> It must have been a lot slower fighting in leather, chainmail or plate armor than in this ultra light modern equipment.
One thing that nobody has mentioned so far is (I believe) people were much more fit in those days. Today we have a very sedentary lifestyle. Not so much in those days, people were much more active. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2614780/How-F...
What data? The average hunter-gatherer was fitter, better nourished and less diseased than the average peasant after the dawn of agriculture (and the population was overwhelmingly peasants) but there was always a warrior class and they ate well and trained hard.
Agriculture did have a noticeable impact. People who have a longer evolutionary history of grain monocultures are shorter on average than those whose ancestors adopted agriculture later but the difference isn't that big. Humans have only gotten about 5
cm shorter since the dawn of agriculture.
I'm aware of no evidence on speed or strength but the thing is that most people were not near the limits of human performance, ever.
It's almost certain that modern humanity is the fittest that it's been since the dawn of agriculture. Most hunter-gatherer skeletons are fit and strong because of low disease burden but mostly because in famine times they just died. Farmers OTOH survived, stunted, diseased and with deficiencies in vitamins, minerals and just not enough food.
But the warrior class always ate fine. Even as late as WW1, the average member of the House of Lords was a foot taller than the equivalent Member of Parliament.
Yes, it's true that the data I see is not an actual historical measurement of physical strength, and so quantification of strength is only inferred. Thanks for calling me out on that. But basically, it seems to me that society in general was more active back then, whether you were a hunter-gatherer or a farmer, and that this decreased as more and more modern amenities came about (and truly accelerated after the Industrial Revolution). Here's a great summary: http://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/history.html
When you have an entire society living that lifestyle due to circumstances, not by choice, you'll also have a much larger sample pool from which to draw exceptional warriors. That is my argument. And the farther you go back, the larger the source pool will be, simply due to the circumstances of how the world lived.
It is interesting that the History of Fitness article guys claim that a society becoming lazy in general contributed to a loss in their overall fighting power. Can we prove it? OK, maybe we can't. But I'd posit that we can't say there is NO data out there to create better theories, as long as we acknowledge the possibility that we could be wrong.
One thing that nobody has mentioned so far is (I believe) people were much more fit in those days. Today we have a very sedentary lifestyle. Not so much in those days, people were much more active. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2614780/How-F...