Slinging.org Forum - Academics are at it again

_kava_ Senior Member Offline Sling making fanatic ;) Posts: 343 Australia Gender:	Academics are at it again Mar 25^th, 2009 at 6:10am Quote: http://pennstate.academia.edu/NathanCraig/Papers/85895/New-experimental-data-on-...
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wanderer Interfector Viris Spurii Offline Posts: 1360 Texas Gender:	Re: Academics are at it again Reply #1 - Mar 25^th, 2009 at 7:12am Well spotted . This is the same lady who Marc contacted a few months ago. He included a reply to his enquiry in his posting. I must go read the paper.....
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David Morningstar Slinging.org Moderator Offline Slinging Rocks! Posts: 3419 UK	Re: Academics are at it again Reply #2 - Mar 25^th, 2009 at 8:55am Those distances seem a bit limp. I'm good for 120 meters and I know I can develop my techniques to in further than that. Anyway, an academic already tested some Turkish shepherds and they were going beyond 200 meters.
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Re: Academics are at it again
Reply #3 - Mar 25^th, 2009 at 9:31am

A very worthwhile report - especially for those interested in the Andean or Peruvian slings and slingers. Seems the findings were that an experienced adult male will sling an average of 78 meters, with many casts beyond 100 and a max of 138 - if I understand the report correctly. But the report includes a list of other sources citing throws up to 500m. But what were they throwing - lead, rocks, clay? I also note that it is one thing to discuss the performance of modern Andean farm workers with irregular stones and unfamiliar slings and quite another to discuss trained, selected warriors, with personally selected slings and projectiles.

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wanderer

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Re: Academics are at it again
Reply #4 - Mar 25^th, 2009 at 10:29am

Frustratingly for me they do not mention the weight of the rocks. I was surprised how short some of these distances were, but the authors do remark on experience with the sling declining amongst the indigenous population. They also emphasise that skill/experience is critical in the use of the sling.

The tables of distances were those pretty much trawled from the entire 'academic' literature (no criticism of the authors intended!), and show the truly miserable variation in accounts which bedevils the 'official' literature of the sling.

I don't myself doubt the distances are on the low side of that which would have been expected when the sites were being defended, but it's generally prudent to err on the side of caution when making claims in the academic literature, and most of us know how unbelievable some of these distances can seem until we start to personally get to grips with the sling.

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Rockman

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Re: Academics are at it again
Reply #5 - Mar 25^th, 2009 at 12:08pm

Andean people usually sling rocks the size of fists. They even go the extra mile and carve them into suitable shapes.
People from Puno and other high land areas in Peru are usually small. Estimates between 1.50 to 165 meters tall
(About 5 feet to 5 feet 5 inches) So even if these guys train their slinging since childhood, I don´t think they´ll aproach distances from let´s say, people from the Netherlands who ussually stand past the 6 feet mark (longer arms generally equal longer throws, as well as a higher point of release)

The most efective way to meassure distances may be registering in both an standard measure of unit AND paces from that particular slinger (The statment that you can sling at 100 paces holds true no matter your height)

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wanderer

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Re: Academics are at it again
Reply #6 - Mar 25^th, 2009 at 1:37pm

Rockman wrote on Mar 25^th, 2009 at 12:08pm:

Andean people usually sling rocks the size of fists. They even go the extra mile and carve them into suitable shapes.
People from Puno and other high land areas in Peru are usually small. Estimates between 1.50 to 165 meters tall

Good point Rockman,

To be honest I'd forgotten the significant height difference, but given that their life is a lot more physically demanding than for us couch potatoes, wouldn't that compensate?

I had no idea that they went to the trouble of at least occasionally carving the rocks, that's good to know.

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Rockman

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Re: Academics are at it again
Reply #7 - Mar 25^th, 2009 at 2:12pm

People from the andes and other mountain terrains have special adaptations to suit their enviroment (all these are nesesary to live in an oxigen deprived area).

A typical andean man has a bigger chest cavity, bigger lungs and heart and more red cells on their blood than people living at sea level like me. So, while these guys are not terribly intimidating by their size alone, they can work for hours on farming and physically demanding jobs (and the ocational soccer match) in places were other people would be short of dying from a heart attack or exaustation.

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timann

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Re: Academics are at it again
Reply #8 - Mar 26^th, 2009 at 2:48pm

I find it interesting to read the report, among other things I think it is interesting to know that women is the ones who use slings most often today, and that some of the women intervjued had used slings in battle recenty, in land disputes!!!!!!!
Perhaps, then, their main goal is not to sling as far as possible, but to hit where they aim, within reasonable distance Wink

timann

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slingbadger

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Re: Academics are at it again
Reply #9 - Mar 27^th, 2009 at 1:58pm

The interesting thing is that the site for the Roman battle of Kalkriese was found by an amateur archeologist. What did he find? 3 lead glandes. What happened when he did the right thing by reporting it to the authorities? They took all the credit for the find and forced him out of the picture. After all, he's not one of "them." He has no paper to prove he knows what he knows.

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winkleried

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Re: Academics are at it again
Reply #10 - Mar 28^th, 2009 at 12:23pm

Coming down from the emission stacks I test,

There are no perfect academic papers, even Korfmann's article had some issues. Yeas the frst table is gleaned off the various academic papers out there that we are familiar with. If ya wanna see variation take a look at the sling ranges that were collected by this forum on the home page.

For those of us that are writing formal papers on the sling this paper gives some nice information to us. Particulalry the break down between ages and sexes of individual slingers. It also gives us a larger sample pool than the normal " We saw a few slingers and estimated thier casting distances" that seem to be the norm in other academic papers and historical manuscripts.

Anyway it's nice seeing Dr. Vegas paper posted to this forum and I hope we will see many more.

Send her an e-mail and let her know that as a recreational slinger you enjoyed her paper.

Marc Adkins

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winkleried

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Re: Academics are at it again
Reply #11 - Mar 28^th, 2009 at 12:36pm

Here is a copy of the e-mail I just sent Dr. Vega

Dr. Vega,

A Slinging.org member posted a link to your recent paper on the forum. As a amatuer recreational slinger I can say I throughly enjoyed your paper. It also brought back all sorts of memories about the various statistical tests you perfromed on your data. I am one of the rare slingers who understand what a Shapiro-Wilks W test is ( having had to do one for my thesis) Anova and t-tests. At least you had parametric data to deal with

Anyway I won't bore ya with the details of my public health thesis research.

I really liked how you broke the data down by rough age group and by sex. You have given the amatuer slinging research community some usefull data to use.

If you are intrested in swinging by the forum, here is the URL for the thread

http://slinging.org/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1237975848/0

Again thank your for your efforts
Marc Adkins

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