If you’ve ever done a trek and had a porter lug much of your gear up steep mountain sides, then I’m sure you asked
yourself, How do these guys do it? I can hardly carry my knapsack, you tell yourself, and these guys are carrying the
weight of a small family on their backs. Well is it any surprise that Nepalese porters (or sherpas, which is actually
the name for a specific indigenous group in Nepal that became synonymous with porter) are
actually more efficient with
their expenditure of energy. It makes a lot of intuitive sense in a Darwinian way, of course, but scientist have now
shown it to be a fact…or at least a more solidly documented theory. Scientists discovered, for example, that a
typical Nepalese porter carries nearly his own weight as a load, but when doing so he burns less energy per
pound than a backpacker would need to shoulder about half the same weight. Fascinating, eh?