Hard to fathom? No, the old measures beat metric

CUBITS, fathoms and handspans may live on only in the history books for most of us.

But these ‘body-based measurements’ can often work better than their metric alternatives, experts have said.

Whether it is a gardener planting vegetables in rows a hand-span apart or a cook using a pinch of salt in a recipe, a study has found people still use their bodies to calculate distances and amounts five millennia after standardised measurements were invented.

The study, published in the journal Science, looked at 99 societies representative of cultures across the world over several centuries.

They found almost a quarter of them used some variation of the fathom – a handy way of measuring distance by stretching out both arms.

The second most popular bodybased measurement was the cubit – the distance from the tip of the elbow to the tip of your pointing finger – followed by a handspan.