The Endurance Running Hypothesis

Life of Mammals persistence hunt: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wI-9RJi0Qo" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wI-9RJi0Qo</a>

&#62; but in order to accelerate, a deer goes anaerobic, while the man remains in an oxygenated jogging zone.<p>Anaerobic exercise is where you get close to red-lining your body's limits.<p>The Ironman is arguably one of the most difficult single-day athletic event an individual can participate in. Training for the Ironman (2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, 26.2 mile run) requires at least one year of up to 20 to 40 hrs of concentrated training every week. The whole point of the training is to build your body's endurance such that when you do the actual race you do not go anaerobic. Even the people winning the race in 9hr times do not venture into the anaerobic zone while racing. Once you go anaerobic (lactic acid), your ability to complete the race (or even continue) goes seriously downhill. Going anaerobic is also the reason why most people cannot swim more than 100m without training (simply put - their technique is so bad that most of their energy is expended and wasted into fighting the water - so it's like running 100m sprints).<p>Also, check out the Marathon Monks of Japan. 84km/day for 100 days.<p><a href="http://www.howtobefit.com/tendai-marathon-monks.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.howtobefit.com/tendai-marathon-monks.htm</a>

A friend of mine who keeps a small flock of sheep as a hobby swears by the run-them-down technique. He doesn't have a sheepdog and sheep can be difficult to catch for a human. But he says that if he is prepared to chase one sheep round the field for 45 minutes or so, then it will give up, even though he can never catch it in a sprint.

If endurance running has significantly affected human evolution, why are there not more pronounced differences between men and women? Anthropological evidence is unequivocal, I thought, about the fact that men hunted far and women gathered nearby. So you would expect men to have evolved much higher endurance running traits that women, if their primary hunting technique was running animals down. Yet many of the modern ultra-distance runners are women, and last I checked my toes were shorter than most men's :-)<p>Yet bipedalism has effectively made human reproduction a nightmare (due to the orientation of the pelvis with respect to the birth canal). So if there is an evolutionary reason for bipedalism I would expect it to apply at least equally if not more to women. Naively, anyway.

The first thing that comes into mind is old Roman military. Infantry and long marches - on a regular basis they could out-march cavalry.

Keeping track of where your prey has gone suddenly becomes a matter of putting pieces of evidence together to tell a story that is quite a bit more complicated than simply seeing them directly and running them down. If we are going to have physical adaptations, we should also expect cognitive ones.

This is intresting, since some health or fitness advocates has been saying that "no-one should run a marathon" (eg. Art De Vany: <a href="http://www.arthurdevany.com/2005/08/top_ten_reasons.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.arthurdevany.com/2005/08/top_ten_reasons.html</a>)<p>Still it isn't clear that marathon or any massive repentive excercise is ultimately good for you, but if humans are built for running, it might change my mind a bit towards running.

Another good book is <i>Why We Run: A Natural History</i>, by Bernd Heinrich, a biologist who studied insect physiology, wrote many books about natural history, and held several American ultrarunning records. The book is half memoir and half natural history, and it's a quick and fascinating read.

And yet all this research and hypothesizing doesn't end with grabbing one of these super marathon runners, taking him to the wide open plains of Utah, and asking him to bring back a dead antelope.

It seems that Mr. Hawks, the critic toward the end, is somewhat confused about evolution, expecting traits to disappear once they become no longer useful.<p>His second assertion, from the finding that toe length does not affect walking, strikes me as completely nonsensical even considering the above confusion.

One of the basis of evidence for this about spear use is very misleading. We have no idea how long humans have been using wooden spears since they don't preserve. But since chimps do, it is possible we have been for millions of years. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/22/AR2007022201007.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02...</a>

Amazing!