No doubt models were selected specifically for their muscular builds, but I find it very fascinating to see the sheer amount of fat free mass (some) people were able to sustain hundreds/thousands of years in the past.
It speaks a lot to just how effective frequent, high volume stress is at producing muscle mass even in cases where people were (most likely) eating very plain diets which a lot of people today would categorize as "insufficient".
EDIT: I mistakenly thought that 'selected specifically' and 'some' would be sufficiently adequate at emphasizing that I meant that these people existed; I'm not suggesting that the average Roman citizen was built like a young Arnold. My apologies.
Sugar is the big one and it being added to everything is the most likely source of the modern obesity epidemic.
Seriously. Just try to find packaged or restaurant foods without added sugar. You pretty much have to make all your own food. We got a bread machine to reduce sugar in our diet, among other things.
Of course sugar doesn’t magically make one fat. The problem is that the body doesn’t register how many calories it’s eaten with sugar (and “processed” food in general), and so you can’t rely on that natural mechanism to know how much to eat.
I think it’s crazy that the default outcome in our current modern environment if you follow your natural instincts is obesity. Clearly we need some regulation around how processed food must produce satiety and not just flavor, the current setup is not working.
It's not just that sugar doesn't satiate hunger, the body actually craves it. In pre-agricultural times, calories were scarce and sugar (glucose or fructose) was an easy way to get a lot of calories quickly. The palate evolved to favor things like honey, fruit, berries, and other sources of sugar.
The few thousand years since food has not been univerally scarce have not changed that.
> I think it’s crazy that the default outcome in our current modern environment if you follow your natural instincts is obesity. Clearly we need some regulation around how processed food must produce satiety and not just flavor, the current setup is not working.
I kind of agree, but people are irrationally attached to unhealthy, high caloric-density foods. If you tried to regulate away or even just tax ice cream, soda, and chips, people would riot in the streets. Regulating unhealthy food is extremely unpopular.
Regulation wouldn't fix the underlying problem anyway.
Plenty of food addicted persons get obese from eating gargantuan amounts of "normal" food.
When I used to be obese, my weakness was sushi rice. Getting my binge-eating "high" required only a high quantity of food. Hell, I would eat a lot of Nori if I were desperate enough.
Go to a Puerto Rican cookout in NYC and look at what the heavier persons are eating. They're not waiting until dessert time to start digging in. They're eating plate after plate of Arroz con Pollo.
>but people are irrationally attached to unhealthy
I'd disagree, we are rationally attracted to these things because the state of pretty much all animal life has been boom/bust cycles of food. That's why our bodies get fat in the first place. A reserve for when the lean times come.
Humans, bees, and ants are some of the few creatures that break this cycle well.
> I think it’s crazy that the default outcome in our current modern environment if you follow your natural instincts is obesity.
Is it a matter of natural instinct(s)? I don't think so.
Using food as a drug to cope with your life is not natural. It's understandable given our "modern environment", but it's certainly not a natural outcome.
Food addiction is the #1 cause of obesity. HFCS and other food additives come in a distant second if we're assigning blame.
(To make matters worse, once obesity sets in, Leptin & friends take over to add a physiological addiction on to the psychological one!)
A teaspoon of sugar (or about 5 grams) is about 20 calories. A 12 oz can of most soft drinks have about 40 grams. They clock about 140 calories. All from sugar.
You're going to hit 2000 calories way before you feel like you've eaten anything significant if you get all of your calories from sugar.
>The obesity epidemic is because people eat too much. Calories are stupid cheap.
Not really... It's kinda like saying "My cars engine blows up when I put nitromethane in the gas tank", well, we aren't designed to run on nitromethane. And yea, you could probably run your car on that fuel if you highly restricted the injectors to drastically reduce the incoming fuel.
If you just eat sugar every day it seems pretty likely in 40 years you'd get ass cancer and die. The human body requires fiber for intestinal health. Fiber is something that has been removed in mass in our diets and turned back into animal feed. Fiber also gives you a feeling of fullness and helps prevent over consumption.
Definitely this. I spent a few weeks trying to eat 'no added sugar or sweetener or high fructose corn syrup' and it was incredibly difficult, tons of things I would've assumed didn't have sugar (bread, salad dressing, condiments like ketchup, soup, peanut butter, etc). You can find brands or alternatives for all of these things but it makes your grocery shopping take at least twice as long to examine the labels of 10 different bread loaves and you usually have to pay more for the fancier or organic version for one that doesn't have additives.
Calcium restricts faecal fat loss, so the water of todays mains potable water supplies which is typically hard water not only uses limescale to plug holes in the pipework but also contributes to todays obesity levels.
Manganese isnt as widespread in todays diet, and yet high fat diets deplete the body of Mn and its useful for oxidising dopamine, preventing outbursts in people who might be considered autistic or just an A-hole.
In fact Manganese carbonate rivals Mn Super Oxide Dismutase (MnSOD) at reducing free radicals, Manganese Carbonate could be considered double bubble, in that the Mn contributes to MnSOD but can equally reduce Oxygen Reactive Species in its own right which makes it arguably the perfect Mn supplement if it wasnt classed as not fit for human consumption.
Our exposure to manganese will be greatest bathing/surfing in coastal waters or eating fish from coastal waters which is also part of the Mediterranean diet.
It also involved picking wild plants and herbs which are far higher in things like vitamin K1 than what you would find in the supermarkets, which helped the skeleton form properly, but also aided the maintenance of the body through its interactions with the carboxylation processes and we all produce alot of carbon dioxide.
Plants will on average preferentially absorb more manganese than other metals like copper, zinc or lead when grown in "contaminated" soil, but how many people eat enough vegetables, let along vegetables with contaminants like metals?
Manganese isnt used in livestock feed because it produces lean healthy livestock, thats not conducive to the economics of farming, thats why TV chefs are used to push meat cuts that are marbleised with fat.
Milk is now typically homogenised because it hides the fat removal at Xmas time when used for creams, but it produces a greatly enhanced taste as the fat is consistent throughout the drink straight from the bottle or as a milkshake.
Malnutrition and obesity is good for the economy and helps the ego's of politicians who just throw money around at their pet projects or ideologies, whilst trade organisations exist to protect their members own income, which isnt always conducive to great human health.
When your default state is starvation, staying lean is easy.
If you look at statistical measures of height, the average height of most human beings continued to increase until the mid 1980s whereupon it plateaued in many countries.
What this tells you is that vast majority of people, even in the "First World" were nutritionally deprived until the mid 1980s. Which, gee, would you look at that, is considered to be the start of the "obesity epidemic".
As such, the answer to the obesity epidemic is obvious: simply starve people again.
I just got back from Rome and took multiple tours with very informative guides. The one guide said they were designed to look like the Gods. I don't think many people had this physique. We have all muscles, it wouldn't of been that hard for a sculptor to look at their own muscles and simply make them bigger as such I don't think it's any indication that ancient Romans were jacked per se.
Historians consistently underestimate the strength and sheer "badass-itude" of premodern peoples. It's a reminder that historical volk are alien creatures, with a bewitching external similarity that belies their internal lives, outlook, and abilities. The example fresh in my mind was the old "official" military historian estimate for the upper bounds of the English longbow draw weight, which was ballparked in the hundred-something range maximum. Archeology later showed that the actual English bows had draw weights well over two hundred pounds, more than twice the earlier maximum possible estimate. We've seen similar things with muscle-powered weapons in the ancient world. Historians earlier posited that bladed weapons would have been largely ineffective against Parthian armor, then archeology shows how some ungodly Roman beast shoved his gladius through 4mm of bronze/iron composite.
What's the reason for the consistent overestimation? In my opinion, we operate from the standpoint of an extremely long-lived and risk-averse civilization. Therefore, changing our bodies - through training, scarring, and other means - is largely seen as neurotic if it damages overall health. This would have been an alien outlook to many premodern peoples - permanently impinging the usage of one's thumbs would have been a small cost for being a solider able to swing through plate, or fire an arrow with killing power at three hundred yards. We need to remember that what we see as important is not always what the human species has seen as important. Indeed, you can see this today, even among different polities of the same country.
I agree and I think of it another way. The day to day life and focus of many modern day olympians / world champions was probably close to the norm for many of the fighter-class.
People training day in day out to hone their skills and fitness, putting their lives on the line for glory and survival.
Sure we eat better and train smarter but most of us no longer dedicate ourselves to a singular purpose that involves our bodies so the realities of that are so foreign to us that the notion of marching a marathon carrying 40kg is seen as superhuman rather than the bare minimum.
People, myself included, also seem to underestimate the force animals can apply to things. Frustrating, as when it is corrected, it often times leads to silly "imagine if we fully exerted ourselves" discussions.
> It speaks a lot to just how effective frequent, high volume stress is at producing muscle mass even in cases where people were (most likely) eating very plain diets which a lot of people today would categorize as "insufficient".
> EDIT: I mistakenly thought that 'selected specifically' and 'some' would be sufficiently adequate at emphasizing that I meant that these people existed; I'm not suggesting that the average Roman citizen was built like a young Arnold. My apologies.
Spot the discrepancy. “Most likely” versus “some”.
Most people subsisting on peasant diets doesn’t mean that there were not some people that had better diets.
I'm not a native speaker and am finding it hard with how many qualifiers one needs to put into English sentences as to avoid looking like one is making sweeping absolute statements. Is this also necessary for verbal communication?
To fully pad out what I meant with that sentence:
... where I assume that most people doing that type of heavy physical labor were, on average, quite likely to have had very plain diets when compared to what a lot of laymen in modern days would deem/assume sufficient for developing such a physique in modern times.
> I'm not a native speaker and am finding it hard with how many qualifiers one needs to put into English sentences as to avoid looking like one is making sweeping absolute statements. Is this also necessary for verbal communication?
I would recommend you don’t extrapolate too much from HN conversation. The prevalence of skimming combined with detail fixation here means that often times you are receiving feedback from the most argumentative people who can also respond more quickly because they didn’t fully consider your position.
Notice how the commenter here skillfully talks in general instead of asserting that the original replier did anything in particular. This is how to write a good HN comment.
I believe your qualifier "on average" is fine for communicating you are not making sweeping generalizations. I prefer the phrasing of
<who/subject>
<did/verb>
<qualifiers/adverbs>
<what/object acted upon>
and then adding in context: when/where/why/how.
I would have written it this way. I believe on average our ancestors had more muscular physiques than us, despite having what laymen today would deem a poor diet lacking sufficient nutrition due to the heavy physical labor required in the past.
> I'm not a native speaker and am finding it hard with how many qualifiers one needs to put into English sentences as to avoid looking like one is making sweeping absolute statements. Is this also necessary for verbal communication?
My comment had exactly nothing to do with your supposed lack of qualifiers. No need to bring out the ESL qualifiers.
> I'm not a native speaker and am finding it hard with how many qualifiers one needs to put into English sentences as to avoid looking like one is making sweeping absolute statements.
Web-forum-English isn't like normal English. Well-written books or articles in real publications usually aren't written with the goal of heading off unreasonably-hostile readings or very-careless readings—in normal writing, that just means a few readers misunderstand something due entirely to their own mistakes or prejudices and that's the end of it, while on Web forums it can spawn entire useless threads and flamewars.
Clarity and some amount of contextually-appropriate precision are still important in normal English writing—it's not the case that every misreading is necessarily the reader's fault—but this kind of trying-to-craft-a-wish-for-a-malicious-genie crap isn't the norm.
Likelihood based on what? Likelihood of some distant past is easier to talk about when you talk about the average and is harder to talk about when you talk about some specialist, like a model.
Most likely it was difficult for Michaelangelo to get permission to paint female figures. What were the cultural attitudes towards that type of thing at the time? Renaissance probably had plenty of prudishness about that sort of thing, with women probably not considered proper to show much skin at all.
> Pockets of Michelangelo’s artwork show that not all of his women possessed overt male qualities. He drew a female nude in preparation for his painting of the Entombment, and one need look no further than his sculpture of the Pietà to be persuaded that he could depict a woman with feminine attributes very convincingly. Instead of being for the sake of propriety or tradition, Michelangelo likely used male models and created masculine depictions intentionally.
They commonly hired prostitutes as models, it was a somewhat socially marginal occupation (which is funny because these people often were at one degree of separation from kings and popes, but it worked like that).
> Michelangelo likely used male models and created masculine depictions intentionally.
Hold up, they're saying that "Michelangelo, perhaps the greatest artist the world has produced" (as he's described in the blurb for a linked article) was drawing his figures like this intentionally? :P
I'm pretty sure (vicariously) appreciating people who take amazing care of their bodies (often in excess of what we do with our own bodies) doesn't make you gay. Ask any gym rat the control question what kind of bodies they would depict if they were an artist, or even like to see depicted in art, and they will certainly choose jacked over flabby (or "normal") any and every day of the week.
> That said, da Vinci undertook his own dissections; they led him to make the pioneering discovery that the heart has four chambers.
Huh, for some reason I assumed this knowledge would have been older. Like would the romans not have known this? We know they did autopsies. And I mean, various animal hearts have been used in cooking across the world.
But wikipedia first cites it to Turkish researchers in the 1200s and spreading to the west in 1400, which is way later I would have expected this kind of visually observable biology knowledge to come from.
In some instances, there was this "reverse" chauvinism going on. The shape of the human liver was thought to be different for the longest time, I think, because Galen had been dissecting pigs.
So while I wouldn't rule out chauvinism entirely, it's anything but a given.
> Galen, like other physicians of his time, knew that the heart had four cavities, but like Erasistratus, he regarded only the ventricles as forming the heart proper and the atria as being a sort of enlargement or bulge of the vessels leading into the ventricles. He points out the presence of four openings in the ventricles, two in each cavity: one to introduce the blood, the other to expel it. The difference between the thick structure of the left ventricle in contrast to the thin of the right impresses him. At the base of the left ventricle, he writes, there is a large hole that comprises three sigmoid membranes and opens into the great artery (aorta), giving rise to all the arteries. He believed wrongly that there was communication between the right and left ventricles because of perforations in the septum, a notion that misled the medical community for centuries
> Erasistratus was the first physician who recognized the heart’s activity as a “pump” ... [Ctesibius's] pump consists of two identical cylinders, just like the two heart chambers ... Another great innovation of Erasistratus, was the meticulous description of all four heart valves.
It sounds like they were on a good track of research, then progress pretty much stalled until the Turks you mention?
It's also quite possible this is knowledge lost and reacquired. Maybe the Romans did know it, but we lost records of them knowing it. And then we subsequently lost the knowledge itself.
It might have had to be rediscovered in the West. I remember learning that DaVinci’s autopsies were controversial because they were considered desecrations of someone’s body and therefore disgusting and unholy.
As a fun side note regarding rigorous anatomical study:
It was always very clear to me from my basic anatomical knowledge that the "delts" are obviously divided in three section: anterior, middle and posterior.
Very easy to spot on muscular bodies with lower body fat or verifiable through palpation.
So understandably I was pretty shocked to find out that the deltoid actually has 7 (!) distinct segments ... like with all the anatomical details: tendons, insertions and function; not some weird artifact of dissecting the muscles, but real anatomic structures[0].
And thanks to super-physiological levels of steroids and testosterone it is even visually verifiable on extremely low-fat bodybuilders[1], once you know what to search for.
The "Doni Tondo" example in the article isn't a great one imho - the woman is muscular, but not massively built like the other examples in the article. I've seen ladies build biceps like that just carrying a baby around all day.
I know that it's inaccurate to project back modern conceptions of sexuality, but it's a useful lens; being a queer woman, and knowing queer men, Michelangelo sounds queer. It's hard to put my finger on anything specific, but there's definitely a difference between the way straight women describe men's bodies and the way queer men do, and vice versa. Michelangelo's description of the male form sounds like a gay guy.
Why did Michelangelo prefer male models? Because he thought they were hot. (I'm far from an expert in art history, and from a quick google this seems to be a common theory)
It seems I misinterpreted some of the quotes in the article as being translations of things he said. Definitely a miss on my part.
Mistake aside, his art also has that same feel I described above. His women are posed more like a man poses for men, and their breasts look like someone unfamiliar with them (and/or unappreciative of them). The article mentions that and links to this other article about that in particular: https://renresearch.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/men-with-breast...
I don’t think it’s a question of sexuality. Seeing the fully engaged arms and shoulders of a top female or male athlete doing a world class bouldering problem is just striking. (EX: https://www.blurmediaphotography.com/top-photos-ifsc-climbin...) If you look at the tendons etc in Michelangelo’s drawings these aren’t people simply normal people holding a pose but look more like bodybuilders flexing.
Renaissance Italy would have been filled with people who did significant physical labor constantly and had reasonably healthy diets. That’s not going to make everyone look like top athletes, but it’s just a very different starting point for someone to consider the human form and it’s ideal state. Not that everyone would come to the same conclusions, just that such context is relevant beyond direct cultural norms.
67 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadIt speaks a lot to just how effective frequent, high volume stress is at producing muscle mass even in cases where people were (most likely) eating very plain diets which a lot of people today would categorize as "insufficient".
EDIT: I mistakenly thought that 'selected specifically' and 'some' would be sufficiently adequate at emphasizing that I meant that these people existed; I'm not suggesting that the average Roman citizen was built like a young Arnold. My apologies.
- you live in the mediterranean area (plenty of olive oil and sea food),
- red meat is not a daily staple,
- fruit is not available all year,
- fasting is done as part of religious practice, and
- sugar is only rarely added to meals,
it's way easier to stay lean.
Seriously. Just try to find packaged or restaurant foods without added sugar. You pretty much have to make all your own food. We got a bread machine to reduce sugar in our diet, among other things.
You can eat nothing but sugar and still lose weight if you burn more than you eat (See McD and Twinkies experiment)
I think it’s crazy that the default outcome in our current modern environment if you follow your natural instincts is obesity. Clearly we need some regulation around how processed food must produce satiety and not just flavor, the current setup is not working.
The few thousand years since food has not been univerally scarce have not changed that.
I kind of agree, but people are irrationally attached to unhealthy, high caloric-density foods. If you tried to regulate away or even just tax ice cream, soda, and chips, people would riot in the streets. Regulating unhealthy food is extremely unpopular.
Plenty of food addicted persons get obese from eating gargantuan amounts of "normal" food.
When I used to be obese, my weakness was sushi rice. Getting my binge-eating "high" required only a high quantity of food. Hell, I would eat a lot of Nori if I were desperate enough.
Go to a Puerto Rican cookout in NYC and look at what the heavier persons are eating. They're not waiting until dessert time to start digging in. They're eating plate after plate of Arroz con Pollo.
I'd disagree, we are rationally attracted to these things because the state of pretty much all animal life has been boom/bust cycles of food. That's why our bodies get fat in the first place. A reserve for when the lean times come.
Humans, bees, and ants are some of the few creatures that break this cycle well.
Is it a matter of natural instinct(s)? I don't think so.
Using food as a drug to cope with your life is not natural. It's understandable given our "modern environment", but it's certainly not a natural outcome.
Food addiction is the #1 cause of obesity. HFCS and other food additives come in a distant second if we're assigning blame.
(To make matters worse, once obesity sets in, Leptin & friends take over to add a physiological addiction on to the psychological one!)
A teaspoon of sugar (or about 5 grams) is about 20 calories. A 12 oz can of most soft drinks have about 40 grams. They clock about 140 calories. All from sugar.
You're going to hit 2000 calories way before you feel like you've eaten anything significant if you get all of your calories from sugar.
Not really... It's kinda like saying "My cars engine blows up when I put nitromethane in the gas tank", well, we aren't designed to run on nitromethane. And yea, you could probably run your car on that fuel if you highly restricted the injectors to drastically reduce the incoming fuel.
If you just eat sugar every day it seems pretty likely in 40 years you'd get ass cancer and die. The human body requires fiber for intestinal health. Fiber is something that has been removed in mass in our diets and turned back into animal feed. Fiber also gives you a feeling of fullness and helps prevent over consumption.
Manganese isnt as widespread in todays diet, and yet high fat diets deplete the body of Mn and its useful for oxidising dopamine, preventing outbursts in people who might be considered autistic or just an A-hole. In fact Manganese carbonate rivals Mn Super Oxide Dismutase (MnSOD) at reducing free radicals, Manganese Carbonate could be considered double bubble, in that the Mn contributes to MnSOD but can equally reduce Oxygen Reactive Species in its own right which makes it arguably the perfect Mn supplement if it wasnt classed as not fit for human consumption.
Our exposure to manganese will be greatest bathing/surfing in coastal waters or eating fish from coastal waters which is also part of the Mediterranean diet.
It also involved picking wild plants and herbs which are far higher in things like vitamin K1 than what you would find in the supermarkets, which helped the skeleton form properly, but also aided the maintenance of the body through its interactions with the carboxylation processes and we all produce alot of carbon dioxide.
Plants will on average preferentially absorb more manganese than other metals like copper, zinc or lead when grown in "contaminated" soil, but how many people eat enough vegetables, let along vegetables with contaminants like metals?
Manganese isnt used in livestock feed because it produces lean healthy livestock, thats not conducive to the economics of farming, thats why TV chefs are used to push meat cuts that are marbleised with fat.
Milk is now typically homogenised because it hides the fat removal at Xmas time when used for creams, but it produces a greatly enhanced taste as the fat is consistent throughout the drink straight from the bottle or as a milkshake.
Malnutrition and obesity is good for the economy and helps the ego's of politicians who just throw money around at their pet projects or ideologies, whilst trade organisations exist to protect their members own income, which isnt always conducive to great human health.
If you look at statistical measures of height, the average height of most human beings continued to increase until the mid 1980s whereupon it plateaued in many countries.
What this tells you is that vast majority of people, even in the "First World" were nutritionally deprived until the mid 1980s. Which, gee, would you look at that, is considered to be the start of the "obesity epidemic".
As such, the answer to the obesity epidemic is obvious: simply starve people again.
What's the reason for the consistent overestimation? In my opinion, we operate from the standpoint of an extremely long-lived and risk-averse civilization. Therefore, changing our bodies - through training, scarring, and other means - is largely seen as neurotic if it damages overall health. This would have been an alien outlook to many premodern peoples - permanently impinging the usage of one's thumbs would have been a small cost for being a solider able to swing through plate, or fire an arrow with killing power at three hundred yards. We need to remember that what we see as important is not always what the human species has seen as important. Indeed, you can see this today, even among different polities of the same country.
People training day in day out to hone their skills and fitness, putting their lives on the line for glory and survival.
Sure we eat better and train smarter but most of us no longer dedicate ourselves to a singular purpose that involves our bodies so the realities of that are so foreign to us that the notion of marching a marathon carrying 40kg is seen as superhuman rather than the bare minimum.
> EDIT: I mistakenly thought that 'selected specifically' and 'some' would be sufficiently adequate at emphasizing that I meant that these people existed; I'm not suggesting that the average Roman citizen was built like a young Arnold. My apologies.
Spot the discrepancy. “Most likely” versus “some”.
Most people subsisting on peasant diets doesn’t mean that there were not some people that had better diets.
I'm not a native speaker and am finding it hard with how many qualifiers one needs to put into English sentences as to avoid looking like one is making sweeping absolute statements. Is this also necessary for verbal communication?
To fully pad out what I meant with that sentence:
I would recommend you don’t extrapolate too much from HN conversation. The prevalence of skimming combined with detail fixation here means that often times you are receiving feedback from the most argumentative people who can also respond more quickly because they didn’t fully consider your position.
I would have written it this way. I believe on average our ancestors had more muscular physiques than us, despite having what laymen today would deem a poor diet lacking sufficient nutrition due to the heavy physical labor required in the past.
My comment had exactly nothing to do with your supposed lack of qualifiers. No need to bring out the ESL qualifiers.
Web-forum-English isn't like normal English. Well-written books or articles in real publications usually aren't written with the goal of heading off unreasonably-hostile readings or very-careless readings—in normal writing, that just means a few readers misunderstand something due entirely to their own mistakes or prejudices and that's the end of it, while on Web forums it can spawn entire useless threads and flamewars.
Clarity and some amount of contextually-appropriate precision are still important in normal English writing—it's not the case that every misreading is necessarily the reader's fault—but this kind of trying-to-craft-a-wish-for-a-malicious-genie crap isn't the norm.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_of_Alexandria
Hold up, they're saying that "Michelangelo, perhaps the greatest artist the world has produced" (as he's described in the blurb for a linked article) was drawing his figures like this intentionally? :P
Huh, for some reason I assumed this knowledge would have been older. Like would the romans not have known this? We know they did autopsies. And I mean, various animal hearts have been used in cooking across the world.
But wikipedia first cites it to Turkish researchers in the 1200s and spreading to the west in 1400, which is way later I would have expected this kind of visually observable biology knowledge to come from.
So while I wouldn't rule out chauvinism entirely, it's anything but a given.
> Galen, like other physicians of his time, knew that the heart had four cavities, but like Erasistratus, he regarded only the ventricles as forming the heart proper and the atria as being a sort of enlargement or bulge of the vessels leading into the ventricles. He points out the presence of four openings in the ventricles, two in each cavity: one to introduce the blood, the other to expel it. The difference between the thick structure of the left ventricle in contrast to the thin of the right impresses him. At the base of the left ventricle, he writes, there is a large hole that comprises three sigmoid membranes and opens into the great artery (aorta), giving rise to all the arteries. He believed wrongly that there was communication between the right and left ventricles because of perforations in the septum, a notion that misled the medical community for centuries
Looking up Erasistratus (200s BC), https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/ijae/article/downlo... says
> Erasistratus was the first physician who recognized the heart’s activity as a “pump” ... [Ctesibius's] pump consists of two identical cylinders, just like the two heart chambers ... Another great innovation of Erasistratus, was the meticulous description of all four heart valves.
It sounds like they were on a good track of research, then progress pretty much stalled until the Turks you mention?
It was always very clear to me from my basic anatomical knowledge that the "delts" are obviously divided in three section: anterior, middle and posterior.
Very easy to spot on muscular bodies with lower body fat or verifiable through palpation.
So understandably I was pretty shocked to find out that the deltoid actually has 7 (!) distinct segments ... like with all the anatomical details: tendons, insertions and function; not some weird artifact of dissecting the muscles, but real anatomic structures[0].
And thanks to super-physiological levels of steroids and testosterone it is even visually verifiable on extremely low-fat bodybuilders[1], once you know what to search for.
[0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3042752/
[1]https://www.strengthlog.com/lateral-delts-muscles-exercises-...
(specifically one which liked muscular male physiques)
> ... The Libyan Sibyl, for example, was created for the Sistine Chapel, a site of papal activity.
I've never heard it called that before.
Why did Michelangelo prefer male models? Because he thought they were hot. (I'm far from an expert in art history, and from a quick google this seems to be a common theory)
Mistake aside, his art also has that same feel I described above. His women are posed more like a man poses for men, and their breasts look like someone unfamiliar with them (and/or unappreciative of them). The article mentions that and links to this other article about that in particular: https://renresearch.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/men-with-breast...
Renaissance Italy would have been filled with people who did significant physical labor constantly and had reasonably healthy diets. That’s not going to make everyone look like top athletes, but it’s just a very different starting point for someone to consider the human form and it’s ideal state. Not that everyone would come to the same conclusions, just that such context is relevant beyond direct cultural norms.