If the Olympic Games teach us one thing every two years, it’s that even at the pinnacle of athletic achievement, human bodies are imperfect sporting machines.

They’re inefficient. They’re awkward. They break down. There’s only so far a swimmer’s shoulder will allow them to reach, only so high a gymnast’s leg muscles will help them leap.

Evolution carved out homo sapiens for survival: to be hunters and gatherers, parents and omnivores, complex thinkers and users of tools. It was not about winning the 50-meter butterfly. So as the finest physical specimens on earth prepare to do their best with the bodies they have, The Wall Street Journal wondered: What if 60,000 years of human evolution had gone another way?

If survival instead depended on being able to perform a tidy clean-and-jerk or execute a pommel horse dismount, humans would be built differently. We asked evolutionary and biomechanical experts to figure out which traits our Olympics-optimized humanoids would need to sweep every gold medal.