The further back in time you go, the greater the general badassery of the human populace. Seriously. In the previous century alone, we started out with people for whom electricity in the home was as new as the internet is for us -- and ended it with, among other things, eBaums World.

Scale it back another few hundred years and we're looking at pretty much every member of the human race, from the sixteen-year-old milkmaid working a butter churn to the stoic blacksmith hammering out another weapon of war, being 100% a-okay with fully-lucid surgery from the guy who doubles as the town barber and his set of WTF-drenched, unsanitized "tools."

Push it back just a few dozen of the hundred or so millenniums we as a species have lived through and you're looking at human beings who spend every waking minute playing nobody's favorite game, "kill or be killed" with pathogens, predators and Mother Nature itself.

Indeed, some formidable people have walked this earth. These are not them.