| A few counterpoints: 1. Heavy reliance on plants does not preclude nutritional/energetic value of, desire for and effort exerted to obtain meat. 2. Prevalence of small-game trapping/hunting does not preclude the importance of big-game persistence hunting and carcass poaching. Small-game heavy diet can be dangerously light on fat compared to protein. [1] Dietary fat tends to be harder to obtain, is more important in the short-term, and has higher energetic value than protein. Big-game gets you lots of fat and extremely high nutrient organs. 3. Endurance running for persistence hunting does not require much speed, it mostly requires…persistence. Persistence is pain-tolerance. Pain tolerance is lacking in modern society. Pain tolerance is also very easy to improve. I’ve personally seen average runners break through mental
barriers to become excellent runners. 4. It’s illogical to compare individual humans to other humans in order to refute a claim about the relative ability of the human species as compared to other species. 5. Similarly, it’s illogical to use variance when most humans today have no need to run at all and others voluntarily run far longer than any persistence hunter would ever choose to do (in resource constrained environments of the past). In such a situation, outliers will be extreme and the floor will be overpopulated relative to the past. And yet, the floor may still be higher than it would otherwise have been if not for our history. In fact, the presence of extreme outliers might indicate that the species itself is more capable than the current average indicates. 5. A mile is not an endurance run. It may seem that way nowadays to an unpracticed runner, but not to any trained/habitual runner and certainly not to any persistence hunter. 6. Stocky individuals can still run far. They just can’t do it as fast as equally trained lighter humans. This doesn’t say anything about how they compare to prey animals over the same distance. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning |