West Africans - the place from where America's slaves originated - are a very large people, with large muscle mass. Generally, from opinions I've garnered on forums, they seem to view white people as being smaller than themselves, with larger ears.
Western africans are definately the muscular africans, but they're not that big, white people can be a lot bigger.
Not just fat americans either, the natural state of scandinavian men is huge and muscular, not as cut as black people because they're from a colder environment where storing fat is beneficial, but way bigger and stronger.
In africa men aren't that big, there are bigger people in their natural state like maoris and other pacific islanders, and like I said many europeans.
African americans are comparable to these people in power and then often faster, or a better way of looking at it would be bigger faster people are more consistently produced by the african american linneage.
West africans are smaller and weaker on average than maoris and lithuanians. Notice Kmguru can reference a middleweight boxer from Ugada, not a heavyweight.
There are some very tall africans in places like sudan, but they're very skinny, and then ofcourse you'll get very small africans from places like kenya who can run forever.
All of these things can be traced back to a specialisation of tribes in the area or their sexual selection pressures.
The men in a certain tribe might need to do pogo dancing and the women choose the ones who are reaching the greatest heights, so tall springy ectomorphs who can jump are favoured. In some other tribes jumping over a cow is necessarry for a young man to become a proper man and marry;
Then you get hunting tribes from kenya and ethiopia which hunt ungulates like the oryx by running them into exhaustion, unsurprisingly kenya and ethiopia dominate long distance running because they've evolved as long distance running predators.
West africans are quite combative and are largely shaped by conflict, so compared to other africans they are strong and fast, and yes this was tapped into in the selection of slave owners, but it was exagerrated, as traits very easily can be with selective breeding.
I think selective breeding could obviously have been used to increase certain physical characteristics. But the genetic potential was already there.
I kind of agree, but it's not like shaq could have popped up in west africa, no amount of food could have turned a west african baby into shaq or the oaf from the green mile.
Those are big slave boys, custom made to work like oxen.
Selective breeding definately contributed to making them the way they are, and cross breeding with europeans probably helped as well.
African americans have more potential in this regard than africans, the potential has been increased.
