Ancient World Review

Conan The Barbarian Wouldn't Look Like Arnold Schwarzenegger

I'm a huge fan of the original Conan stories by Robert E. Howard, one of the best American writers who ever lived. I like the movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as well, even the second one which is almost universally considered, with considerable justification, to be a piece of crap. The Conan of the movies is so radically different from the Conan of the Howard stories that they might as well be two different characters, but never mind that.

The scene in the clip above is from the first movie, Conan the Barbarian (1982). It shows how Conan, enslaved as a child after his village was destroyed by the forces of the evil Thulsa Doom, was chained to a mill wheel and grew into a heavily muscled giant after years of pushing the wheel around in circles.

This scene always bothered me because it seems unlikely that pushing a wheel around like that would give you the physique of a world-class bodybuilder. It's possible, I guess, at least to a certain extent. This kind of labor would definitely strength your thighs and calves, and I suppose the pushing action would have some effect on your chest, back and other muscles, but would it turn you into The Arnold? Very doubtful.

There's also the question of nutrition here. Bodybuilding, even accidental bodybuilding, requires a good diet and I find it hard to believe that the slaves pushing that wheel were fed very well. I'm not sure how old the movie-Conan was supposed to be when he was first chained to the wheel, but he must have spent at least ten years pushing it around and around in all kinds of weather. In the real world I'm guessing all that repetitious slogging would have left him extremely thin, wiry and prematurely aged when they finally released him. And he probably would have had all kinds of knee and back problems.

Around the time Conan the Barbarian was made, Arnold Schwarzenegger was 6'2" with a 52" chest, a competition weight around 235 and an off-season weight around 260. (Source: Bodybuilding.com) The guy was flat-out monstrous and even though he had the genetics for size he didn't get that big on a slave's diet. Hard labor can give you mass and make you tough and strong (if it doesn't kill you) but the one thing it doesn't do is give you gigantic, well-defined muscles like a bodybuilder. That kind of physique requires a specific type of training and it's not the same thing as training for strength.

There's a big difference between bodybuilders like Arnold, who train for size and definition, and powerlifters, who train for strength. For example, the next video shows the Georgian powerlifter Lasha Talakhaze at the 2017 Weightlifting Championship in Anaheim, California. His build is a long, long way from Arnold's, but it's fairly typical of powerlifters I've seen.

Warriors in movies are usually shown as being extremely chiseled, but that kind of physique requires long sessions of targeted exercises in the gym. It's not the kind of body that a Viking farmer, for instance, or a Cimmerian like Conan would develop as a matter of course. In the stories, Howard describes Conan as being huge and muscular with amazing endurance and lightning reflexes. He can also move across a forest floor as "silently as a panther," a talent not usually associated with sheer mass. These qualities -- speed, size, stealth, fast reactions -- aren't usually found together. In and of themselves, they're not totally unrealistic, but even if Conan combined them all in one lethal package, he still wouldn't have looked like Arnold.

There's also the question of how good a fighter someone as big and muscular as Arnold would be. If you put a sword in his hand, he could probably do a lot of damage -- for a while -- but he would probably gas out pretty quickly because sustained fighting requires a lot of cardio conditioning and cardio tends to work against the bodybuilder's goal of size. Runners have a completely different kind of physique and a smaller, lighter opponent can usually run circles around a bigger, slower man. For example, the next video shows the notorious MMA fighter, Conor McGregor (around 155 pounds, depending), sparring around with Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (400+ pounds), the Icelandic strongman who played The Mountain in Game of Thrones.

They're just playing around here, but it's obvious that Björnsson could crush McGregor with his bare hands if he ever got hold of him in a real fight. It's also obvious that someone as big as Björnsson doesn't have the cardio to keep the conflict going for very long. If this was a sword fight, the lighter, faster McGregor could probably beat Björnsson if he could just stay out of his reach and wear him down long enough to get in close, something that probably wouldn't take very long. The heavier you are, the slower you are. It's the classic size-and-brute-strength vs speed-and-agility tradeoff. Smaller fighters have an advantage over bigger, heavier opponents if they know how to use it. This is how Bronn won the trial-by-combat against the heavily armored Sir Vardis Egan in Game of Thrones. It's also how the Viper almost beat the Mountain in GOT. Unfortunately for the Viper, he got cocky and that particular fight didn't end so well for him.

Getting back to Conan, though, what would someone like him look like in real life? That's hard to say. He would be big, certainly, and muscular, but he wouldn't have the kind of physique that Arnold had in his prime. There were no bodybuilding gyms (or steroids) in the Hyborean Age. Conan was fast as well as strong, so he wouldn't look like Lasha Talakhaze, either. If he did, his stamina and fighting abilities would be limited. A real-life Conan would be big, but not too big, and he would also be lean due to his diet and the generally harsh conditions of his life. He might look something like a extremely fast UFC heavy-weight (206+ pounds) fighter, but considering his speed and agility it seems more probable that he would fit into the light heavy-weight (186-205 pounds) category. In other words, he wouldn't be a giant.

All of this, of course, directly contradicts Howard's own descriptions of Conan. For example, in the classic novella Red Nails, Conan is said to be "almost a giant in stature, muscles rippling smoothly under his skin which the sun had burned brown." In Queen of the Black Coast, he's described as a "tall powerfully built figure in a black scale-mail hauberk, burnished greaves and a blue-steel helmet from which jutted bull's horns highly polished." In The Hour of the Dragon, he's a "mailed giant" and so on. He can move over a bed of dead leaves in complete silence and he's always bounding around, as "supple as a panther." In other words, Conan somehow manages to combine the muscularity and size of a heavyweight bodybuilder with the speed, reactions and endurance of a lightweight MMA fighter, not to mention the fact that he's highly intelligent, literate and a wise ruler with a strong sense of honor and chivalry towards the weak. All told, that's a fantastic collection of attributes not normally found in the real world; but he is, after all, a fantasy character, the greatest fantasy character ever created.

Scene from The Whole Wide World (2003), based on the life of Robert E. Howard.

DNA Of World's Oldest Natural Mummy Unlocks Secrets Of Ice Age Tribes In The Americas

Video from 2013. I don't know the source.

"A wide ranging international study that genetically analysed the DNA of a series of famous and controversial ancient remains across North and South America has discovered that the Spirit Cave remains -- the world's oldest natural mummy - was a Native American. They were also able to dismiss a longstanding theory that a group called Paleoamericans [?] existed in North America before Native Americans." Source: Science Daily.

Comment: On the face of it, this story is kind of confusing. According to Wikipedia, "PaleoAmerican" is another term for "Paleoindian" so it's hard to see how this study could have disproved the idea that PaleoAmericans, i.e. Paleoindians, arrived in North America before Native Americans. After all, the Paleoindians are thought to have been early Native Americans.

I haven't gone into any of this in any detail, but apparently the term "PaleoAmerican" is being used in a different sense here, denoting a group of people once thought to have been completely different [based on skull measurements] from modern Native Americans:

According to one of the researchers, "[the remains found at] Spirit Cave and Lagoa Santa [a site in Brazil] were very controversial because they were identified as so-called 'Paleoamericans' based on craniometry -- it was determined that the shape of their skulls was different to current day Native Americans. Our study proves that Spirit Cave and Lagoa Santa were actually genetically closer to contemporary Native Americans than to any other ancient or contemporary group sequenced to date."

In other words, the remains found at Spirit Cave were once thought (by some) to provide evidence that other people were here before the ancestors of the Native Americans, but this DNA study has supposedly disproved that idea. It doesn't prove that the PaleoIndians were here first, though. That kind of certainty is probably impossible since who knows what other remains are lying buried out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered? All this particular DNA study proves, assuming that it's accurate, is that the remains at Spirit Cave are related to modern Native Americans.

I'm starting to lose a little faith in these DNA studies since they frequently seem to produce contradictory results. For example, according to a 2016 story in Ancient Origins, "DNA studies indicate that people could not have crossed the Beringia land bridge to enter the Americas 13,000 [?] years ago because the 'entry route was biologically unviable'. Although this finding by geneticists is surprising, it adds even more mystery to the archaeological evidence that anatomically modern humans were in South America tens of thousands of years before Ice Age people could have crossed a viable land bridge between Alaska and Siberia."

So which DNA study is accurate? Who knows? If you try researching this stuff in detail, you'll quickly find yourself buried in the technical arcanum of archaeogenetics, an impenetrable swamp complicated by academic squabbles and contemporary identity politics. The prevailing wisdom, which appears to be based on solid evidence, is that the Paleoindians, the ancestors of modern Native Americans, were the first people in the Americas, period, and any evidence which seems to contradict that claim immediately creates a storm of controversy.

One interesting detail buried in this story is that "[t]he ground-breaking research also discovered clues of a puzzling Australasian genetic signal in the 10,400 year old Lagoa Santa remains from Brazil revealing a previously unknown group of early South Americans -- but the Australasian link left no genetic trace in North America. It was described by one of the scientists as 'extraordinary evidence of an extraordinary chapter in human history'."

This seems to support the theory that some of the earliest, if not the first, people in South America may have crossed the Pacific in boats from Australasia.

Ancient DNA Evidence Reveals Two Unknown Migrations From North To South America

"A team has used genome-wide ancient DNA data to revise Central and South American history. Their analysis of DNA from 49 individuals spanning about 10,000 years in Belize, Brazil, the Central Andes, and southern South America has concluded that the majority of Central and South American ancestry arrived from at least three different streams of people entering from North America, all arising from one ancestral lineage of migrants who crossed the Bering Strait. " Source: Science Daily.

Note: I'm not sure if this was the same DNA study, the results of which were announced at around the same time, which showed that the remains found at Spirit Cave in Nevada were related to modern Native Americans. In any case, the Spirit Cave study found evidence of an Australasian genetic component which suggests that yet another migration into South America may have occurred, this time from across the Pacific Ocean.

New Study Adds Evidence To Debate Over Only Known Clovis Burial

"At sites scattered across western North America, long, fluted stone projectile points mark the presence of ancient people from a culture archaeologists now call Clovis. For much of the 20th century, the Clovis people were considered the very first Americans. But more recent data has shown that people arrived in North America several thousand years before the oldest known Clovis projectile points were made. But Clovis appears to be the first widespread culture, and it still represents a key chapter in the story of how people spread across two continents." Source: Ars Technica.

Comment: Despite the lack of direct evidence for the Solutrean Hypothesis, I still don't see any reason why small groups of prehistoric Europeans couldn't have crossed over to the Americas during the last Ice Age. Did this actually happen? Who knows? At the moment, the theory is still highly speculative and controversial, but to my knowledge it has never been conclusively disproved. In fact, I'm not sure how it could be disproved once and for all. If bands of European hunter-gatherers did reach the New World, the evidence is probably buried under the ocean off Newfoundland and the northeastern coast of North America.

Surviving Ancient Alaska (Excerpts)

Excerpts from an unknown National Geographic documentary. 2013.

Ancient Remains Found In Alaska Shed Light On How Humans Populated The Americas

Video from March 2018.

"The girl was just six weeks old when she died. Her body was buried on a bed of antler points and red ocher, and she lay undisturbed for 11,500 years." Source: Anchorage Daily News (Jan. 2018?).

"Archaeologists discovered her in an ancient burial pit in Alaska in 2013, and on Wednesday an international team of scientists reported they had retrieved the child's genome from her remains. The second-oldest human genome ever found in North America, it sheds new light on how people — among them the ancestors of living Native Americans — first arrived in the Western Hemisphere.

"The analysis, published in the journal Nature, shows that the child belonged to a hitherto unknown human lineage, a group that split off from other Native Americans just after — or perhaps just before — they arrived in North America."

According to the summary of the paper in Nature (hidden behind a pay wall), "[t]he remains of two infants were recovered at Upward Sun River (USR), and have been dated to around 11.5 thousand years ago ... Here ... we show that USR1 is most closely related to Native Americans, but falls basal to all previously sequenced contemporary and ancient Native Americans. As such, USR1 represents a distinct Ancient Beringian population."

Note: "The Upward Sun River site, or Xaasaa Na’, is a Late Pleistocene archaeological site associated with the Paleo-Arctic Tradition, located in the Tanana River Valley, Alaska. Dated to around 11,500 BP, Upward Sun River is the site of the oldest human remains discovered on the American side of Beringia. The site was first discovered in 2006." Source: Wikipedia.

Did A Comet Trigger The Younger Dryas Event?

Video from May, 2018.

"The Younger Dryas (c. 12,900 to c. 11,700 years BP) was a return to glacial conditions which temporarily reversed the gradual climatic warming after the Last Glacial Maximum started receding around 20,000 BP." (Wikipedia)

The relatively sudden cooling that occurred during the Younger Dryas is thought to have killed off all the big mammals like the woolly mammoth that once existed in prehistoric North America. The paleo-indian Clovis culture, once believed to have been the earliest on the continent, also came to an end around this same time, possibly as a result of the loss of game, though it's probably more accurate to say that the Clovis culture just changed into something else in response to environmental pressures:

"The most commonly held perspective on the end of the Clovis culture is that a decline in the availability of megafauna, combined with an overall increase in a less mobile population, led to local differentiation of lithic and cultural traditions across the Americas." (Wikipedia)

Note: Image by United States Geological Survey.

Several theories have been proposed to explain this abrupt cooling period, which seems to have taken less than ten years to develop. That's extremely fast for a temperature shift of this magnitude. The most dramatic explanation is the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, which " states that the air burst(s) or impact(s) of a swarm of carbonaceous chondrites or comet fragments set areas of the North American continent on fire, causing the extinction of most of the megafauna in North America and the demise of the North American Clovis culture after the last glacial period." (Wikipedia)

Evidence has been found supporting a comet strike during that time, but it has been called into question for various reasons. According to Wikipedia, at any rate, no one has found any evidence of a Clovis population decline or widespread wildfires, and it's possible that the geological evidence used to support the comet theory was actually the result of fires started by prehistoric humans.

Other possibilities such as sea eruptions and supernovas have been suggested.

Video from 2008.

The impact hypothesis was being widely dismissed several years ago:

"Comet explosions did not end the prehistoric human culture, known as Clovis, in North America 13,000 years ago, according to research published in the journal Geophysical Monograph Series." Source: Science Daily (2013).

In 2017, however, a paper in Scientific Reports reported that experts had discovered solid evidence of an anomalous event from the period that could indicate some kind of comet / meteor strike:

"We document discovery of a distinct Pt [platinum] anomaly spread widely across North America and dating to the Younger Dryas (YD) onset. The apparent synchroneity of this widespread YDB Pt anomaly is consistent with Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) data that indicated atmospheric input of platinum-rich dust."

According to this paper, the anomalies discovered "may result from multiple processes of enrichment, including: a) cometary or meteoritic influx ... b) impactites from an extraterrestrial impact event ... c) volcanoes ... d) mantle material, e.g., from tectonic motion or in cratons ... e) exhalative-hydrothermal processes; f) precipitation from seawater; g) post-depositional transport and precipitation at redox boundaries; and h) reduction from intermediate and low-temperature solutions."

In other words, the anomaly that triggered the Younger Dryas could have been a comet strike, a meteor bombardment, a volcanic eruption, the release of subterranean material by an earthquake, hydrothermal venting, or some kind of deposition by wind, water or glaciers (?). I don't really understand all of this, but whatever happened back then it must have been fairly dramatic to cause such a sudden and widespread drop in temperature.

Documentary from 2009. Overdramatized but interesting.

Oldest Weapons Ever Discovered In North America Predate Clovis

"Researchers have discovered what are believed to be the oldest weapons ever found in North America: ancient spear points that are 15,500 years old. The findings raise new questions about the settlement of early peoples on the continent." Source: Science Daily.

Comment: The Clovis-first / Single-origin hypothesis appears to be effectively dead. Until recently, most archaeologists believed that the Clovis culture was the first to appear in North America, but "the primary support for this was that no solid evidence of pre-Clovis human habitation had been found." (Wikipedia)

This has changed over the years with the discovery of around twenty pre-Clovis sites around North and South America.

Ice Age And Clovis Culture

"The Clovis culture is a prehistoric Paleo-Indian culture, named for distinct stone tools found in close association with Pleistocene fauna at Blackwater Locality No. 1 near Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1920s and 1930s. It appears around 11,500–11,000 uncalibrated radiocarbon years before present at the end of the last glacial period, and is characterized by the manufacture of 'Clovis points' and distinctive bone and ivory tools. Archaeologists' most precise determinations at present suggest this radiocarbon age is equal to roughly 13,200 to 12,900 calendar years ago. Clovis people are considered to be the ancestors of most of the indigenous cultures of the Americas." (Wikipedia)

"Initially discovered between the rib bones of large, extinct mammals, Clovis points were long viewed as hunting tools. Similarly, it was thought that the Clovis culture focused on hunting big game—“Pleistocene megafauna.” To this day, countless museum dioramas portray doughty paleo-Indian men thrusting spears in the faces of mammoths, mastodons and saber-toothed tigers. Women and children lurk at the edges, hoping the hunters will survive. Later archaeologists questioned this picture. Chasing after giant beasts with sticks and sharp stones is dangerous. How could any group base its subsistence on something so risky? It would be like a society in which the majority of adults made their living by disarming land mines." Source: Smithsonian Magazine (2013).

Younger Dryas Period Caused By Massive Arctic Flood?

Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Red arrows are warm surface currents. Blue arrows indicate cooler deep currents. Video from 2008.

"A research team found the fingerprint of a massive flood of fresh water in the western Arctic, thought to be the cause of an ancient cold snap that began around 13,000 years ago. " Source: Science Daily (July, 2018).

"'This abrupt climate change -- known as the Younger Dryas -- ended more than 1,000 years of warming' ... The cause of the cooling event, which is named after a flower (Dryas octopetala) that flourished in the cold conditions in Europe throughout the time, has remained a mystery and a source of debate for decades."

Note: According to this research, the cause of the catastrophic flooding was "a huge influx of freshwater from melting ice sheets and glaciers that gushed into the North Atlantic, disrupting the deep-water circulation system -- Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) -- that transports warmer waters and releases heat to the atmosphere. However, geologic evidence tracing its exact path had been lacking."

This is yet another theory explaining the Younger Dryas period, an abrupt cooling which occurred around 12,000 years ago and apparently led to the extinction of large prehistoric mammals like the woolly mammoth across North America.