Today I Learned (TIL)

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TIL that it may be faster for humans to run on all fours. (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The fastest human on the planet might be a quadrupedal runner at the 2048 Olympics, which may be achieved by shifting up to the rotary gallop and taking longer strides with wide sagittal trunk motion. More generally, investigation of quadrupedal running will not only result in the development of new techniques that allow biomechanists to study locomotion in natural settings but will also reveal the underlying principles of how these runners accomplish their astonishing performances.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

The study covers an awful lot more than that. Even the posted excerpt discusses gait analysis and mechanics. Yes it's a projection, but it's hardly unfounded.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

We plotted the historical world records for bipedal and quadrupedal 100-m sprint times according to competition year. These historical records were plotted using several curve-fitting procedures. We found that the projected speeds intersected in 2048, when for the first time, the winning quadrupedal 100-m sprint time could be lower, at 9.276 s, than the winning bipedal time of 9.383 s.

Video analysis revealed that in quadrupedal running, humans employed a transverse gallop with a small angular excursion.

These results suggest that in the future, the fastest human on the planet might be a quadrupedal runner at the 2048 Olympics.

I stand by my analysis. Statement #1 is fine, if a little bit wierd. Statement #2 doesn't excuse or ameliorate the total cuckoo pants nonsense of statement #3, though.

If what's the in study is somehow different -- like if the first sentence is "obviously we're not saying that extrapolating these two particular curves forward suggests the exact year when sagittal trunk motion will manage to overcome millions of years of evolutionary re-optimization away from quadrupedal gait, that would be insane" -- then sure. But if that's true, they should have written the abstract different.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Fair enough!