When we compare humans’ physical abilities to those of other animals, we are not impressive. We’re not the fastest out there and we’re definitely not the strongest. In fact, there are very few areas in which humans excel physically — but one of them is long distance running.

Humans are better endurance runners than most (maybe even all) other animals. This capacity has puzzled scientists for decades. How did such an ability evolve, and what role did it play in the survival and evolution of early humans? A new international study dives deep into this ability and suggests that endurance running might have shaped our evolution.

Persistence hunting

Eugène Morin (from Trent University, Canada, and Bordeaux University, France) was looking at old ethnohistoric accounts of hunter-gatherers. Morin would notice the occasional description of human hunters pursuing game for long distances. He realized that these references were actually pretty common, so he decided a more thorough investigation was needed.

He recruited Bruce Winterhalder from the University of California, Davis. Together, they combed through all sorts of sources of information, looking for mentions and references to endurance hunting for humans. Overall, they found nearly 400 mentions from 272 locations across the world.

This research is significant because it looks at something called the “endurance running hypothesis,” which says that long distance running actually shaped human evolution.

At its core, the hypothesis suggests that our ancestors developed endurance running to effectively hunt prey over long distances. The ability would have provided crucial survival advantages by allowing early humans to exhaust large animals over prolonged chases, a method known as persistence hunting.

Persistence hunting isn’t unique to humans. Wolves, dingoes, and some birds can also chase their prey over long distances. But humans are just remarkably well-suited to long-distance running. The idea of persistence hunting is to outlast your prey. You could first injure and then chase them, or simply chase them to exhaustion over time.

However, humans are the only primates capable of endurance running. We also have the proportionally longest legs of all known hominin species. Since relatives like chimps and orangutans don’t have this type of adaptation, and neither does a common ancestor like Australopithecus, it’s possible that members members of the Homo genus developed this adaptation by themselves.

“In terms of biomechanics (functional morphology), human running is a gait of its own. It’s not just fast walking, meaning longstanding explanations of bipedalism itself are insufficient to explain the evolution of running.”

“The endurance pursuit hypotheses was given prominence in 1984 by David Carrier, but even proponents have worried about the higher cost (energy expenditure) of running compared to walking, and the rare occurrence of running pursuits among late 20th century foragers.  Our recasting of the costs in terms of foraging theory, and our discovery of hundreds of instances from observations made prior to the 1950s, should diminish those reservations,” says Winterhalder for ZME Science.

Running costs a lot of energy. But it’s fast

The idea was to see how much a hunter would gain from a long-distance hunt versus how much resources it costs. But in the new study, the researchers added another twist: running.

One of the longstanding challenges to the hypothesis has been the energetic cost associated with long-distance running. Running is a high-energy activity, and many have wondered if the caloric returns from persistence hunting would have been sufficient to justify the effort. Morin and Winterhalder’s research, however, uses mathematics based on accounts of long-distance running to calculate the return rates of hunting and the cost of the extra effort.

They found that endurance running pursuit could be as efficient, if not more so, than other pre-modern hunting methods.

“No one, ourselves included, had thought to ask ‘What happens if the forager switches from a cautious, walking stalk of prey to a running pursuit or to one that mixes walking with running?’ Prompted by the empirical observations we were finding and using a well-confirmed metric, net acquisition rate of kilocalories, the result was surprising. The differential cost of running vs. walking almost disappears, swamped by the much larger kcal value of medium- to large-sized game animals.

“The time that might be saved by a running pursuit has an even greater impact on return rates. If running saves two hours on a stalk that would take four by walking, it almost has doubled the net return rate for the time spent. The two hours saved can be invested in locating another pursuit opportunity or for other important activities. In economic terms, it’s a standard opportunity cost advantage.”

An unusual dataset

Compiling the dataset wasn’t easy and often took the researchers outside of the usual academic circles. They relied on Google Books and digital libraries, analyzing thousands of historical documents. Overall, they analyzed literature dating from the 1500s to the early 2000s, using specialized scripts to parse these sources quickly.

They even reach as far as podcasts and popular articles. For instance, they even turned to a memorable podcast by Scott Carrier, brother of the David Carrier mentioned above. The podcaster was describing an unsuccessful attempt by Scott and David to run after antelope. Another quirky example comes from a 1978 Sports Illustrated where the author described his personal attempt to test the endurance pursuit idea by running after a black-tailed deer in the mountains outside of Oregon. 

Overall, however, the dataset was quite diverse. They modelled caloric rewards under various conditions (such as hot environments, crusted snow cover, soggy substrates), helping the researchers derive reliable quantitative estimates of endurance pursuit return rates.

“We chose a sample of several thousand sources of diverse authorship, including ethnographers, missionaries, explorers, government agents, and scientists participating in discovery expeditions.  We then searched all of them with a standardized script, carefully assessing and each of us separately evaluating the coding of the excerpts that were located,” Winterhalder explained. In most situations, long-distance chase and running was the efficient choice.

However, the dataset also has its limitations.

“English and French language sources dominate our sample. Most of our reports are frustratingly incomplete of supporting details, largely restricting us to descriptive statistics. But keen observers can be found, for instance, explorers who themselves were dependent on the hunting prowess they could learn from Indigenous Peoples.  Multiplication of examples allows us to note the wide distribution of the technique over the globe, and the variety of environments and contexts in which it occurs, the game sought, and the variant methods used (e.g., relays vs. individual pursuers).”

Is running in our genes?

The authors suggest that this type of hunting would have been a viable strategy for human hunters from 2.6 million years ago to 11,700. However, this work relies on ethnographic accounts from recent history, which don’t speak directly to our evolutionary past.

Nevertheless, the evolutionary implications of this study are profound. The findings suggest that long-distance running was not just a side-effect of bipedalism or a random evolutionary trait, but a significant driver in human evolution. This ability likely influenced the development of various physiological and anatomical features, such as increased sweating for better thermoregulation, the development of the Achilles tendon for more efficient energy storage and release, and even changes in the respiratory system for sustained aerobic activity.

“Notable in our sample are societies that encourage skilled and sustained running by men, women and children, sometimes in festive competitions featuring races. The runners in our sample often are young men, who may be demonstrating their food-providing skills for purposes of courtship. We have instances in which, for purposes of sacred rituals, an animal must be captured alive by hand through a running pursuit to exhaustion.  Although these motivations are instrumental to subsistence, courtship and religious belief rather than health as such, they suggest that running — read as including jogging in modern terms — has a deep history in our species, with satisfying rewards,” concludes Winterhalder.

Image published in Nature Human Behavior.