An interesting article that argues that humans as animals,
although bad for high speed running, are excellent slow pace, long distance
runners
Some excerpts from the article:
“Humans are terrible athletes in terms of power and speed, but we’re phenomenal at slow and steady. We’re the tortoises of the animal kingdom”
“While some of our ancestors’ meat-eating may have been due to scavenging, Lieberman said
the appearance about 2 million years ago of physical adaptations that
have no impact on walking but that make humans better endurance runners
provide evidence that early scavengers became running hunters.”
“Lieberman said he envisions an evolutionary scenario where humans began eating meat as scavengers. Over time, evolution favored scavenging humans who could run faster to the site of a kill and eventually allowed us to evolve into persistence hunters. Evolution likely continued to favor better runners until projectile weapons made running less important relatively recently in our history.”
Article: Humans hot, sweaty, natural-born runners
