and
we really started with an observation a that humans are amazingly good products and we
can throw both with incredible accuracy and complexity
and people would notice for years that humans are amazing errors if you look at
any professional baseball player cricket all they can throw ninety two hundred miles an hour
many times over and over again single came but really i think the most amazing
thing is what normal class so if you look at any
a little league baseball game in any town american you could find a twelve or
thirteen year old kid a control sixty or seventy miles per hour and that to
me is really remarkable performance that ability comes in to better focus when you consider
what chimpanzees for our closest a living relatives can do in terms of performance and
user really athletic
the very strongly hundred how they can run essentially right up the tree but adult
males don't throw about twenty miles row
which is about thirty as fast as the not twelve or thirteen why is it
and how is the humans are so good when to that occur most of occur
sometime during a revolution that we can control
and probably arguably most important why
what we started to look at was the mechanics of how someone throws an object
held really remarkable thing that humans do is the store energy in their shoulders i
and it sort of good analogy for how that storage occurs a slingshot so with
a slingshot you full really heart on those elastic bands that store energy in that
slingshot you're doing the same thing to show
when you're actually throwing your rotating your shoulder back and here you're essentially stretching the
elastic bands that are your tendons and ligaments shoulder
i know store energy and then just like a slingshot when you release
perhaps slingshot that the last energies are then it allows you are real
accelerate an object such as rock for the same things happening we study that in
collegiate baseball we had in our lab and we stuck reflective markers on their arms
and their torso and we recorded how they move in three dimensions what shall see
is that as the army sort of rotated back
that's what we think the last gonna just being stored and then the arm is
rapidly rotating for a number of changes that have occurred during a revolutionary asked to
the shoulder in the or and the torso really make this elastic energy storage possible
and those changes occur at around two million years ago we see hunting behavior merge
around that time
the earliest evidence of hunting in terms of problems or what you're
i think that nature appear around two main years ago synchronous with this behavior we
think that throngs probably most important early on in terms of hunting behavior enabling our
ancestors to effectively
she'll be game and
get more calories that i
and why is that important wise what is wanting matter hunting probably matters because more
calories in your diet means you can build bigger bodies in figure three and have
more bits
the things that matter for evolution the interesting thing about the way that we threw
in the past versus the way to be thrown out
is that there are very few people to throw to hunt and most electable throw
two days during sports
a and the remarkable thing about sports is that you're throwing using this incredible ability
but you're doing it hundreds of times a couple of our snack
wasn't the case
a for how we would've probably
one revolving in use instant
so this remarkable ability which we were able to do doesn't really sync up with
a moderate usage
and what happens is the people actually injure their shoulders and into their l so
at the end of the david the ability that we have just or elastic energy
and shoulder makes us greater hours but it's also injuring is there a number of
things we're doing to follow this research up of one of the things we're doing
is actually looking at what really project house actually work so we know that throwing
probably evolved around two million years ago at least have to differ from what we
don't see evidence of projectiles in the archaeological record for about a million half years
so what was it that we were strong and how is if that were killing
a these animals one way that we can try to look at that is to
look at one capacity of things such as sharpened wooden spears right
what happens if you try to kill something they just the sharpened wooden stick i
can you do it how much energy is required can individuals actually through all these
things effectively and use them time and that's were looking at next