Indigenous Ability

[The provided video will come into play in the second half of this essay. You’ll be prompted when to have a look.] Studying old school ways of hurt can go by many names: Combat Archeology, Combat Re-Creation, Historical Resurrection, but no matter what you want to call it, the goal and spirit are the same. We diggers in the past have beaucoup respect for old school tough, and if you’re anything like me, you’re more than a ‘Net-dabbler, or a mere copy-and-paster of what’s already been said by someone else. You drop money on the endeavor, you subscribe to numerous Historical Archive Societies, you keep your eye out for estate sales that might be pertinent to the facet of study. You test exhaustively via physical experimentation. You read anything and everything that is cogent, and you are even more deeply read in areas that seem tangential as often, like panning for gold, the dust downstream tells you there’s a good spot for a placer-mine somewhere upstream.  [See...

In my daily gig as old school combat archeologist I come across countless stories, tales, anecdotes and reportage claiming that “ The Old-Timers were tougher than ‘these kids today.’” The flip-side to that glorification of the past argument is that “these kids today” get the gift of standing on all of that accumulated old-school wisdom and the added bonus of attaching modern day bells and whistles to make today’s combat cadre tougher than the prior generations. So which story is true? Were the bad-asses of yore the tip of the top? Or…is it today’s crop of combatateers that prove the creamiest? This often leads to the old chestnut of a question “ Who would win between [insert past legend and legend in the making]?” There is simply no way to conduct such past and present comparisons with any sort of scientific rigor without aid of a time-machine. So, until we are provided with such a chronal-distortion device are we left without an answer to the “ Who ...