The Roman business is silly. The legions routinely set up stockaded camps every night, a job that required several hours. If you look at Cyrus's marching rates in The Anabasis, generally his troops (contemporary with the early republican legions) made a bit under 20 miles per day, making camps that weren't fortified. The legions may have managed the occasional 40-mile forced march, but so have infantries much more recently.The USMC at one point made a fetish of the 50-mile hike.

I suspect the Athenian business is silly. Our information about the building and operation of the triremes is quite sketchy, or was within the last ten to fifteen years.

As I recall the Tutsis had a step up before the bar, from which they jumped. What the mechanical advantage of that might be, I don't know.

I'm tired of this nonsense, probably because I'm a modern wimp--australopithecus surely had a higher tolerance for pseudo-scientific nonsense.

"Turning to the high jump, McAllister said photographs taken by a German anthropologist showed young men jumping heights of up to 2.52 meters in the early years of last century."

Does this mean that people were jumping 2.52 in the early 1900s?! If so, did they use the Fosbury Flop and it faded out after that? Because if not, they probably jumped that height with the Scissors-Jump, which seems highly unlikely...

Domestication of animals consists of selecting examples with protracted juvenile form; more docile and manageable for longer. Humans have self-domesticated. Today we have later onset of puberty, lower hormone levels, bred out much aggression.

This might be the case, but even if it's true, the principle of evolution dictates that we're wimpier because it doesn't matter anymore. Why be strong when we have tools to be strong for us?

That's why we are "sapiens", our physical strength is not as good as ancients homos but we are smarter. Smarter proved to be better than faster or stronger. We may be wimp, but we survived.

In other news: Ancient men did not have modern technology.

I think if you look further back along the evolutionary chain you'll find that apes monkeys etc are far better climbers than us. This just seems like a pointless rant about how adaptation has taken us in a different direction. :/