Couch Potatoeism, from Pitt T. Maner III
This interesting anthropological study is making the internet rounds.
"From Athletes to Couch Potatoes":
"Using Shaw's study of bone rigidity among modern Cambridge University undergraduates, Macintosh suggests that male mobility among earliest farmers (around 7,300 years ago) was, on average, at a level near that of today's student cross-country runners. Within just over 3,000 years, average mobility had dropped to the level of those students rated as sedentary, after which the decline slowed."
'Indeed the hunter-gatherers of 30,000 to 150,00 years ago traveled extremely long distances while hauling all kinds of weight. "They were much stronger than the long-distance runners of today," says Shaw. In a study he published earlier this year, he concluded that "the people back then were monsters by comparison. What you see today is quite pathetic."
Here is the original study.