The Queens of Porting

The porters of Nepal are famous for trekking up and down steep mountain trails carrying loads that often exceed the porter's own body weight. How? In a basket supported by a strap across their foreheads, of course. Not only that, they do it more efficiently than Westerners with backpacks and African women who carry baskets on their heads.

But, are they the true masters of the head-carried load? What of the women of the African Kikuyu and Luo tribes? In previous studies, these women were found to carry loads of up to 60% of their body weight at a considerably cheaper metabolic cost than army recruits carrying equivalent backpack loads. Their secret? Conserving energy by swinging their bodies like a pendulum.

In order to determine the true porting master, a report published in Science compares the efficiency of each. A selection of porters from each race was asked to walk around a flat track at various speeds while carrying several different loads. The energy expended was measured by directly monitoring their oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production through a mask. The result? As reported in Nature: At light loads, the Nepalese porters and the African women were about equally efficient. But the heavier the load, the better the Nepalese became at expending minimal energy.

Exactly how this was accomplished remains a subject of further study. In the meantime, long live the Queens.

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