Born to Run - the evolution of the human body | Hacker News Reader

Born to Run - the evolution of the human body

discovermagazine.com

14 pointsjmackinn10 comments

There are several billion human beings on earth. There is NO society on earth that relies on marathon running to survive. There are very few societies where people are at all inclined to run for long distances as part of the daily culture.

We may have the mechanism to run, but it somehow doesn't really strike me that human beings are made for running marathons. It just seems wrong to me. Marathon running is too taxing for us.

What I think happened is that the core human design was not especially built for marathon running. But at the critical point in history where marathon running was very much needed (for example, when the sapiens started expanding), all the marathon runners survived and took over.

For example, let's say the earth were suddenly to increase the temperature to 48° for the space of one year. A lot of people will die, but the ones who survive will be the ones that already had the capability to survive that type of heat. So even if the earth ever goes back to normal temperature, all remaining people will be people who can survive at 48° and the descendants of such people. So heat survival will become a new trait of all humans, but it does not mean that we actually need it anymore.

So I think that we have this ability because at some evolutionary point, we REALLY needed it. So now we don't need it anymore, but it's still there.

You can hunt deer on foot, you know. I've never done this myself, but as long as you keep your attention on one and pursue it, you can exhaust it. Then you sit on it until it stops breathing (or cut its throat with your flint knife or whatever).

It's also not that long ago that many if not most human societies required their males (at least) to be very physically fit and those that weren't were killed by the fitter males of other human societies. Why do you think there was a baby boom after WW2? The "fittest" (and the luckiest) survived and passed on their genes. It's ironic that the baby boomers are the first generation that were largely sedentary (e.g. driving everywhere, working in offices, etc).

The question is not if I CAN. Yes, I surely can hunt deer in that manner, but it's not very clever. And our advantage is that we are clever, not that we are physically superior.

If this endurance approach were really an effective hunting mechanism, then why are there no animals doing this? There is no need to have a huge expensive brain if all you need is just lithe enduring figures and an efficient gait.

And I once went antelope 'hunting'. You know what happens when they see you? The run, really quickly and they completely disappear from sight. You have no frickin idea where they are anymore.

Only in really huge savannas that are completely flat and with very low grass can you keep your eye on one animal and just follow it.

This whole idea of endurance hunting does not sit well with me.

The influence of the second world war on genetic culling, in my opinion, was pretty minimal. The second world war was really not survival of the fittest, it was survival of the luckiest. First of all, the physically fittest were most likely to die, because they were fighting in the front. And even among those fighting, how fit you are hardly had an influence on your death. Bombs and guns and falling buildings are not affected by muscle size.

And your other statement about unfit males being killed by other males is just plain old dumb. Where did you read that nonsense? Humans are dominant because of social structure and tool handling, and not because of physical strength. Any human society that selected for physical fitness would decay very quickly.

Wolves use tag team endurance hunting to bring down big game. They don't always hunt that way but the effectiveness of tag team endurance hunting probably has a lot to due with the evolution of wolves.

Edit: We where not always clever. Anyway building big brains takes a lot of energy and nutrients so having a high energy diet with meat supplements is vary useful for creating big brains. I think there was a transition period where humans where starting to get good at hunting and gathering which increased the value of large brains and at the same time giving us the resources to support them.

> You can hunt deer on foot, you know. I've never done this myself, but as long as you keep your attention on one and pursue it, you can exhaust it

Yes, but doing this looks nothing like going for a jog, if you watch footage of it. There's a lot of brisk hiking and some sprinting. There's a lot of stopping to examine track signs.

The article seems to equate running with jogging and I really don't think there's a good case that people are well adapted to distance jogging. There are zero ethnographic examples of people having any occasion to go out for a five or ten mile run. They walk fast and sprint.

According to the article some hunters use speeds of around 4 to 6 miles per hour to chase down antelope to survive.

We may not be marathoners, but the saying "A human can outwalk a horse." is both ancient and true.

Bernd Heinrich (biologist and (ultra)marathoner) wrote a book that dealt with this—Why We Run: A Natural History. It's very good (like many of his books).

To relate this to startups: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Young_(athlete)

A 61-year-old farmer, in 1983 he beat a field of professional athletes in a 875 km race because he didn't know you were supposed to sleep.

If that's not a metaphor for how to run a startup, I don't know what is.

He did know. He was just able to run while others were sleeping.

Ok, I just have to know how they did the cheetah experiment :)

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