Endurance Running Hypothesis
en.wikipedia.orgThe hypothesis posits a significant role of endurance running in facilitating early hominins' ability to obtain meat. Proponents of this hypothesis propose that endurance running served as a means for hominins to effectively engage in persistence hunting and carcass poaching, thus enhancing their competitive edge in acquiring prey. Consequently, these evolutionary pressures have led to the prominence of endurance running as a primary factor shaping many biomechanical characteristics of modern humans.
Very skeptical of this hypothesis. The evidence suggests early humans subsisted on plants far more than animal meat. Likely what meat was procured did not entail chasing gazelles or antelopes for miles on end, but rather hunting for rodents and such. Or setting up traps.
Second , if this were true, we would expect all or the vast majority humans to be good at endurance running, but there is considerable variance of individual running ability. In high school, for example, as I can recall from personal experience only 25 percent of the boys in class could run a mile at a decent time and only 25% could not complete it. Those who failed were not necessary obese or otherwise had obvious medical conditions like asthma, but simply lacked the stamina for whatever reason to finish it without stopping multiple times.
Endurance running is more of a consequence of bipedalism and increased height and lighter bone mass, the ability of which is highly unequally distributed, not that enduring running arose from evolutionary pressure. As humans became lighter and less stocky, endurance running became possible.
I don't know if I really agree with this.
Humans absolutely did hunt large animals for meat.
If you read the famous book 'Born to Run' which funnily enough this article has citations to, it describes that tribes still exist today that are incredible endurance runners and are that way because of running concepts they use that are not taught outside of those tribes. One of the main benefits of humans compared to animals is that we can breathe independently of our stride, whereas many animals rely on their stride for breathing.
The sample from high school is not a very good explanation as to whether we're meant to be good at endurance running at all. It's like saying students that didn't show critical thinking at tasks in high school demonstrate that humans aren't good at critical thinking. Or if only the top ~10% of students achieve all A grades, does that mean that humans aren't good at linguistics and numeracy? I don't think so.
Our early humans were running at very young ages and not running for the sake of running but because it's just what you did.
There are plenty of people I knew in high school that didn't run and weren't considered good runners that are now running quite fast through half/full marathons. Furthermore, our advantage as humans as described isn't necessarily speed, but our ability to run for a long time.
We don't live the lives of our ancient counterparts and therefore it is difficult to make connections on human endurance performance based on the performances of people today.
A few counterpoints:
1. Heavy reliance on plants does not preclude nutritional/energetic value of, desire for and effort exerted to obtain meat.
2. Prevalence of small-game trapping/hunting does not preclude the importance of big-game persistence hunting and carcass poaching. Small-game heavy diet can be dangerously light on fat compared to protein. [1] Dietary fat tends to be harder to obtain, is more important in the short-term, and has higher energetic value than protein. Big-game gets you lots of fat and extremely high nutrient organs.
3. Endurance running for persistence hunting does not require much speed, it mostly requires…persistence. Persistence is pain-tolerance. Pain tolerance is lacking in modern society. Pain tolerance is also very easy to improve. I’ve personally seen average runners break through mental barriers to become excellent runners.
4. It’s illogical to compare individual humans to other humans in order to refute a claim about the relative ability of the human species as compared to other species.
5. Similarly, it’s illogical to use variance when most humans today have no need to run at all and others voluntarily run far longer than any persistence hunter would ever choose to do (in resource constrained environments of the past). In such a situation, outliers will be extreme and the floor will be overpopulated relative to the past. And yet, the floor may still be higher than it would otherwise have been if not for our history. In fact, the presence of extreme outliers might indicate that the species itself is more capable than the current average indicates.
5. A mile is not an endurance run. It may seem that way nowadays to an unpracticed runner, but not to any trained/habitual runner and certainly not to any persistence hunter.
6. Stocky individuals can still run far. They just can’t do it as fast as equally trained lighter humans. This doesn’t say anything about how they compare to prey animals over the same distance.
"personal experience" is a polite way of saying "comfortable falsehood."
if only it was conformable. running those laps was hard.
It’s not like 100% of the group was going on hunts, though. Maybe running laps was hard for many of the early human males too.
Nothing comes easy, but when its putting food on the table there's a key motivator we don't have anymore