_Accurate?

As I watched my cat massage my belly with his razor sharp claws, It struck me once again how perfectly adapted - even as a domesticated, dumbed-down version of a cat - he is to survive; 20 sharp claws, a mouth full of teeth, movable, directional big ears, protective and grippy paw pads, loose, wriggly skin to escape from any bigger predator, a powerful jump from my sofa all the way to the top of a ceiling-high cupboard, the nose, the eyes, the balancing, communicative tail. Everything is finely tuned to be a successful creature of nature.

_{Vicious killing machine}

Humans on the other hand, have a brain. That's about it. I recently watched an Episode of The Walking Dead (spoilers ahead), and was infuriated at how unbelievable one scene was, it took me right out of the story in rage.

A fully grown, 600lb beast of a tiger jumps into about 6 zombies to attack them, letting the important characters conveniently be saved. Unfortunately, the tiger was no match for the 6 humans which, even if alive and full of health and strength would still have a hell of a time trying to bite and scratch the tiger to death with our little, bendy keratin fingernails and dull, flat, small teeth attached to a little jaw that gets tired after one too many Dime Bars.

But apparently my assumptions of tiger strength being distorted by nature documentaries, the zombies effortlessly won over the tiger who was quickly overburdened by the pure weight of the zombie's leaning power, before it met its demise seconds later.

Spoiler over

The point is, realistically humans are outperformed in every physical aspect by nature... except for one thing.

Endurance

Being human, we love to sit around and be blown away by superhuman athletes who, in the grand scheme of things, are kind of like the sick grandparent of the animal kingdom in terms of athletic prowess. As we watch in amazement Usain Bolt tumble pathetically along the racetracks after decades of relentless training, a wolf somewhere out there is casually jogging at least 15km/h faster than that.

_{The peak of humanity can just about outrun a small cat, on a good day}

But being human, we love to pride ourselves we do do best: Endurance.

All over the internet you are told that humans can outrun any animal; and that was our hunting strategy back in the day. Just follow some caribou and out-last it. Sure it might spring around, mocking you at first, but 2 weeks later when you're still marching steady, that caribou is dying of exhaustion, ready to be eaten.

This impressive human feat was proven by a Welsh Pubman Gordon Green, who started a man VS horse marathon in 1979. For two an a half decades, the horses won every time, but finally, as humans optimized themselves through education, Huw Lobb defeated the horse in 2004. From this precedent came others and the rest is history.

I recently wrote about how the fittest champions of female rowers had a pathetic upper body strength when compared to that of our ancestral female farmers back in the day, who were churning and cutting and seeding all day long. It looks like we just needed to go back to our roots to really see the full potential.

Once again, we can out-endure any animal.

This makes sense, as noted in several papers, we are evolutionarily designed for this. The Achilles tendon, a particularly springy tissue at the back of our ankles, is absent in the Australopithecus lineage, and appears only in the homo genus later on, 2 million years ago. This would have given us a lot of advantages on the Savannah, but there's so much more.

The large legs and flat feet, comparatively massive butt muscles (gluteus maximus), our twist-able hips, fatigue-resistant muscle fibers... all these and more are adaptations specially set out to aid balance, absorb forces, increase stability and, ultimately, endurance - at the sacrifice of speed.

This kind of adaptation is pretty unique in the animal kingdom. Most animals are either very quickly running away from something or very quickly running after something, and are rarely caught in a situation where they have to run for days at a time. Subsequently, their muscle fibers are fast-twitch allowing bursts of speed over short distances.

Won't we overheat? Being in the Savannah and all

Well any other animal would, but we happen to be masters of sweat, allowing an unprecedented heat-dispersal rate across our bodies. This is why when humans finally defeated horses in 2004 and onward, it was typically a hot day. We are clearly more capable of coping with the conditions than a horse that kind of steams its sweat away. Such a waste.

If you move away from the weird countryside of Wales and into the professional endurance sports, you'll find that humans quite comfortably beat all of nature by quite a long shot. A horse can travel about 20km a day, but humans do 100km+ super-marathons in a few hours - for fun.

Why?

It's a good question, in all scenarios. But it is particularly intriguing as to why we developed so well in this profession when in all other aspects, we just kinda let loose in return for a balloon-headed genius.

Unfortunately, a big brain doesn't prevent you getting trampled or your guts being exploded out the back of your spine by a rogue hoof or horn, and we evidently already gave up any line of defense against that. No, it was smarter to hang back and wait; essentially bore animals to death.

But there's another human strategy; passive scavenging. Hyenas, our main competition, for example, are also pretty damn good endurance runners, so when early hominids looked into the sky and saw vultures circling in the distance, the race was on to get to the meat first. If hyenas were to arrive, that could be the end of them all. Being pathetically weak and all. Or if it were cats or wolves or basically anything else. Including the Vultures, probably.

So a hyena would sprint for a while, walk for a while, relax and cool off because they're burning up in the sun and then sun again, they can get pretty far that way, while humans could just bolt it across the entire Serengeti to quickly swipe the meat and get on outta there.

Challenge

This is, surprisingly, not the full story. The idea of ancient humans being both Endurance hunters and passive scavengers has been challenged by evidence in some studies (one below). In fact, the study demonstrates that it is an assumption, possibly based off movies, that humans can tune their senses to become master trackers of animals kilometers away; there are far too many disturbances and variants in nature for this to be possible over long distances and humans would have easily lost the trail of their hunt out in the open.

On the contrary, the evidence from 2010 suggests that humans were in fact very adept ambush predators. the study points out that:

...it is not reasonable to assume sophisticated tracking skills in early Homo, while at the same time discounting any intellectual ability to ambush prey. In the absence of direct evidence, we do not know how early Homo would have hunted large prey._source

_{Not so inaccurate}

Here's my guess

Humans were both endurance hunters and passive scavengers, as well as gatherers of fruit and veg, but as their tools advanced and projectiles became sharper and deadlier, ambush hunting became a valid and successful tactic.

Either way, there's no denying we are excellent endurance runners, undefeated champions to this day. Right?

I'm afraid not! Let this post be a lesson to you: Don't believe everything you read online.

Part 2 will explore another creature out there in the wilderness that make our endurance records look like a brief jog to the post box.

Sources: _{Endurance running and its relevance to scavenging by early hominins | Endurance running and the evolution of Homo | Mammalian Domestication and its Effect on Brain Structure and Behavior | Bovid mortality profiles in paleoecological context falsify hypotheses of endurance running–hunting and passive scavenging by early Pleistocene hominins}

_{All image sources CC0 licensed}