile swim
13. 100 mile bike ride
14. 5 mile bike sprint
15. Shot put
16. Discus
17. Broad jump
18. Pole vault
19. High jump
20. Javelin throw
21. Hammer throw
22. Triple jump
23. Weight lifting: clean & jerk
24. Weight lifting: snatch
25. Some equestrian event to make 25.