Found this amazing short video via Alistair Pott’s post on “persistence hunting,” linked to from Tim Ferriss’s piece on Vibram Five Finger shoes. Brought to mind Scott Carrier’s This American Life segment.
Anyway, simply amazing.
Though not often, living in Montana you do see animal heads strapped to the roofs of pickup trucks during hunting season, and I’ve often said that if you want to parade around with another animal’s head, you best run it down instead of shoot it. Well, I didn’t know it was not only possible, but quite likely how we adapted to hunt in the first place:
“But a handful of scientists think that these ultra-marathoners are using their bodies just as our hominid forbears once did, a theory known as the endurance running hypothesis (ER). ER proponents believe that being able to run for extended lengths of time is an adapted trait, most likely for obtaining food, and was the catalyst that forced Homo erectus to evolve from its apelike ancestors. Over time, the survival of the swift-footed shaped the anatomy of modern humans, giving us a body that is difficult to explain absent a marathoning past.”
Via The Running Man, Revisited in Seed.
