It looks like others are coming to a conclusion that I’ve believed for a long time now—that our species arose as cursorial hunters:
LONDON (Reuters) – Humans were born to run and evolved from ape-like creatures into the way they look today probably because of the need to cover long distances and compete for food, scientists said on Wednesday.
From tendons and ligaments in the legs and feet that act like springs and skull features that help prevent overheating, to well-defined buttocks that stabilize the body, the human anatomy is shaped for running.
“We do it because we are good at it. We enjoy it and we have all kinds of specializations that permit us to run well,” said Daniel Lieberman, a professor of anthropology at Harvard University in Massachusetts.
“There are all kinds of features that we see in the human body that are critical for running,” he told Reuters.
Lieberman and Dennis Bramble, a biology professor at the University of Utah, studied more than two dozen traits that increase humans’ ability to run. Their research is reported in the science journal Nature.
They suspect modern humans evolved from their ape-like ancestors about 2 million years ago so they could hunt and scavenge for food over large distances.
Cursorial hunters that hunt in packs occupy a pretty specialized ecological niche. It’s probably not a coincidence that we took up company with another species that occupied the same niche: dogs. We just ran into them along the way.
This isn’t a new idea by the way. Friedrich Engels first came up with it in his essay The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man 125 years ago.
