Today’s men are not only slow, they are weak, says McAllister, who has calculated the upper arm strength of La Ferrassie 2, a Neanderthal girl unearthed in a cave in France in 1909. His conclusion? ‘‘Any Neanderthal woman could have beaten Arnold Schwarzenegger in an arm wrestle’’. Modern Olympic archers would also be no match for Mongol bowmen in the 12th century who shot with higher accuracy over distances six times as great and from galloping horses. And even in the metrosexual stakes, David Beckham, with his primping and preening, pales beside the nomadic Wodaabe men of Niger. For hundreds of years they have competed for women in beauty contests in which they wear make-up, beaded costumes and ostrich-plume headdresses, fluttering and rolling their eyes and striking elegant poses to impress. Nor would many men today be as sympathetic to their wives during childbirth as the Huichol Indian fathers of Mexico who tied strings to their testicles so the mothers could pull on them during labour to share the pain. McAllister was a journalist and graphic artist before studying palaeoanthropology and archaeology at the University of New England and the University of Queensland. His scientific specialty is prehistoric tool use and what this reveals about the cognitive development of ancient people.

Learning about the extraordinary eyesight of a part-Aboriginal whaler, Tom Chaseland, sparked his interest in comparing the prowess of modern men against their ancestors. Chaseland astounded European sailors in the early 19th century with his ability to identify whales in the far distance and spot land from 50 kilometres away. ‘‘We tend to assume that in modern civilisation everything we do is better than how it has been done before,’’ McAllister says. It took 18 months to write the book but it is based on years of collecting a vast array of data about ancient customs. Men over the millennia have endured countless gruesome practices, including unanaesthetised open skull surgery, which appears to have been surprisingly common; initiation rites involving gloves full of biting ants and genital swabs with stinging nettles; as well as multiple varieties of penile mutilation, including a rather mild Japanese tradition of inserting pearl-like beads permanently into the foreskin. The horrors of the past overwhelm some of today’s events, from which the author makes some contentious conclusions. The Mongols were very successful terrorists, he says, killing 30 million to 60 million people in a 90-year history. ‘‘Without making light of the evil that modern Islamic jihadists have inflicted on the world, comparisons like these make it plain that Osama bin Laden wouldn’t have made noyan [captain] in any army of Genghis Khan.’’ But it was not just savagery, violence and machismo that ancient men excelled at. McAllister, whose next book will be about the mythology of Australia’s lost pygmy tribes, also dwells on the lifestyle of the Aka Pygmies of Western Congo. Dubbed the ‘‘best fathers in the world’’, the men spent most of their time raising the children, going so far as to offer their nipples for the babies to suck on. In an evolutionary sense, life for the males of our species has mainly been about surviving long enough to have sex and pass on their genes, and the Mongols, again, were the world champions. DNA studies show that 16 million Eurasian men today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan and his close male relatives.

This drive also helps explain why some daredevils take extraordinary risks, such as train surfing. While research shows men who display bravery for altruistic reasons are attractive as heroes to women, the daredevils grossly overestimate their appeal to females. But by displaying their bravado to other men, which is usually the case in this kind of reckless behaviour, they may be indirectly increasing their chances of getting sex, by proving their right to associate with men who are more successful with women. Anecdotal reports of roadies who score with the female groupies who hang around rock stars tallies with this idea, McAllister says. Many men in the past, of course, simply took their women by force, and genetic studies of herpes suggest they did not have time for the niceties of oral sex. But when it came to understanding women, even the ancient Greeks, Indians and Chinese were aware of female ejaculation, something some sex researchers today still do not accept exists, he says. Men in the past may have been faster, stronger and more physically skilled, but they were not superhuman. Modern men are genetically much the same. If they really wanted to, they could emulate these feats with some lifelong gruelling effort. Aboriginal hunters of the Willandra Lakes region, for example, would have run tens of kilometres a day, chasing food, and Mongol archers trained from age two. Few men now get a chance to test their courage. ‘‘Everyday opportunities to face real peril have almost evaporated,’’ McAllister says.Many comparisons of past and present are obviously flawed. Would Japanese ninja really be better at finding bin Laden? How would they dodge bullets?

McAllister also ignores the many successes of modern society, including the rule of law and scientific inquiry. But in his own defence, he says his book is meant as ‘‘a prosecutor’s brief’’ against modern men, and one aim is to get people to think about how demographic factors, such as the large number of affluent people alive today, rather than some superior human intelligence, underpin modern achievement. Manthropology, published by Hachette Australia, was released this week.