Humans Are Among the Top Mammals for Endurance Running

Running is one of the most common workouts that most people are able to do. There’s no need for fancy equipment; all you need are some comfortable clothes and shoes. With some practice, you may even become an endurance runner, traversing long distances with relative ease. This may sound daunting but there’s some scientific proof that we’re all built for it which may encourage you to do it. A study has found that humans being at one of the best mammals when it comes to endurance running.

Bruce Winterhalder, professor emeritus at the UC Davis Department of Anthropology and Graduate Group in Ecology, and paleoanthropologist Eugène Morin, of Trent University, teamed up to study how we fare when it comes to endurance running, based on the endurance pursuit hypothesis, first proposed by biologist David Carrier in 1984. This premise implies that endurance running traits in humans evolved to allow us to run down large game animals through persistence hunting.

To support this, Winterhalder and Morin mixed mathematical modeling with a thorough ethnohistoric investigation of first-hand accounts of endurance pursuits. The latter was only possible thanks to a recent digitization of accounts by the likes of explorers, missionaries and officials between 1527 through the early 20th century. “We have software that allows us to search for information that dwarfs what we could do if we were trying to read through all the possible sources ourselves,” Winterhalder told UC Davis.

Aided by this technology, the pair found 391 accounts of hunts from 272 locations around the world that matched endurance pursuit tactics. Despite taking place in different sociological and geographical contexts, they share similar characteristics. First, a hunter finds a prey, followed by a pursuit in which the animal outdistances the hunters. However, the prey then gets tired and stops to recover, which allows the hunters to catch up with them. The cycle then repeats until the animal is exhausted and captured.

Then, the pair turned to the mathematical models to analyze increasing velocity during game pursuits, comparing return rates to other methods, like stalking. “We found that in contexts like high heat or a substrate that impedes the animal, such as crusted snow, the net return rate of food acquisition from endurance pursuits can match or exceed that of other methods of prey acquisition. The chance of pursuit failure appears to diminish, and exhausted prey are safer to approach. For early humans without ballistic weaponry, these are significant advantages,” Winterhalder said.

The researchers also noted the prevalence of team efforts in these hunting episodes, like those done by relay or having one member climb a hill to tell the others where the prey went. Ultimately, they hope this unique connection between sports and science inspires others to look deeper into what’s behind the world of running. “To run long distances, to have an evolved gait that’s uniquely imbued with stamina is unusual in the animal world,” Winterhalder said. “If that inspires you to go for a run, great.”