Early Hominids: From Scavengers to Persistence Hunters

Did you know that a trained human runner can outrun any animal on earth? It’s true; this includes animals such as a cheetah or a horse. I mean, yes, humans are terrible sprinters when compared to other non-human primates, but we have what it takes to outrun any animal in the long run. That’s because we evolved to run, or better said, we evolved to hunt other animals via persistence hunting which is a hunting method that aims to run an animal down to exhaustion by keeping the animal running at a trotting pace for long periods of time (where the animal is not allowed to rest).— but we didn’t always have this ability to engage in persistence hunting. We first began as scavengers in the evolutionary past.

Citations

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Carrier, D.R.; et al. (Aug–Oct 1984). "The Energetic Paradox of Human Running and Hominid Evolution". Current Anthropology. 25 (4): 483–495.

Dominguez-Rodrigo, M., and T. Pickering
2003 Early Hominid Hunting and Scavenging. A Zooarchaeological Review. Evolutionary Anthropology 12(6):275-282.

Pickering, Travis Rayne; Bunn, Henry (October 2007). "The endurance running hypothesis and hunting and scavenging in savanna-woodlands". Journal of Human Evolution. 53 (4): 434–438.

Walter M. Bortz II (February 1984). "Physical exercise as an evolutionary force". Journal of Human Evolution. 14 (2): 145–155.

Liebenberg, Louis
1990 The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science. David Philip, Cape Town.

Liebenberg, Louis
2006 Persistence Hunting by Modern Hunter-Gatherers. Current Anthropology 47(6):1017-1025.

Lieberman, D. E., and D. M. Bramble
2007 The Evolution of Marathon Running: Capabilities in Humans. Sports Medicine 37(4-5):288-290.

Lieberman, Daniel E., et al.
2007a The Evolution of Endurance Running and the Tyranny of Ethnography: A Reply to. Journal of Human Evolution 53(4):434-437.

McDougall, C.
2009 Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, Super athletes, And The Greatest Race The World Has Never Seen. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Sikes, N.
1999 Plio-Pleistocene floral context and habitat preferences of sympatric hominid species in East Africa. In African Biogeography, Climate Change, and Human Evolution. T. Bromage and F. Schrenk, eds. Pp. 301-315: Oxford University Press.

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