Why Neanderthals Sported Arms Like Popeye page

[JBailey]

Hit the link for the full article...

Why Neanderthals Sported Arms Like Popeye | LiveScience

"Neanderthals have really interesting upper bodies," researcher Colin Shaw, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cambridge in England, told LiveScience. "If you and I are both right-handed, you'd expect 4 to 13 percent asymmetry between our arms. Neanderthals have up to 50 percent or more asymmetry. They were doing something with their dominant arms that were either more intense or repetitive or both than we do today. The only population of modern people that we see who are similar are tennis players, who hit tennis balls many, many years aggressively."

Edit to add - My partner suggested maybe they were fapping to cave art

[wiltondeportes]

Must have been their strong hand...

[Alex Good]

It's possible they had developed a form of knife or stick fighting (think Irish shillelagh) by that time as well. The technology was there and the musculature suggests that to me.

[wiltondeportes]

I'm a little stumped on this one. It clearly has to be some sort of tool use, in my mind. Could be a weapon, a digging stick, a construction tool.

[Alex Good]

My right arm was almost twice as large as my left when I was practicing with weapons regularly. Just saying.

[JennaRose]

Edit to add - My partner suggested maybe they were fapping to cave art

HAHA my immediate thought xD

[JennaRose]

Must have been their strong hand...

my germs!

[Owly]

I had a friend a few years ago who was a seriously competitive fencer (competed at the national level), and his dominant arm was huge compared to the other. I can imagine that use of hand weapons plus heavy use of hand tools of whatever type could definitely lead to muscular imbalance if they tended to be strongly dominant on one side.

[Lewis]

Hit the link for the full article...

Why Neanderthals Sported Arms Like Popeye | LiveScience

Yeah, intriguing. From your link:

The researchers found that spear-thrusting led to significantly higher muscle activity on the left side of the body than on the right, opposite to what is seen in Neanderthal fossils.

So, as they say, either it can't have been from spear-thrusting or most Neanderthals were left-handed.

I wonder if they were using missile-weapons? I wonder what pattern of muscle-activity throwing a javelin would result in -- not that I know offhand whether any of their toolkits contain stone-points that suggest anything like a throwing-spear.

Then I guess there's throwing a large stone one-handed -- a pound or so in weight. Maybe they'd do that.

[Knifegill]

Hanging from a branch with one arm while grabbing fruit with the other comes to mind. But most likely weapon use is the culprit I'd guess. And ritualistic male assertion games like arm-wrestling or stone hurling make sense, too.