| I don't know if I really agree with this. Humans absolutely did hunt large animals for meat. If you read the famous book 'Born to Run' which funnily enough this article has citations to, it describes that tribes still exist today that are incredible endurance runners and are that way because of running concepts they use that are not taught outside of those tribes. One of the main benefits of humans compared to animals is that we can breathe independently of our stride, whereas many animals rely on their stride for breathing. The sample from high school is not a very good explanation as to whether we're meant to be good at endurance running at all. It's like saying students that didn't show critical thinking at tasks in high school demonstrate that humans aren't good at critical thinking. Or if only the top ~10% of students achieve all A grades, does that mean that humans aren't good at linguistics and numeracy? I don't think so. Our early humans were running at very young ages and not running for the sake of running but because it's just what you did. There are plenty of people I knew in high school that didn't run and weren't considered good runners that are now running quite fast through half/full marathons. Furthermore, our advantage as humans as described isn't necessarily speed, but our ability to run for a long time. We don't live the lives of our ancient counterparts and therefore it is difficult to make connections on human endurance performance based on the performances of people today. |