Jagged0
Mr.Ellish 5 VIP [ 🇺🇦 blur gang] KING OF .ME
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2019
- Posts
- 13,917
- Reputation
- 23,162
A few weeks ago, my German Shorthaired Pointer, Stockton, and I were on a run along a trail network in the Mojave Desert foothills behind our home. I remember saying something like, “I feel a bit lightheaded. Maybe we should slow down.” Stockton skidded to a halt, swooping his head around to eye me with a “what the hell’s wrong with you?” look. I felt like I might vomit.
A couple miles earlier, we’d heard yapping somewhere far off in the desert. In the distance, some breed of poofy white dog stood barking, swallowed by the immensity of the empty land. Dogs often get lost out here—they escape from the neighborhoods below and seek refuge in the hills, where there’s no water and a lot of heat, snakes, and coyotes. This furball would be dead in 48 hours, I thought.
Stockton and I hatched a plan: We’d chase down the imperiled canine, and then I’d pick him up and take him back to civilization to find his owner. Simple. Off we went, galloping towards the dog, who saw us coming and took off in turn. Evolutionarily speaking, this task should have come naturally to me: Studies have shown that humans likely evolved to run very long distances in order to chase down prey—or, in this case, a lapdog. In fact, the type of fitness required to run down a deer, kudu, or antelope to the brink of exhaustion was commonplace thousands of years ago, according to another study.
The researchers discovered the bones of prehistoric homo sapiens were more dense than ours today, suggesting early sapiens likely ran far more often—and for longer distances. Other studies suggest many early humans had the running capacity of today’s competitive cross-country athletes.
Most big game can easily outsprint us, but they tire quickly. That's likely a big part of the reason why humans developed attributes geared toward endurance running; for example, we don’t have much hair and we have larger sweat glands, which keep us cooler during exercise.
Early humans would slowly but surely chase down prey for miles upon miles until the animal toppled over from heat exhaustion, at which point we’d spear it and have dinner for up to a month. This method, called “persistence hunting,” was likely practiced by prehistoric hunter-gatherers for nearly two million years. It was also used by the Rarámuri to hunt deer in the mountains of northern Mexico, and Aborigines for hunting kangarooin northwestern Australia.
Kalahari bushmen used the technique as little as a decade ago, until South Africa banned hunting altogether, says Louis Liebenberg, an associate professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University who has studied persistence hunting and tracking. Liebenberg discovered that Kalahari persistence hunts required the bushmen to run an average 9:40 minute/mile pace across more than 20 miles of rugged, sandy terrain in 107-degree heat.
More from Tonic:
More recently, a team of nine professional runners—one of them a 2:10 marathoner—attempted to persistence hunt a New Mexican pronghorn antelope, which can sprint 60 miles an hour. The runners covered 20 miles over the course of the hunt and at one point clocked a 4:36 mile. (They got within 10 yards of the animal and could have killed it, but didn’t.)
tldr:ancient humans used to have denser skeletons and could run as fast as Olympic runners
A couple miles earlier, we’d heard yapping somewhere far off in the desert. In the distance, some breed of poofy white dog stood barking, swallowed by the immensity of the empty land. Dogs often get lost out here—they escape from the neighborhoods below and seek refuge in the hills, where there’s no water and a lot of heat, snakes, and coyotes. This furball would be dead in 48 hours, I thought.
Stockton and I hatched a plan: We’d chase down the imperiled canine, and then I’d pick him up and take him back to civilization to find his owner. Simple. Off we went, galloping towards the dog, who saw us coming and took off in turn. Evolutionarily speaking, this task should have come naturally to me: Studies have shown that humans likely evolved to run very long distances in order to chase down prey—or, in this case, a lapdog. In fact, the type of fitness required to run down a deer, kudu, or antelope to the brink of exhaustion was commonplace thousands of years ago, according to another study.
The researchers discovered the bones of prehistoric homo sapiens were more dense than ours today, suggesting early sapiens likely ran far more often—and for longer distances. Other studies suggest many early humans had the running capacity of today’s competitive cross-country athletes.
Most big game can easily outsprint us, but they tire quickly. That's likely a big part of the reason why humans developed attributes geared toward endurance running; for example, we don’t have much hair and we have larger sweat glands, which keep us cooler during exercise.
Early humans would slowly but surely chase down prey for miles upon miles until the animal toppled over from heat exhaustion, at which point we’d spear it and have dinner for up to a month. This method, called “persistence hunting,” was likely practiced by prehistoric hunter-gatherers for nearly two million years. It was also used by the Rarámuri to hunt deer in the mountains of northern Mexico, and Aborigines for hunting kangarooin northwestern Australia.
Kalahari bushmen used the technique as little as a decade ago, until South Africa banned hunting altogether, says Louis Liebenberg, an associate professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University who has studied persistence hunting and tracking. Liebenberg discovered that Kalahari persistence hunts required the bushmen to run an average 9:40 minute/mile pace across more than 20 miles of rugged, sandy terrain in 107-degree heat.
More from Tonic:
More recently, a team of nine professional runners—one of them a 2:10 marathoner—attempted to persistence hunt a New Mexican pronghorn antelope, which can sprint 60 miles an hour. The runners covered 20 miles over the course of the hunt and at one point clocked a 4:36 mile. (They got within 10 yards of the animal and could have killed it, but didn’t.)
tldr:ancient humans used to have denser skeletons and could run as fast as Olympic runners
