November 5, 2015 • 40 mins
Did the human fist evolve to punch faces? Did our faces evolve to take punches? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian explore University of Utah biologist David Carrier's research into human evolution -- including his 2015 study that involves a cadaver-armed punching machine.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert lamp and I am
Christian Sager. Hey, Robert, I want you to hit me
as hard as you can. All right, here it goes.
(00:24):
You hit me in the ear. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. No, No,
that was perfect. Are you okay? Hit me again? Now?
Maybe later. Man, We've got an episode to record, so,
as you may guess from our little uh little fight
club homage there, this episode is about the evolution of punching,
(00:46):
in particular fists and human beings and how we evolved
in the theory that our hands specifically evolved so that
we could fight each other. Yeah, in particular, this is
the theory that's been put forth by by all just
David Carrier from the University of Utah, and he's done
a number of different studies and published a number of
(01:06):
different papers um supporting this theory. And whether you agree
with it or not, he makes some He just makes
a wonderful case for it, and he's committed to this theory. Yeah.
I want to say he has like what five academic
papers published all about different parts of the body, but
all around this theory. Yes, the most recent of which
just came out in the last couple of months. Uh.
(01:27):
And in fact, we have done how Stuff works video
about it that you wrote and started in and there's
a little like article accompanying it. Yeah. Well, I think
the real stars of that video. But we'll get to that.
So see if you want, If you want something a
little little creepy fun, this will deliver. But for the
most part, we're talking about basic human evolution here, the
(01:49):
evolution of the human form and really the human function
as well, the humanity's shadows self. Yeah. Well, before we
get into the meat of the episode, I just want
to remind our listeners that we have a couple of
things going on with social media right now. We've just
started periscoping and we're doing that every Friday at noon.
(02:09):
We did our first one last week and it went
really well, so we're gonna try it again. We're gonna
try to keep going with it, uh, and we'd love
to see you there. So if you have time, you
have periscope on your phone or your computer or whatever,
check it out and uh talk to us. Yeah, we'll
have links about it on Facebook and Twitter and Tumbler
as well. Uh, and we'll be reminding you right before
(02:30):
it happened. Yeah. Absolutely, and we're blow the mind on
all of those social media platforms. One other thing too,
we were thinking we've heard that apparently it helps your
iTunes rankings if you get reviews. I'm assuming positive reviews
from your listeners. Uh, and we checked in. There haven't
been that many reviews in a while, especially since Joe
(02:53):
and I joined the show. So we're hoping that if
you could please go in and you know, if you
have time, provider review you for us over in iTunes.
And I just found out yesterday too. Did you know
we're available on Google Play now as well. Apparently they
have a podcast streaming service as well. Yeah that's pretty cool.
So yeah, how about the algorithm dropped by iTunes of
your an iTunes listener give us a positive review. Uh,
(03:14):
it helps us out because some of those reviews are
old like that, years and years back to when the
podcast was still in diapers, right, all right, so let's
get into it. Fists Punching Fight Club. Yes, so, um,
if you've ever seen Stanley Kubrick's sci fi classic two
thousand one of Space Odyssey and I hope you have,
because it's it's really the stuff to blow your mind movie,
(03:37):
and many of us um it paints a wonderful picture
of humanity's violent evolutionary ascension, right this wonderful Dawn of
Man segment in which these early hominids, some of the
best men in monkey suits ever in eight suits if
you rather, just sort of mucking about and then eventually
(03:58):
just discovering a was technology, the technology to pick up
a tool specifically, I think like a taper of job
and just start wailing on animals and each other. Yeah.
There's this band that I like called Oxes and they
performed itself by Southwest one year and they just did
that entire scene verbatim at the end of their show.
(04:20):
It's like, like, I think they played the music that
was going on in it and then like they acted out.
They acted out, they showed the members of the band
acted it out. Yeah, it was pretty amusing. But yes,
so this brings us to the real like I think,
academic heart of this episode is a guy named David Carrier,
(04:42):
and he is uh if you, by the way, if
you google David Carrier, it turns out that there's a
bunch of other guys with that name who get higher
rankings Google than him. So you might want to add
like evolutionary or a biologist or something like that, this
would work. Yeah. He's at the University of Utah, uh,
(05:02):
and he has published multiple papers, like we said, and
really just has this overall theory that humanity, especially male humans,
have physically evolved over time, uh, to be fighting machines basically,
and that that is something that's inherent in us. And
I think what he's getting out overall is that we
(05:23):
now live in a society where there aren't that many
reasons for melee combat. Uh. Actually the episode that we're
kind of record after this one is about another form
of combat. But in terms of fist fighting, there aren't
that many reasons, right, not like they're there used to
be back in the good days, back back when we
used to and you know, jokingly, I think that this
(05:44):
is kind of the philosophical heart of Fight Club as well, right,
the the idea that that like we're made to be
hunter gatherer physical fighting machines and our primordial fisticuff roots. Yeah,
and in modern society doesn't allow us to do that.
So where do we how do we you know, burn
off that inherent I don't know, uh, evolutionary aesthetic. Yeah. Now,
(06:08):
it's it's important to note here that an in carrier
will be the first to stay this as well. Obviously,
there are a number of different factors going on in
human evolution and the ascent of man um you have.
You know, our oversized brains are our diet um some
of the just environmental scenarios that enabled us to get
to where we are now. Uh, and so his you
(06:31):
often encounter the idea that comes down to our tool use. Right.
A tool use, of course, is an important aspect of
a humanity. Humanities of center, our ability to to like
that guy in an eight costume in two thousand one,
to pick up a tool and start using it, um
to to overpower more sophisticated predators, to overpower each other.
(06:54):
And certainly we have the manual dexterity to make tools,
to wield to tools. We have the brain that can
allow us to update our body schema to incorporate this
tool into our image of ourself and utilize it properly.
But UH Carrier is ultimately making the case that that
the real violent aspect of humanity enters the picture along
(07:15):
with if not earlier than our tool using hands like
that when you look at the human hand, yes, manual
dexterity is a big part of the form, but also
the ability to punch right right. Yeah, And so from
the research that we looked at for this, most anthropologists
up until Carriers research have been saying just that that
(07:37):
the dexterity is the important part, and it's so that
we can pick up things and maybe throw things, but
especially to help us use those tools, have you know,
made us the powerful species that we are, right, But
one of the this is an important fact to throw
out there too, is that when you when it comes
to punching, no matter what you've seen and Disney is
the Jungle Book, humans are the only creatures that can
(07:59):
throw a punch. Yeah, you know what. I had never
thought about that before until reading Carriers research, and of
course it makes sense. But not even primates can do it, right.
We we alone, even among the primates, are the only
ones who can curl that that that hand up into
a fully buttressed fist and uh, you know, socket to them.
So the idea is that in our current form, this
(08:21):
evolved form, you can just look at your hand right
now and try this out. The closed fists, the fully
buttressed fist with the generally with the thumb on top.
According to the schematics we're looking at, Um, what what's
occurring here is that the closed fist protects the hands,
delicate bones, the muscles, ligaments during impacts. So Carrier's theory
(08:41):
says that we've we've evolved to be able to throw
that punch. There's a there's an evolutionary advantage in being
able to throw that punch in such a way to
where you can get maximum force without damaging those delicate
manual dexterity tools that that are your hands. So that
right there leads me to think that this isn't like
(09:02):
such a black and white issue within evolutionary biology and
anthropology that it's either a fist or it's manual dexterity.
I think it's both, right. I think ultimately that's the
argument he's trying to make. Otherwise he wouldn't be saying, well,
the whole purpose of a buttressed fist is to protect
the hand from getting damaged so that it can subsequently
(09:23):
later on go and use manual dexterity. Yeah, I mean
imagine kind of a prehistart dating game, right, and in
which you have the the lovely young woman and then
the three potential suitors. One one one of them could
throw a really hard punch, but he can only do
it every every so often because it shatters all the
all the fingers in his hands, and it's such his
(09:45):
his hands are garbled, a garbled mess. He can't build anything.
He's not he's not good for anything else around. He
just gets into like one fight every like two or
three months and nails it, but then he's useless. And
then on the other hand, you have an end of
jewel who's who's wonderful around the camp for manual dexterity. Uh,
but all I can do is kind of slap and paw.
(10:06):
But in the middle, the sweet spot is you have
an individual who can who can buttress that fist, who
can who can punch hard, but at the end of
the day, can still do all the other things around
the camp in the tribal community that are important and
essential to passing on his jeans. Right. Yeah, And so
one thing that I think is important to distinguish here too,
(10:26):
if I think I have this right, is that carriers fists.
If you're listening, like maybe make a fist. Right, now,
go along with me. Here is that your four interior
fingers are folded in and your thumb is over your
second and third finger, right or sorry, rather your third,
(10:47):
your middle finger and your ring finger. Yes, that's how
it's depicted in the study. Is the best way to
get accomplished. This I've been fighting wrong my whole life,
I think, because I don't. I think I've been doing
it the wrong way. I think my thumb Not that
I get into fights that often, but the thumb over
(11:08):
I've been doing it with my thumb over my forefinger
and my middle finger. Yeah. Well, I mean I've only
been pretend punching. Yeah, I try to, you know. Go,
I mean, just go down to the parking lot and
get a couple of swings in every once a month
or something, just to stay fresh. All right, let's get
into the research here, going back to two thousand seven,
UH carriers paper dealing with the legs of our early ancestors.
(11:31):
In particular, all his studies are really revolving around the
austral epits. UH. And these are creatures in the genus
austro Lepipocus, immediate predecessors of the human genus Homo. They
had heights around three ft nine inches for females and
four ft six inches for males, and they lived from
four million to two million years ago, And there's a
(11:53):
lot of information on this and like I read basically
the Encyclopedia Britannica entry last night about these guys, and uh,
there are there's a lot about them. There's a lot
of subspecies, but the basic gist that I found is
that most of the fossils for this species were found
in Africa. They had small canine teeth, but they had
(12:14):
large cheek teeth, so you can kind of imagine that
sort of I don't know, um caveman kind of look
I think would probably be appropriate. I didn't know this,
but Lucy, that famous preserved fossilized skeleton was an australopith,
So that that if you've pictured that before, you've seen
that before. That's what we're talking about here. Uh and uh,
if the remains are older than six million years, they're
(12:37):
actually considered to be fossilized apes. So that I think
there's like an age difference there, uh between the six
million and the four million gap, But there's there's definitely
some evolution between the two. And the last thing, and
this is going to be important for when we're talking
about Carrier's research, is that they had these curved hands
if you can picture kind of I would imagine like
(12:58):
apes do today, uh, and really long toes and short thighs.
And this is important because we're gonna be talking about
the legs in particular right now. So okay, the assumption
that most anthropologists have had about australapiths up until now
is that they had short legs because they probably lived
like a treetop type culture. Their legs were used primarily
(13:21):
for climbing and balancing. Carrier argues, though, that he thinks
there's another reason, and this is kind of you're going
to find that with most of Carrier's research that it
it works like this, there's a presumption with an anthropology
he adds something onto it, and it's usually around fighting.
In this case, it is Uh. He says that the
reason why they have short legs is that it's advantageous
(13:43):
for them to be short because it gives them an
edge and grappling, which is the kind of fighting they
would probably do. Also, they have like a lower, more
stable center of gravity I'm thinking of I'm thinking of
Wolverine like in the comics, Like he's supposed to be
like short and stubby, right, and that makes him a
great fight the topple. Yeah, exactly. Uh. And this is
specifically uh in a in a paper that he wrote
(14:06):
for Evolution, which is called the Short Legs of Great
Apes colon Evidence for Aggressive Behavior in austro Lepith the Scenes,
and this came out in two thousand and seven, but
one of the key papers comes to us from two
thousand twelve. This is where a carrier really rolled out
the the the idea that that the the human fist
has evolved to this form because it is designed to
(14:29):
punch other humans face other and and other ancestors in
the pace face. So again it comes down to the
idea of the proportions of the human hand allow us
to make a fist that protects all those delicate bones,
muscles and ligaments during a you know, a josh shattering punch.
And again, no other primates or any animal for that matter,
can throw a punch. And meanwhile, our earliest ancestors may
(14:52):
have benefited from an evolutionary advantage and that they could
punch hard without entering Uh. These five fingered murder weapons,
so of us, your winning mates, resources, tribal honor, uh
and uh. In this particular study, Carrier also proved out
just the impact value of the punch, showing that the
punch is actually always better than a swap or a
(15:14):
chop because and it all comes down to the peak
strike force. The peak strike force is always the same
no matter what manner of handblow you're using, Okay, be
it a slap, a chop, a three stooges fingerpope, whatever,
whatever you're you're throwing, the peak four strike force is
always the same. But the fist delivers all this force
to a smaller area. So according to carry, the force
(15:36):
per area is up to three times greater with a
punch versus a good old swap. Okay. One of the
interesting things about this, this first study that he did
on fists, that I guess I didn't know even though,
like I've studied anatomy for drawing purposes, especially like hand drawing.
But male index fingers are always shorter than our ring fingers,
(15:58):
and that's part of being He argues that that's part
of being able to form this ideal fist, right, But
in women they're typically the same length, which I guess
I hadn't even really realized before. And maybe that's why
my drawings of women's hands have been terrible in the past.
But I mean, when I look at my hands right now,
that's certainly true. I thought of look like means you're
(16:19):
a wearewolf? Right, it could be that it could be
that it might be tied to the wolf, something about
like the different But yeah, so that's something I didn't realize.
And then so this gets into the his evolutionary argument
split along gender lines to that I guess he wasn't
considering Rhonda Roussi when he was thinking about fist formation. Yeah, well,
(16:43):
that's certainly Some of the criticism that has been leveled
at him is that that this is a very male centric,
or even bro centric view of human evolution. Yeah, and
I think that maybe this is a good time for
us to touch on I wish Joe is here because
he has a specific disdain for what is called bro science. Uh. Yeah.
(17:05):
And and in fact, when I was doing the research
for this article, I ran into a couple of quote
bro science articles. Uh. I guess the best way to
explain this is kind of a pseudo science repurposing scientific
principles to to to just like geek out about like
guy stuff like sports and fighting and and and uh
(17:29):
lifting weights and things like that. That's what I've seen mainly.
The article that I decided that I didn't feel like
the science was strong enough to include it in this
episode was from a site called Boxing Science, and it
was all about the science of boxing, and I thought, oh, well,
this might be interesting and a good uh you know,
compliment to carriers research. And it really didn't have a
(17:50):
whole lot of a weight to it and wasn't wasn't
very well connected, especially in regards to anatomy. But there
was a lot of talk about um uh martial science
in other research, and this was academically published, so I
did think I should bring this up. There was apparently
a study published in the Journal of Cerebral Cortex, and
(18:11):
the suggestion there was that punches actually start with our
brain structure. So yeah, the fist might be important, as
Carrier argues, but brains are also really important to this.
So what they did was they did brain scans of
active martial artists versus people with similar builds but with
no martial arts training, and they looked to see if
(18:34):
there was a correlation between the karate punchers, and they
found that there was. That the people who were trained
punchers actually had denser white matter in the supplementary motor
cortex of their brains, and that that's a section that
controls coordination between all of our different muscle groups. Right.
So you pair this together the ideas that multiple muscle
(18:56):
groups working together, they are doing this thing that we
refer to as or science referred to as kinetic linking.
You see this in combat, but you also see it
in stuff like golf for baseball. Right, multiple muscles all
working together so that we can accomplish these these great feats. Um.
But coordination and timing are also essential to all this
as well, which is where the brain comes in. So
(19:19):
the idea here is really that, yes, the fist may
be important in this research came out before uh Carrier's
most recent piece on fists, so I'd be curious with
their what the what the authors of that piece would
say about carriers research how fists are connected to brains
and vice versa, and the whole body working together. There
was a lot of articles online that took this and
(19:42):
then extrapolated out of it like there was a nerdous
piece and then I think that piece was linked to
a popular mechanics piece that was all about Bruce Lee's
one inch punch and the like physics behind that. And
I wait, what's the deal with a one inch punch?
It's just like a specific like Bruce Lee martial arts move.
Does that mean like there's one inch between, like it's
(20:04):
just a very rapid short punch. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
absolutely right. Um and if you kind of right, yeah, exactly,
you have to do that. There's good. That's the study
that's coming out in sixteen is the WAW contribution that
I think it's worth worth Both of these studies that
we've we've touched on here, I feel like they are
pretty solidly outside of any growth science area. But it's
(20:27):
it's picks it up and then runs with it and
starts rewriting the study and extrapolating it and uh and
and pushing a certain picture of humanity. Yeah. And even
like the press release that went out about carriers study
that came out just a couple what was it two
weeks ago? Uh stated specifically, here's our retorts to brow
(20:50):
science claims before before anybody even made them because they
knew that there was going to be there. I mean, yeah,
David Carrier is an accomplished biologist. Yeah. Absolutely, look at
picture of him. He looks like an accomplished biologist, right,
he doesn't. He's not like a CrossFit Jim who's trying
to use like a physics book to justify uh, you
know whatever. Alright, So two thousand fourteen, Carrier publishes a
(21:15):
new study and Biological Reviews and he worked with this
one on this one with physician Michael H. Morgan, and
they the key argument here is that it goes beyond fists,
that human faces also evolved to minimize injury from punches
of the face during fights between males. Uh, that's where
(21:36):
we tend to punch people. And I've often wondered this,
where do we Where do we first get that idea
about punching people in the face, Because even in children's films,
like I mentioned Jungle Book earlier, because when I let
my son watch it for the first time, I was
kind of a pall that all the fisticuffs. There's a
lot of punching bears, punching tigers, humans punching bears, human
(21:59):
bears punching human I wonder if the new c g
I version is going to have all these punching, especially
because they're like c G I, actual animals rather than
like a cartoon Blue the Bear. Yeah, it'll be interesting
to see how that goes. But but yeah, that we
just have this idea of punching and groined in us
early on. But yeah, and but but the face, I mean,
(22:22):
I guess there must be a connection there because like,
and we've talked about this on previous episodes that like,
we think of the face and the head as being
the center of identity, right at least we do in
modern culture. We've talked previously about how Egyptians did not
actually they thought that the heart was the center of
the soul. But in our case, we have that is
(22:44):
sort of like a cultural belief, and I wonder if
that's where it stems from. It's like, you got to
hit them right right right where it's all going on. Well,
I mean, I guess it is very Yeah, it's a
very strategic place to strike because you have some major
since organs there. And of course the nose is a
key um key target with any kind of because it's
you can be broken easily to at least throw your
(23:07):
opponent off. You have not actually killed, right, A concussion
will certainly end the fight. But the thing so again,
like I didn't feel comfortable citing this research in the episode,
but when I was reading these boxing sites and they
were talking about, uh that some of them actually were
like consulted on Carrier's research, And basically what it came
(23:28):
down to was them saying, well, yeah, that sounds interesting,
but like the best place to punch somebody is actually
like in the groin, Like it's you know what I mean,
Like from their point of view, I think, in like
a martial arts or boxing contest or whatever, that's going
to maximize your efforts, right yeah, yeah, but the refs watching,
so you can't. You gotta, you gotta, you gotta have
your manager distract the ref then you do the low
(23:51):
blow exactly, and then you roll up for the three count. Um.
This particular study about about the faces, it is important
because I mentioned the nose weakness, and that's this is
them here. This often leveled. But this research is basically
looking back again four or five million years at those
australopith ancestors, and here we find increased robustness in the
(24:12):
particular facial bones that are most likely to suffer fracture
during a pummeling. And these are also the areas where
we find the greatest differences between male and female facial
structures boast, both in the australopiths and in humans, because
again the structures may have evolved, according to Carrier, in
response to male on male violence. And it's these Australopiths.
Also they had a stubbier nose, so they didn't have
(24:35):
the clear target punched me in the center of my
face and send blood flying everywhere. That's the argument against Carrier, right,
is that the Australopith face would actually be better suited
for combat. Yeah. And the idea here too is that
that post auster epath we became we we still love
to punch each other in the face, clearly, but it
(24:56):
becomes less of an evolutionary driving force. Yeah. I loved
how the methodology of this research went about. So these
two guys looked at emergency room statistics from Western societies
and they found that all of the fights between quote
untrained combatants. I wonder how they got that information from
(25:16):
the emergency room files. Uh, most frequently resulted in injuries
to the face, which you know, like we're talking earlier,
we usually go for the face, right, So the jaw,
the cheek, bones, the nose, and in particular the bones
around our eyes are the areas that they're looking at here.
These are the areas that they're saying, why didn't our
bones evolve to be sturdier at these stress points like
(25:38):
early humans? Yeah? Absolutely so. This study in particular has
one major critic. I'm sure there's lots of anthropologists out there,
but the one that I found that was cited that
most was a guy named Owen Lovejoy, who at the
time worked at a Kent State university. He's a he's
a lover, not a fighter. Didn't even apply exactly, so
(25:59):
he's as uh. The hypothesis behind Carrier's research is what
he calls adaptation ism, and he says, essentially, what he's
doing here is assigning evolutionary purpose to a particular trait
when no such relationship actually exists. So, okay, we've got
a little bit of an academic fight here. We see
this all the time, people trying to you know, stand
their ground, make their mark, point their flag. I love
(26:22):
Joy says that the shape of our faces are what
I guess this is a term that's used in this
kind of biological evolution study a spandrel, and that means
that they evolved as a byproduct of other traits. So
for example, brain size or the muscles and bones that
are in our jaws that are needed for chewing. Uh,
(26:44):
these are why our faces are shaped the way that
they are. Not the punching thing. Yeah, I mean this
is the one of the problems you get into when
you start pulling apart these definitely different evolutionary theories. Is
there are just so many factors that are involved the
face punching sure, but yeah, also the ability to to
crunch and grind up your food. Uh, this this swelling
(27:07):
size of the human brain, etcetera. He also says this
goes back to our earlier sort of scene that we
were setting, where like the human female would be, the
early human female would choose for mates. He said that
early human females actually did not prize aggression in their mates. Uh.
They and subsequently they chose partners that had smaller canine teeth.
(27:30):
So that was a thing because you know, I think
that these early human ancestors were biting as well as
slapping and punching. Well, that's clearly an ingrained right instinct, right. Uh.
And so subsequently, the smaller canines lead to males that
cooperated with one another more and this led to the
(27:50):
success of the human species, or one of the things
that led to success. So he's arguing completely against the
whole fist face thing. Okay, Now, I always think to
cut off fish when when discussions like this come up,
and and I'm I'm not making a direct comparison and
cuttle fish and humans because obviously the very alien creatures
compared to one another, they're totally different environments. But when
(28:11):
the couple fish, you see the survival of both the
robust fighter male and the sneaky, smaller male who even
pretends to be a female in order to to mate.
And uh, it always reminds me that, you know, when
you're looking at a complex mating relationship with the creature,
there there is the potential for more than one model
(28:33):
that's effective. Yeah. I mean, I think that this gets
back to what we're you know, talking about from the
very beginning of Carrier's research here, that I think that
it's more than just one thing. Right. You can't just
say like, oh, we just evolved because of fists or
we just evolved because of manual dexterity. There's so many
factors that are going on there, right, And yeah, it
(28:54):
works really well to get published in an academic journal
if you have some kind of amazing insight with research
to back it up that says, well, hey, look at
this one thing that we haven't thought about yet. But
that doesn't mean that it's exclusive right now. Of course,
Carrier again is devoted to this research, and the latest
study is pretty pretty incredible. Whether you agree with him
(29:17):
or not, this is just yeah, I mean, this is
this is why we wanted to do this. This is crazy. Yeah,
I've been blogging about his work for for years, but
this is the one where they came around and actual
said this on our Facebook site. The the actual study,
I want to say, like the week it came out,
and then immediately after you were like, oh, we've got
to do a video on this. So in this latest study,
(29:39):
this is a two fifteen published in Journal of Experimental Biology,
he attempts to level some more purely experimental data at
the theory. A theory you know again, continues to generate
some controversy and and needs some proving out, so what
do you do? Well, care and his team collected cadaver
arms from nine different individuals. They ended up being able
(30:01):
to actually use eight, so they have a bunch of
dead human arms. Okay, So so I'm already like this
is you had me at hello? Like like, so I
actually went and tried to access the article itself, not
the press releases surrounding it, and unfortunately it's behind a
paid firewall, so I was not able to read the
(30:24):
article itself. So if you are David Carrier, or you
know David Carrier, or you helped on this research, what
I want to know is where do you get eight
cadaver arms? Like where do you just go and say
I need eight human arms? And they go, well why?
And I well, there's actually an interesting chapter in Mary
roaches um stuff. The deal deals just not only for
(30:48):
medical purposes, but even like like purely medical purpose purposes
or research purposes, but also for just like cosmetic surgery trains. Sure, yeah,
I mean obviously like people donate their bodies to science
and such, but how what I'm fascinated with is that process.
I mean, this is a great article article, the research
is interesting, but like you start off, and you say,
(31:11):
all right, to pull this off, I need eight human arms,
and I need them severed from their bodies. There's got
to be a place you go and fill out that paperwork.
I want to know where that is. What the paperwork
looks like? This is we've we've got to find out
and do it. Well. It does write the question did
they get them on once? So they have to wait
for the movie? Yeah? Are these specific? Like? Like I
(31:33):
wonder if if he was looking for specific body types
to write, like, we know that they're their mail arms,
but like was one a lifter and the other one
was like more built like me and scrawny. You know, well,
we have his email address, we can we can just
shoot the carrier and I want to find out. Yeah, um,
so he got the arms eight eight to nine arms, right,
(31:55):
But that's that's not quite enough. You can't just start
slinging these around like they're dead fish and a slaps battle, right,
So what you have to do is dissect them to
expose the muscles, essentially flaying these arms and then attaching
fishing line to all the tendons so that you're essentially
making a corpse arm puppet. So you can you can
make that open hand slap. You can pull another some
more strings and make a very like rough unbuttressed fist,
(32:19):
which is kind of like imagine the weakest punch possible,
and that's what you have. And then the buttress fist,
the sweet spot that we've been discussing the core here
to to carryers research does all of that, and then
you still need a way to drive that puppy home,
So enter the pendulum. This pendulum device. They load the
arms into this pendulum like apparatus. And there's a wonderful
(32:41):
schematic for this uh in the paper. Maybe we'll end
up using that as the as the art for this episode.
At the very least, I'll link out to it so
you can see it. They have that. We don't have
a picture of it, but you have some wonderful drawings
of what it would look like. And use this pendulum
to then launch that does mbie arm straight into a
(33:02):
padded forth detecting dumb back. That's the best part too,
that it's a dumb balance, like, like, I get it.
Because they wanted to detect the force, they had to
use the technology and everything, but it's just like these
poor arms are just and and the other thing too,
Like again, you know, if if you do this kind
of research, please let us know. But how do you
keep a cadaver arm from rotting? Because I reading the research,
(33:28):
it said that it took a week of study for
each arm. So how do you keep this arm that
you've just flayed and you have hooked up to this
pendulum thing from stinking the joint up and falling apart? Well,
I mean they had problems with one of the arms. Yeah,
that's right because like arthritis. Yeah, I believe it was
too Yeah, that you weren't able to actually manipulate it properly. Uh.
(33:52):
One other thing that I would add to is that
so from the other research that mentioned in particular at
punching has a lot to do not just with our fists,
but also with our brains, and that it's a full
body action, right that I need the whole body to
be able to throw the force and to you know,
(34:12):
execute the move precisely right, So it's not a perfect
recreation exactly like I see where he was going with this,
But I can imagine that their results would be lower
than they would be if you which you know, you
would never get the approval to do this from the university.
But if you had people just punching dumbbells, right, because
he was specifically interested here is like how much protection
(34:34):
is the fist versus the slap or the unbuttress fist.
How much protection is there for the metacarpal bones and
the underlying tissue. And he they found him and his
team did find that a clinched, fully buttressed fist did
provide significant protection for the metacarpal bones. So his findings
suggested that fully buttress fist can safely strike with fifty
(34:55):
more force than an unbuttressed fist and more for been
an open handed slap. So and again that's safely without
damaging things. That's how much more punching. How much more
impact power you have with the with the buttressed fist. Yeah,
and again method methodologically, the way that they did this
was each arm, like I said, took a week. They
(35:17):
they tested the buttressed fist, then the unbuttressed fist, then
the open palm slap. So that's where they got these
figures from. So remember the next time that you get
into a fight, listeners, remember the buttressed fist because it's
going to you know, help you out. Yeah, yeah, if
if if you have anything, look second to think should
I should I? Should I curl it up into the
(35:38):
fist or should I slap Exactly? Yeah, and not only
will it do more damage, but it will also protect
your fingers so that you can type of your keyboard
the next day. Yeah, and keep that stat you role
players out there, if scenario where you get to use that,
throw that info at your d M because you love
it when the players bring a real science, say hey,
(36:00):
I should actually get a little boost on this attack,
and here's the science to prove it. So as we're
thinking about all this, I do want to throw out
a great quote from Carrier in the most recent two
thousand fifteen study that that that gets to some of
the more underlying kind of philosophical aspects of this research.
He says, our research is about peace. We seek to explore, understand,
(36:22):
and confront human kinds violent and aggressive tendencies. Peace begins
with ourselves and is ultimately achieved through discipline, self analysis,
and an understanding of where we've come from as a species.
Through our through our research, we hope to look ourselves
in the mirror and begin the difficult work of changing
ourselves for the better. As an alternative, We suggest that
(36:42):
the hand proportions that allow the formation of a fist
may tell us something important about our evolutionary history and
who we are as a species. If our anatomy is
adapted for fighting, we need to be aware we always
may be haunted by basic emotions and reflective behaviors that
often don't make stance and are very dangerous in the
modern world. So this is essentially like what we're talking
(37:04):
about at the beginning that I think that this is
that no pun intended. The meat of his research is
that he's looking for evidence to show why human behavior
now is sort of haunted by the past. Yeah, so
we end up in this situation, Yeah, where an individual
who is not trained in martial arts will curl up
(37:25):
a fist and throw a punch. Why. To what extent
is that watching Jungle Book as a kid, To what
extent is that something that's just ingrained in a ship.
That's the part I was wondering about, is the ingrained thing,
Because I've been around a lot of babies lately. A
lot of my friends have had kids, and they've well,
that's the thing that that kind of instinctively do, is
like they don't even uh consciously do it, but they
(37:47):
form a fist and then just kind of wail that
arm out there, and you occasionally get clocked in the face. Uh.
And I don't know if that's just you know, inherent
genetic thing that they're just get used to their dexterity
that way, or or what you know. I have to admit,
even though I've never taken a punch to the face
(38:08):
from an adult, I have taken a number of really
jaws shattering We're not josh shattering, but certainly jaw rocking
impacts from saying a toddler's head oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
They throw a lot of fourth around, and they do
so indiscriminately. Like hundreds of years from now, hundreds thousand,
millions of years from now, podcasters are going to be
(38:29):
looking back at how our faces evolved to deal all
these toddlers that are beating the hell out of us. Yeah,
all these head like head butt upper cuts, and then
I don't know how many times have been poked in
the eye at this point. It's crazy, half of them
by my wife from living in the same house, whether
or like It'll be like fumbling around in the morning
and then I end up taking up finger in the eye.
(38:51):
So even when we're not fighting each other, Uh, it's
it's it's humans. We we can't help but damnage each
other's faces exactly. Yeah, it's it's our cur and our gift,
all right. So there you have it, a little look
into the work of David Carrier and this uh fist
punch theory of evolution. Be sure to check out the
landing page for this episode because we'll have links out
(39:12):
to related content. It's some blog content I've done in
the past that now video as well as where you
can find the actual studies. Yeah, and of course you're
gonna be able to find this episode if you're listening
to it already, you've probably downloaded it from our RSS feed.
But go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
You'll find that we have all kinds of related links.
But also there's blog posts there, videos there, including our
(39:34):
Monster Science series, which is just wrapping up it's third season. Uh.
And of course follow us on social media because we
not only post out all the stuff that we're working on,
but we also curate a lot of really cool and
weird science that's getting published around the web. Let us
help you survive the holiday. That's what it's all about, exactly.
(39:54):
So we're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on tumbler.
All those sites were Blow the Mind and don't forget
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send us some old fashioned email, you have a you
have some martial arts experience you want to throw down
if you want to share some some firsthand accounts of
(40:15):
punch for some kinetic strikes and all this, and do
so let us know at blow the Mind at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert lamp and I am
Christian Sager. Hey, Robert, I want you to hit me
as hard as you can. All right, here it goes.
(00:24):
You hit me in the ear. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. No, No,
that was perfect. Are you okay? Hit me again? Now?
Maybe later. Man, We've got an episode to record, so,
as you may guess from our little uh little fight
club homage there, this episode is about the evolution of punching,
(00:46):
in particular fists and human beings and how we evolved
in the theory that our hands specifically evolved so that
we could fight each other. Yeah, in particular, this is
the theory that's been put forth by by all just
David Carrier from the University of Utah, and he's done
a number of different studies and published a number of
(01:06):
different papers um supporting this theory. And whether you agree
with it or not, he makes some He just makes
a wonderful case for it, and he's committed to this theory. Yeah.
I want to say he has like what five academic
papers published all about different parts of the body, but
all around this theory. Yes, the most recent of which
just came out in the last couple of months. Uh.
(01:27):
And in fact, we have done how Stuff works video
about it that you wrote and started in and there's
a little like article accompanying it. Yeah. Well, I think
the real stars of that video. But we'll get to that.
So see if you want, If you want something a
little little creepy fun, this will deliver. But for the
most part, we're talking about basic human evolution here, the
(01:49):
evolution of the human form and really the human function
as well, the humanity's shadows self. Yeah. Well, before we
get into the meat of the episode, I just want
to remind our listeners that we have a couple of
things going on with social media right now. We've just
started periscoping and we're doing that every Friday at noon.
(02:09):
We did our first one last week and it went
really well, so we're gonna try it again. We're gonna
try to keep going with it, uh, and we'd love
to see you there. So if you have time, you
have periscope on your phone or your computer or whatever,
check it out and uh talk to us. Yeah, we'll
have links about it on Facebook and Twitter and Tumbler
as well. Uh, and we'll be reminding you right before
(02:30):
it happened. Yeah. Absolutely, and we're blow the mind on
all of those social media platforms. One other thing too,
we were thinking we've heard that apparently it helps your
iTunes rankings if you get reviews. I'm assuming positive reviews
from your listeners. Uh, and we checked in. There haven't
been that many reviews in a while, especially since Joe
(02:53):
and I joined the show. So we're hoping that if
you could please go in and you know, if you
have time, provider review you for us over in iTunes.
And I just found out yesterday too. Did you know
we're available on Google Play now as well. Apparently they
have a podcast streaming service as well. Yeah that's pretty cool.
So yeah, how about the algorithm dropped by iTunes of
your an iTunes listener give us a positive review. Uh,
(03:14):
it helps us out because some of those reviews are
old like that, years and years back to when the
podcast was still in diapers, right, all right, so let's
get into it. Fists Punching Fight Club. Yes, so, um,
if you've ever seen Stanley Kubrick's sci fi classic two
thousand one of Space Odyssey and I hope you have,
because it's it's really the stuff to blow your mind movie,
(03:37):
and many of us um it paints a wonderful picture
of humanity's violent evolutionary ascension, right this wonderful Dawn of
Man segment in which these early hominids, some of the
best men in monkey suits ever in eight suits if
you rather, just sort of mucking about and then eventually
(03:58):
just discovering a was technology, the technology to pick up
a tool specifically, I think like a taper of job
and just start wailing on animals and each other. Yeah.
There's this band that I like called Oxes and they
performed itself by Southwest one year and they just did
that entire scene verbatim at the end of their show.
(04:20):
It's like, like, I think they played the music that
was going on in it and then like they acted out.
They acted out, they showed the members of the band
acted it out. Yeah, it was pretty amusing. But yes,
so this brings us to the real like I think,
academic heart of this episode is a guy named David Carrier,
(04:42):
and he is uh if you, by the way, if
you google David Carrier, it turns out that there's a
bunch of other guys with that name who get higher
rankings Google than him. So you might want to add
like evolutionary or a biologist or something like that, this
would work. Yeah. He's at the University of Utah, uh,
(05:02):
and he has published multiple papers, like we said, and
really just has this overall theory that humanity, especially male humans,
have physically evolved over time, uh, to be fighting machines basically,
and that that is something that's inherent in us. And
I think what he's getting out overall is that we
(05:23):
now live in a society where there aren't that many
reasons for melee combat. Uh. Actually the episode that we're
kind of record after this one is about another form
of combat. But in terms of fist fighting, there aren't
that many reasons, right, not like they're there used to
be back in the good days, back back when we
used to and you know, jokingly, I think that this
(05:44):
is kind of the philosophical heart of Fight Club as well, right,
the the idea that that like we're made to be
hunter gatherer physical fighting machines and our primordial fisticuff roots. Yeah,
and in modern society doesn't allow us to do that.
So where do we how do we you know, burn
off that inherent I don't know, uh, evolutionary aesthetic. Yeah. Now,
(06:08):
it's it's important to note here that an in carrier
will be the first to stay this as well. Obviously,
there are a number of different factors going on in
human evolution and the ascent of man um you have.
You know, our oversized brains are our diet um some
of the just environmental scenarios that enabled us to get
to where we are now. Uh, and so his you
(06:31):
often encounter the idea that comes down to our tool use. Right.
A tool use, of course, is an important aspect of
a humanity. Humanities of center, our ability to to like
that guy in an eight costume in two thousand one,
to pick up a tool and start using it, um
to to overpower more sophisticated predators, to overpower each other.
(06:54):
And certainly we have the manual dexterity to make tools,
to wield to tools. We have the brain that can
allow us to update our body schema to incorporate this
tool into our image of ourself and utilize it properly.
But UH Carrier is ultimately making the case that that
the real violent aspect of humanity enters the picture along
(07:15):
with if not earlier than our tool using hands like
that when you look at the human hand, yes, manual
dexterity is a big part of the form, but also
the ability to punch right right. Yeah, And so from
the research that we looked at for this, most anthropologists
up until Carriers research have been saying just that that
(07:37):
the dexterity is the important part, and it's so that
we can pick up things and maybe throw things, but
especially to help us use those tools, have you know,
made us the powerful species that we are, right, But
one of the this is an important fact to throw
out there too, is that when you when it comes
to punching, no matter what you've seen and Disney is
the Jungle Book, humans are the only creatures that can
(07:59):
throw a punch. Yeah, you know what. I had never
thought about that before until reading Carriers research, and of
course it makes sense. But not even primates can do it, right.
We we alone, even among the primates, are the only
ones who can curl that that that hand up into
a fully buttressed fist and uh, you know, socket to them.
So the idea is that in our current form, this
(08:21):
evolved form, you can just look at your hand right
now and try this out. The closed fists, the fully
buttressed fist with the generally with the thumb on top.
According to the schematics we're looking at, Um, what what's
occurring here is that the closed fist protects the hands,
delicate bones, the muscles, ligaments during impacts. So Carrier's theory
(08:41):
says that we've we've evolved to be able to throw
that punch. There's a there's an evolutionary advantage in being
able to throw that punch in such a way to
where you can get maximum force without damaging those delicate
manual dexterity tools that that are your hands. So that
right there leads me to think that this isn't like
(09:02):
such a black and white issue within evolutionary biology and
anthropology that it's either a fist or it's manual dexterity.
I think it's both, right. I think ultimately that's the
argument he's trying to make. Otherwise he wouldn't be saying, well,
the whole purpose of a buttressed fist is to protect
the hand from getting damaged so that it can subsequently
(09:23):
later on go and use manual dexterity. Yeah, I mean
imagine kind of a prehistart dating game, right, and in
which you have the the lovely young woman and then
the three potential suitors. One one one of them could
throw a really hard punch, but he can only do
it every every so often because it shatters all the
all the fingers in his hands, and it's such his
(09:45):
his hands are garbled, a garbled mess. He can't build anything.
He's not he's not good for anything else around. He
just gets into like one fight every like two or
three months and nails it, but then he's useless. And
then on the other hand, you have an end of
jewel who's who's wonderful around the camp for manual dexterity. Uh,
but all I can do is kind of slap and paw.
(10:06):
But in the middle, the sweet spot is you have
an individual who can who can buttress that fist, who
can who can punch hard, but at the end of
the day, can still do all the other things around
the camp in the tribal community that are important and
essential to passing on his jeans. Right. Yeah, And so
one thing that I think is important to distinguish here too,
(10:26):
if I think I have this right, is that carriers fists.
If you're listening, like maybe make a fist. Right, now,
go along with me. Here is that your four interior
fingers are folded in and your thumb is over your
second and third finger, right or sorry, rather your third,
(10:47):
your middle finger and your ring finger. Yes, that's how
it's depicted in the study. Is the best way to
get accomplished. This I've been fighting wrong my whole life,
I think, because I don't. I think I've been doing
it the wrong way. I think my thumb Not that
I get into fights that often, but the thumb over
(11:08):
I've been doing it with my thumb over my forefinger
and my middle finger. Yeah. Well, I mean I've only
been pretend punching. Yeah, I try to, you know. Go,
I mean, just go down to the parking lot and
get a couple of swings in every once a month
or something, just to stay fresh. All right, let's get
into the research here, going back to two thousand seven,
UH carriers paper dealing with the legs of our early ancestors.
(11:31):
In particular, all his studies are really revolving around the
austral epits. UH. And these are creatures in the genus
austro Lepipocus, immediate predecessors of the human genus Homo. They
had heights around three ft nine inches for females and
four ft six inches for males, and they lived from
four million to two million years ago, And there's a
(11:53):
lot of information on this and like I read basically
the Encyclopedia Britannica entry last night about these guys, and uh,
there are there's a lot about them. There's a lot
of subspecies, but the basic gist that I found is
that most of the fossils for this species were found
in Africa. They had small canine teeth, but they had
(12:14):
large cheek teeth, so you can kind of imagine that
sort of I don't know, um caveman kind of look
I think would probably be appropriate. I didn't know this,
but Lucy, that famous preserved fossilized skeleton was an australopith,
So that that if you've pictured that before, you've seen
that before. That's what we're talking about here. Uh and uh,
if the remains are older than six million years, they're
(12:37):
actually considered to be fossilized apes. So that I think
there's like an age difference there, uh between the six
million and the four million gap, But there's there's definitely
some evolution between the two. And the last thing, and
this is going to be important for when we're talking
about Carrier's research, is that they had these curved hands
if you can picture kind of I would imagine like
(12:58):
apes do today, uh, and really long toes and short thighs.
And this is important because we're gonna be talking about
the legs in particular right now. So okay, the assumption
that most anthropologists have had about australapiths up until now
is that they had short legs because they probably lived
like a treetop type culture. Their legs were used primarily
(13:21):
for climbing and balancing. Carrier argues, though, that he thinks
there's another reason, and this is kind of you're going
to find that with most of Carrier's research that it
it works like this, there's a presumption with an anthropology
he adds something onto it, and it's usually around fighting.
In this case, it is Uh. He says that the
reason why they have short legs is that it's advantageous
(13:43):
for them to be short because it gives them an
edge and grappling, which is the kind of fighting they
would probably do. Also, they have like a lower, more
stable center of gravity I'm thinking of I'm thinking of
Wolverine like in the comics, Like he's supposed to be
like short and stubby, right, and that makes him a
great fight the topple. Yeah, exactly. Uh. And this is
specifically uh in a in a paper that he wrote
(14:06):
for Evolution, which is called the Short Legs of Great
Apes colon Evidence for Aggressive Behavior in austro Lepith the Scenes,
and this came out in two thousand and seven, but
one of the key papers comes to us from two
thousand twelve. This is where a carrier really rolled out
the the the idea that that the the human fist
has evolved to this form because it is designed to
(14:29):
punch other humans face other and and other ancestors in
the pace face. So again it comes down to the
idea of the proportions of the human hand allow us
to make a fist that protects all those delicate bones,
muscles and ligaments during a you know, a josh shattering punch.
And again, no other primates or any animal for that matter,
can throw a punch. And meanwhile, our earliest ancestors may
(14:52):
have benefited from an evolutionary advantage and that they could
punch hard without entering Uh. These five fingered murder weapons,
so of us, your winning mates, resources, tribal honor, uh
and uh. In this particular study, Carrier also proved out
just the impact value of the punch, showing that the
punch is actually always better than a swap or a
(15:14):
chop because and it all comes down to the peak
strike force. The peak strike force is always the same
no matter what manner of handblow you're using, Okay, be
it a slap, a chop, a three stooges fingerpope, whatever,
whatever you're you're throwing, the peak four strike force is
always the same. But the fist delivers all this force
to a smaller area. So according to carry, the force
(15:36):
per area is up to three times greater with a
punch versus a good old swap. Okay. One of the
interesting things about this, this first study that he did
on fists, that I guess I didn't know even though,
like I've studied anatomy for drawing purposes, especially like hand drawing.
But male index fingers are always shorter than our ring fingers,
(15:58):
and that's part of being He argues that that's part
of being able to form this ideal fist, right, But
in women they're typically the same length, which I guess
I hadn't even really realized before. And maybe that's why
my drawings of women's hands have been terrible in the past.
But I mean, when I look at my hands right now,
that's certainly true. I thought of look like means you're
(16:19):
a wearewolf? Right, it could be that it could be
that it might be tied to the wolf, something about
like the different But yeah, so that's something I didn't realize.
And then so this gets into the his evolutionary argument
split along gender lines to that I guess he wasn't
considering Rhonda Roussi when he was thinking about fist formation. Yeah, well,
(16:43):
that's certainly Some of the criticism that has been leveled
at him is that that this is a very male centric,
or even bro centric view of human evolution. Yeah, and
I think that maybe this is a good time for
us to touch on I wish Joe is here because
he has a specific disdain for what is called bro science. Uh. Yeah.
(17:05):
And and in fact, when I was doing the research
for this article, I ran into a couple of quote
bro science articles. Uh. I guess the best way to
explain this is kind of a pseudo science repurposing scientific
principles to to to just like geek out about like
guy stuff like sports and fighting and and and uh
(17:29):
lifting weights and things like that. That's what I've seen mainly.
The article that I decided that I didn't feel like
the science was strong enough to include it in this
episode was from a site called Boxing Science, and it
was all about the science of boxing, and I thought, oh, well,
this might be interesting and a good uh you know,
compliment to carriers research. And it really didn't have a
(17:50):
whole lot of a weight to it and wasn't wasn't
very well connected, especially in regards to anatomy. But there
was a lot of talk about um uh martial science
in other research, and this was academically published, so I
did think I should bring this up. There was apparently
a study published in the Journal of Cerebral Cortex, and
(18:11):
the suggestion there was that punches actually start with our
brain structure. So yeah, the fist might be important, as
Carrier argues, but brains are also really important to this.
So what they did was they did brain scans of
active martial artists versus people with similar builds but with
no martial arts training, and they looked to see if
(18:34):
there was a correlation between the karate punchers, and they
found that there was. That the people who were trained
punchers actually had denser white matter in the supplementary motor
cortex of their brains, and that that's a section that
controls coordination between all of our different muscle groups. Right.
So you pair this together the ideas that multiple muscle
(18:56):
groups working together, they are doing this thing that we
refer to as or science referred to as kinetic linking.
You see this in combat, but you also see it
in stuff like golf for baseball. Right, multiple muscles all
working together so that we can accomplish these these great feats. Um.
But coordination and timing are also essential to all this
as well, which is where the brain comes in. So
(19:19):
the idea here is really that, yes, the fist may
be important in this research came out before uh Carrier's
most recent piece on fists, so I'd be curious with
their what the what the authors of that piece would
say about carriers research how fists are connected to brains
and vice versa, and the whole body working together. There
was a lot of articles online that took this and
(19:42):
then extrapolated out of it like there was a nerdous
piece and then I think that piece was linked to
a popular mechanics piece that was all about Bruce Lee's
one inch punch and the like physics behind that. And
I wait, what's the deal with a one inch punch?
It's just like a specific like Bruce Lee martial arts move.
Does that mean like there's one inch between, like it's
(20:04):
just a very rapid short punch. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
absolutely right. Um and if you kind of right, yeah, exactly,
you have to do that. There's good. That's the study
that's coming out in sixteen is the WAW contribution that
I think it's worth worth Both of these studies that
we've we've touched on here, I feel like they are
pretty solidly outside of any growth science area. But it's
(20:27):
it's picks it up and then runs with it and
starts rewriting the study and extrapolating it and uh and
and pushing a certain picture of humanity. Yeah. And even
like the press release that went out about carriers study
that came out just a couple what was it two
weeks ago? Uh stated specifically, here's our retorts to brow
(20:50):
science claims before before anybody even made them because they
knew that there was going to be there. I mean, yeah,
David Carrier is an accomplished biologist. Yeah. Absolutely, look at
picture of him. He looks like an accomplished biologist, right,
he doesn't. He's not like a CrossFit Jim who's trying
to use like a physics book to justify uh, you
know whatever. Alright, So two thousand fourteen, Carrier publishes a
(21:15):
new study and Biological Reviews and he worked with this
one on this one with physician Michael H. Morgan, and
they the key argument here is that it goes beyond fists,
that human faces also evolved to minimize injury from punches
of the face during fights between males. Uh, that's where
(21:36):
we tend to punch people. And I've often wondered this,
where do we Where do we first get that idea
about punching people in the face, Because even in children's films,
like I mentioned Jungle Book earlier, because when I let
my son watch it for the first time, I was
kind of a pall that all the fisticuffs. There's a
lot of punching bears, punching tigers, humans punching bears, human
(21:59):
bears punching human I wonder if the new c g
I version is going to have all these punching, especially
because they're like c G I, actual animals rather than
like a cartoon Blue the Bear. Yeah, it'll be interesting
to see how that goes. But but yeah, that we
just have this idea of punching and groined in us
early on. But yeah, and but but the face, I mean,
(22:22):
I guess there must be a connection there because like,
and we've talked about this on previous episodes that like,
we think of the face and the head as being
the center of identity, right at least we do in
modern culture. We've talked previously about how Egyptians did not
actually they thought that the heart was the center of
the soul. But in our case, we have that is
(22:44):
sort of like a cultural belief, and I wonder if
that's where it stems from. It's like, you got to
hit them right right right where it's all going on. Well,
I mean, I guess it is very Yeah, it's a
very strategic place to strike because you have some major
since organs there. And of course the nose is a
key um key target with any kind of because it's
you can be broken easily to at least throw your
(23:07):
opponent off. You have not actually killed, right, A concussion
will certainly end the fight. But the thing so again,
like I didn't feel comfortable citing this research in the episode,
but when I was reading these boxing sites and they
were talking about, uh that some of them actually were
like consulted on Carrier's research, And basically what it came
(23:28):
down to was them saying, well, yeah, that sounds interesting,
but like the best place to punch somebody is actually
like in the groin, Like it's you know what I mean,
Like from their point of view, I think, in like
a martial arts or boxing contest or whatever, that's going
to maximize your efforts, right yeah, yeah, but the refs watching,
so you can't. You gotta, you gotta, you gotta have
your manager distract the ref then you do the low
(23:51):
blow exactly, and then you roll up for the three count. Um.
This particular study about about the faces, it is important
because I mentioned the nose weakness, and that's this is
them here. This often leveled. But this research is basically
looking back again four or five million years at those
australopith ancestors, and here we find increased robustness in the
(24:12):
particular facial bones that are most likely to suffer fracture
during a pummeling. And these are also the areas where
we find the greatest differences between male and female facial
structures boast, both in the australopiths and in humans, because
again the structures may have evolved, according to Carrier, in
response to male on male violence. And it's these Australopiths.
Also they had a stubbier nose, so they didn't have
(24:35):
the clear target punched me in the center of my
face and send blood flying everywhere. That's the argument against Carrier, right,
is that the Australopith face would actually be better suited
for combat. Yeah. And the idea here too is that
that post auster epath we became we we still love
to punch each other in the face, clearly, but it
(24:56):
becomes less of an evolutionary driving force. Yeah. I loved
how the methodology of this research went about. So these
two guys looked at emergency room statistics from Western societies
and they found that all of the fights between quote
untrained combatants. I wonder how they got that information from
(25:16):
the emergency room files. Uh, most frequently resulted in injuries
to the face, which you know, like we're talking earlier,
we usually go for the face, right, So the jaw,
the cheek, bones, the nose, and in particular the bones
around our eyes are the areas that they're looking at here.
These are the areas that they're saying, why didn't our
bones evolve to be sturdier at these stress points like
(25:38):
early humans? Yeah? Absolutely so. This study in particular has
one major critic. I'm sure there's lots of anthropologists out there,
but the one that I found that was cited that
most was a guy named Owen Lovejoy, who at the
time worked at a Kent State university. He's a he's
a lover, not a fighter. Didn't even apply exactly, so
(25:59):
he's as uh. The hypothesis behind Carrier's research is what
he calls adaptation ism, and he says, essentially, what he's
doing here is assigning evolutionary purpose to a particular trait
when no such relationship actually exists. So, okay, we've got
a little bit of an academic fight here. We see
this all the time, people trying to you know, stand
their ground, make their mark, point their flag. I love
(26:22):
Joy says that the shape of our faces are what
I guess this is a term that's used in this
kind of biological evolution study a spandrel, and that means
that they evolved as a byproduct of other traits. So
for example, brain size or the muscles and bones that
are in our jaws that are needed for chewing. Uh,
(26:44):
these are why our faces are shaped the way that
they are. Not the punching thing. Yeah, I mean this
is the one of the problems you get into when
you start pulling apart these definitely different evolutionary theories. Is
there are just so many factors that are involved the
face punching sure, but yeah, also the ability to to
crunch and grind up your food. Uh, this this swelling
(27:07):
size of the human brain, etcetera. He also says this
goes back to our earlier sort of scene that we
were setting, where like the human female would be, the
early human female would choose for mates. He said that
early human females actually did not prize aggression in their mates. Uh.
They and subsequently they chose partners that had smaller canine teeth.
(27:30):
So that was a thing because you know, I think
that these early human ancestors were biting as well as
slapping and punching. Well, that's clearly an ingrained right instinct, right. Uh.
And so subsequently, the smaller canines lead to males that
cooperated with one another more and this led to the
(27:50):
success of the human species, or one of the things
that led to success. So he's arguing completely against the
whole fist face thing. Okay, Now, I always think to
cut off fish when when discussions like this come up,
and and I'm I'm not making a direct comparison and
cuttle fish and humans because obviously the very alien creatures
compared to one another, they're totally different environments. But when
(28:11):
the couple fish, you see the survival of both the
robust fighter male and the sneaky, smaller male who even
pretends to be a female in order to to mate.
And uh, it always reminds me that, you know, when
you're looking at a complex mating relationship with the creature,
there there is the potential for more than one model
(28:33):
that's effective. Yeah. I mean, I think that this gets
back to what we're you know, talking about from the
very beginning of Carrier's research here, that I think that
it's more than just one thing. Right. You can't just
say like, oh, we just evolved because of fists or
we just evolved because of manual dexterity. There's so many
factors that are going on there, right, And yeah, it
(28:54):
works really well to get published in an academic journal
if you have some kind of amazing insight with research
to back it up that says, well, hey, look at
this one thing that we haven't thought about yet. But
that doesn't mean that it's exclusive right now. Of course,
Carrier again is devoted to this research, and the latest
study is pretty pretty incredible. Whether you agree with him
(29:17):
or not, this is just yeah, I mean, this is
this is why we wanted to do this. This is crazy. Yeah,
I've been blogging about his work for for years, but
this is the one where they came around and actual
said this on our Facebook site. The the actual study,
I want to say, like the week it came out,
and then immediately after you were like, oh, we've got
to do a video on this. So in this latest study,
(29:39):
this is a two fifteen published in Journal of Experimental Biology,
he attempts to level some more purely experimental data at
the theory. A theory you know again, continues to generate
some controversy and and needs some proving out, so what
do you do? Well, care and his team collected cadaver
arms from nine different individuals. They ended up being able
(30:01):
to actually use eight, so they have a bunch of
dead human arms. Okay, So so I'm already like this
is you had me at hello? Like like, so I
actually went and tried to access the article itself, not
the press releases surrounding it, and unfortunately it's behind a
paid firewall, so I was not able to read the
(30:24):
article itself. So if you are David Carrier, or you
know David Carrier, or you helped on this research, what
I want to know is where do you get eight
cadaver arms? Like where do you just go and say
I need eight human arms? And they go, well why?
And I well, there's actually an interesting chapter in Mary
roaches um stuff. The deal deals just not only for
(30:48):
medical purposes, but even like like purely medical purpose purposes
or research purposes, but also for just like cosmetic surgery trains. Sure, yeah,
I mean obviously like people donate their bodies to science
and such, but how what I'm fascinated with is that process.
I mean, this is a great article article, the research
is interesting, but like you start off, and you say,
(31:11):
all right, to pull this off, I need eight human arms,
and I need them severed from their bodies. There's got
to be a place you go and fill out that paperwork.
I want to know where that is. What the paperwork
looks like? This is we've we've got to find out
and do it. Well. It does write the question did
they get them on once? So they have to wait
for the movie? Yeah? Are these specific? Like? Like I
(31:33):
wonder if if he was looking for specific body types
to write, like, we know that they're their mail arms,
but like was one a lifter and the other one
was like more built like me and scrawny. You know, well,
we have his email address, we can we can just
shoot the carrier and I want to find out. Yeah, um,
so he got the arms eight eight to nine arms, right,
(31:55):
But that's that's not quite enough. You can't just start
slinging these around like they're dead fish and a slaps battle, right,
So what you have to do is dissect them to
expose the muscles, essentially flaying these arms and then attaching
fishing line to all the tendons so that you're essentially
making a corpse arm puppet. So you can you can
make that open hand slap. You can pull another some
more strings and make a very like rough unbuttressed fist,
(32:19):
which is kind of like imagine the weakest punch possible,
and that's what you have. And then the buttress fist,
the sweet spot that we've been discussing the core here
to to carryers research does all of that, and then
you still need a way to drive that puppy home,
So enter the pendulum. This pendulum device. They load the
arms into this pendulum like apparatus. And there's a wonderful
(32:41):
schematic for this uh in the paper. Maybe we'll end
up using that as the as the art for this episode.
At the very least, I'll link out to it so
you can see it. They have that. We don't have
a picture of it, but you have some wonderful drawings
of what it would look like. And use this pendulum
to then launch that does mbie arm straight into a
(33:02):
padded forth detecting dumb back. That's the best part too,
that it's a dumb balance, like, like, I get it.
Because they wanted to detect the force, they had to
use the technology and everything, but it's just like these
poor arms are just and and the other thing too,
Like again, you know, if if you do this kind
of research, please let us know. But how do you
keep a cadaver arm from rotting? Because I reading the research,
(33:28):
it said that it took a week of study for
each arm. So how do you keep this arm that
you've just flayed and you have hooked up to this
pendulum thing from stinking the joint up and falling apart? Well,
I mean they had problems with one of the arms. Yeah,
that's right because like arthritis. Yeah, I believe it was
too Yeah, that you weren't able to actually manipulate it properly. Uh.
(33:52):
One other thing that I would add to is that
so from the other research that mentioned in particular at
punching has a lot to do not just with our fists,
but also with our brains, and that it's a full
body action, right that I need the whole body to
be able to throw the force and to you know,
(34:12):
execute the move precisely right, So it's not a perfect
recreation exactly like I see where he was going with this,
But I can imagine that their results would be lower
than they would be if you which you know, you
would never get the approval to do this from the university.
But if you had people just punching dumbbells, right, because
he was specifically interested here is like how much protection
(34:34):
is the fist versus the slap or the unbuttress fist.
How much protection is there for the metacarpal bones and
the underlying tissue. And he they found him and his
team did find that a clinched, fully buttressed fist did
provide significant protection for the metacarpal bones. So his findings
suggested that fully buttress fist can safely strike with fifty
(34:55):
more force than an unbuttressed fist and more for been
an open handed slap. So and again that's safely without
damaging things. That's how much more punching. How much more
impact power you have with the with the buttressed fist. Yeah,
and again method methodologically, the way that they did this
was each arm, like I said, took a week. They
(35:17):
they tested the buttressed fist, then the unbuttressed fist, then
the open palm slap. So that's where they got these
figures from. So remember the next time that you get
into a fight, listeners, remember the buttressed fist because it's
going to you know, help you out. Yeah, yeah, if
if if you have anything, look second to think should
I should I? Should I curl it up into the
(35:38):
fist or should I slap Exactly? Yeah, and not only
will it do more damage, but it will also protect
your fingers so that you can type of your keyboard
the next day. Yeah, and keep that stat you role
players out there, if scenario where you get to use that,
throw that info at your d M because you love
it when the players bring a real science, say hey,
(36:00):
I should actually get a little boost on this attack,
and here's the science to prove it. So as we're
thinking about all this, I do want to throw out
a great quote from Carrier in the most recent two
thousand fifteen study that that that gets to some of
the more underlying kind of philosophical aspects of this research.
He says, our research is about peace. We seek to explore, understand,
(36:22):
and confront human kinds violent and aggressive tendencies. Peace begins
with ourselves and is ultimately achieved through discipline, self analysis,
and an understanding of where we've come from as a species.
Through our through our research, we hope to look ourselves
in the mirror and begin the difficult work of changing
ourselves for the better. As an alternative, We suggest that
(36:42):
the hand proportions that allow the formation of a fist
may tell us something important about our evolutionary history and
who we are as a species. If our anatomy is
adapted for fighting, we need to be aware we always
may be haunted by basic emotions and reflective behaviors that
often don't make stance and are very dangerous in the
modern world. So this is essentially like what we're talking
(37:04):
about at the beginning that I think that this is
that no pun intended. The meat of his research is
that he's looking for evidence to show why human behavior
now is sort of haunted by the past. Yeah, so
we end up in this situation, Yeah, where an individual
who is not trained in martial arts will curl up
(37:25):
a fist and throw a punch. Why. To what extent
is that watching Jungle Book as a kid, To what
extent is that something that's just ingrained in a ship.
That's the part I was wondering about, is the ingrained thing,
Because I've been around a lot of babies lately. A
lot of my friends have had kids, and they've well,
that's the thing that that kind of instinctively do, is
like they don't even uh consciously do it, but they
(37:47):
form a fist and then just kind of wail that
arm out there, and you occasionally get clocked in the face. Uh.
And I don't know if that's just you know, inherent
genetic thing that they're just get used to their dexterity
that way, or or what you know. I have to admit,
even though I've never taken a punch to the face
(38:08):
from an adult, I have taken a number of really
jaws shattering We're not josh shattering, but certainly jaw rocking
impacts from saying a toddler's head oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
They throw a lot of fourth around, and they do
so indiscriminately. Like hundreds of years from now, hundreds thousand,
millions of years from now, podcasters are going to be
(38:29):
looking back at how our faces evolved to deal all
these toddlers that are beating the hell out of us. Yeah,
all these head like head butt upper cuts, and then
I don't know how many times have been poked in
the eye at this point. It's crazy, half of them
by my wife from living in the same house, whether
or like It'll be like fumbling around in the morning
and then I end up taking up finger in the eye.
(38:51):
So even when we're not fighting each other, Uh, it's
it's it's humans. We we can't help but damnage each
other's faces exactly. Yeah, it's it's our cur and our gift,
all right. So there you have it, a little look
into the work of David Carrier and this uh fist
punch theory of evolution. Be sure to check out the
landing page for this episode because we'll have links out
(39:12):
to related content. It's some blog content I've done in
the past that now video as well as where you
can find the actual studies. Yeah, and of course you're
gonna be able to find this episode if you're listening
to it already, you've probably downloaded it from our RSS feed.
But go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
You'll find that we have all kinds of related links.
But also there's blog posts there, videos there, including our
(39:34):
Monster Science series, which is just wrapping up it's third season. Uh.
And of course follow us on social media because we
not only post out all the stuff that we're working on,
but we also curate a lot of really cool and
weird science that's getting published around the web. Let us
help you survive the holiday. That's what it's all about, exactly.
(39:54):
So we're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on tumbler.
All those sites were Blow the Mind and don't forget
that we're periscoping every Friday at noon again from the
Twitter handle below the Mind. And Hey, you want to
send us some old fashioned email, you have a you
have some martial arts experience you want to throw down
if you want to share some some firsthand accounts of
(40:15):
punch for some kinetic strikes and all this, and do
so let us know at blow the Mind at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com
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