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Vice Blog

New Zealand - Big Scary Dudes Explained

Rugby players generally are pretty frightening but the New Zealand All Blacks are fucking petrifying. Have you seen how big those guys are? Their thighs are the same size as a fat man's torso and their heads just kind of skip the neck and go straight to the shoulders. This basically means they are perfectly designed for all the things that help you win rugby like scrumming and head butting and knocking people over. There has been a lot of rugby on recently and the best bit by far is the traditional war dance they do at the start of every game called the Haka.

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When Maoris perform the Haka they pull these intense faces, slap themselves really hard and, if they're feeling really fiery, they make a gesture where they slice their thumbs across their necks thereby insinuating that they're going to slit the throats of the other team. It's kind of nuts and there has been talk about how it's too aggressive or whatever.

Anyway, today science shed a big golden ray of light on all of this with the finding that Maori men have a "striking over-representation" of a gene called monoamine oxidase - dubbed the "warrior gene" - which they say is strongly associated with aggressive behaviour and violence. This is linked back to the whole survival of the fittest thing and apparently explains how the Maori's managed to make the treacherous journey across the Pacific Ocean all the way to New Zealand as well as Jake's disproportionate outbursts in Once Were Warriors.