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Comment by iamben | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of the man vs horse races (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon). Man rarely wins unless the weather is hot.

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To be fair, though, horses are uniquely good at endurance compared to almost all other non-primate mammals. They have sweat glands all over their body just like humans do.

what about dogs? They can cover nearly 1,000 miles of rough winter terrain in under 2 weeks, as seen in the iditarod. Or if we're looking at long distance travel in hot environments what about camels? I think this "humans can run down any animal with our endurance" stuff is vastly overblown. We're above average, but hardly the best on earth.

Dogs can't do endurance running in the heat like we can. Cooling is a limitation for most mammals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis

Humans vs horses: https://slate.com/culture/2012/06/long-distance-running-and-...

Cheetahs, wolves : https://www.businessinsider.com/how-humans-evolved-to-be-bes...

We're really good at running.

Pretty interesting that all the counter-examples named so far are those that have been domesticated by humans

A human can run down any animal on earth because we're smart, not just because we have amazing endurance.

Animals don't realize that if they just ran 10 miles away they would escape easily. They'll just run far enough away that they can't really see us anymore. Then we find them and chase them again. Eventually they get tired because they sprint away and we conserve our energy.

A horse may be physically capable of running farther than a human, but actually getting them to do that is another thing.

Also the times are relatively close.

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