Quote Originally Posted by vartan View Post
Lys makes a good point about the food. That's really great though. I never knew you could infer muscle mass from analysing bones. (EDIT: How does that work by the way? How do you relate bone mass to muscle mass?) @Lys: Safe to say that man today is on average weaker than man ~2000 years ago? (i.e. when you look at nutrition.)
It's fairly easy, actually. Strengthening your muscles in life necessarily strengthens and thickens your bones. They're the support structure, they have to be reinforced to accomodate the greater loads and stresses stronger muscles put on your skeleton.

Modern humans (assuming developed nations) have more pooling at the extremes than ancient peoples; more sedentary and weak people, but also more highly-active and strong people. People in the middle are probably weaker because they're not engaged in manual labour every day.