That's a rather harsh disparagement to a physicist.

Surely, the whole point of a yolking bar is to keep the animals (and load) "locked" together as a team. It's role in distributing forces is incidental.

It was stated (in some previous thread a long time ago) that oxen could not easily be controlled as a team. If you refer back to my previous posting you will see that my proposition was phrased as a question. I was querying whether (if that assertion be true) they might be utilised as a collection of individual pairs rather than as a team.

I understand that the pulling rates are different. Nevertheless each pair would produce a force on their individual rope and those forces would be cummulative at the load, whether or not they are attached to a central bar.