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Please note that this article was originally published in Popular Science Magazine. We included it on SwampButt Underwear because plenty of us like to run but dislike getting all sweaty, especially from the waist down. Early man may have been a sweaty mess like us, but we really do not know.
Endurance running is not just a hobby for modern marathoners or for posting on social media. A new look into the anthropological history of endurance running when hunting for game shows that it may be just as efficient as other more traditional hunting methods like foraging. The findings are described in a study published May 13 in the journal Nature Human Behaviourand supports an idea called the endurance pursuit hypothesis.
Endurance pursuit hypothesis posits that the human ability to run long distances is an adaptation that began roughly two million years ago.
[Related: Humans are natural runners—and this ancient gene mutation might have helped.]
“Unlike other mammals, including other primates such as chimpanzees, humans can sweat profusely and have lower limb muscles evolved for stamina rather than power,” Morin and Winterhalder say. “If economical and successful, endurance pursuits of medium-to-large game in a tropical environment could have [been] selected for that unique combination of traits: sweating and stamina.”
However, there have been few reports of contemporary humans using these endurance pursuits. Running long distances is generally viewed as energetically costly, and thus not worth it.
In their new study, Morin and Winterhalder studied roughly 400 recorded instances dating from the early 1500s to the early 2000s to investigate the role of endurance running while hunting. These included some first-hand accounts of different nomadic groups including the Evenki people in Siberia, the Innu in Canada, the Mbuti in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Pitjantjatjara in Australia, the Inuit in Alaska, and more. Some of these ethnographic sources revealed that hunters sometimes ran over 62 miles in one pursuit.
In addition to reviewing these accounts, the team used mathematical modeling to look at the various scenarios that could play out over a pursuit. They varied the size of the prey, how quickly or slowly a human pursued the animals (walking or running), and the distance covered.
The models found that in the right context, faster-paced endurance pursuit can increase energy returns. The models revealed that the calorific gains of endurance running were comparable to other hunting methods.
[Related: Why are humans good at endurance running? The answer is murky.]
“We were able to show that running or a mix of running and walking can be efficient, and it was a global practice by foragers prior to the modern era,” Morin and Winterhalder say. “In short, endurance pursuits would have provided hominins with an evolutionary advantage while competing with carnivores for game.”
The study suggests this type of hunting strategy would have been available to Pleistocene hominins (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) and may also have had a role in human evolution. However, Morin and Winterhalder stress that this work does not speak directly to human’s evolutionary past, since it relies on ethnographic accounts from recent history.
If you like to run but do not like a sweaty backside, try a pair of SwampButt Underwear.