ArticleNature human behaviour2024
Ethnography and ethnohistory support the efficiency of hunting through endurance running in humans.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Why Do Humans Exercise? A Neuro-Evolutionary Framework for Discretionary Physical Effort.Evolutionary anthropology · 2026Review
- The fitness costs and benefits of hunter-gatherer locomotor engagement.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Extensive locomotor versatility across a global sample of hunter-gatherer societies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
Humans have two features rare in mammals: our locomotor muscles are dominated by fatigue-resistant fibres and we effectively dissipate through sweating the metabolic heat generated through prolonged, elevated activity. A promising evolutionary explanation of these features is the endurance pursuit (EP) hypothesis, which argues that both traits evolved to facilitate running down game by persistence. However, this hypothesis has faced two challenges: running is energetically costly and accounts of EPs among late twentieth century foragers are rare. While both observations appear to suggest that EPs would be ineffective, we use foraging theory to demonstrate that EPs can be quite efficient. We likewise analyse an ethnohistoric and ethnographic database of nearly 400 EP cases representing 272 globally distributed locations. We provide estimates for return rates of EPs and argue that these are comparable to other pre-modern hunting methods in specified contexts. EP hunting as a method of food procurement would have probably been available and attractive to Plio/Pleistocene hominins.
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Registered trials
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