Since the Stone Age, hunters have brought down big game with spears, atlatls, and bows and arrows. Now, a new study reveals traditional societies around the globe also relied on another deadly but often-overlooked weapon: our legs.
According to a report published today in Nature Human Behaviour, running down big game such as antelope, moose, and even kangaroos was far more widespread than previously recognized. Researchers documented nearly 400 cases of endurance pursuits—a technique in which prey are chased to exhaustion—by Indigenous peoples around the globe between the 16th and 21st centuries. And in some cases, they suggest, it can be more efficient than stealthy stalking.
The findings bolster the idea that humans evolved to be hunting harriers, says Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University. “Nobody else has come up with any other explanation for why humans evolved to run long distances,” says Lieberman, who adds that he’s impressed with the paper’s “depth of scholarship.”
For decades, some anthropologists have argued that endurance running was among the first hunting techniques employed by early hominins in Africa. Advocates suggest subsequent millennia spent chasing down prey shaped many unique human features, including our springy arched feet, slow-twitch muscle fibers optimized for efficiency, heat-shedding bare skin, and prodigious ability to sweat. The “born to run” idea has become something of an origin story among many endurance athletes.
But a pack of skeptics has dogged the theory. Critics cited the higher energetic costs of running over walking and noted that accounts of persistence hunting among modern foragers are rare.
Yet hints of such pursuits kept popping up as Eugène Morin, an archaeologist at Trent University and co-author of the new paper, scoured the literature for a book he was writing on hunting among traditional societies. As he pored over early accounts by missionaries, travelers, and explorers, he repeatedly found descriptions of long-distance running and tracking.
For Morin and his colleagues, the study was its own exercise in endurance: They spent more than 5 years exploring the ethnographic literature and other sources, surveying more than 8000 texts spanning about 500 years. “I don’t think you can exaggerate just how much effort they must have put in,” Lieberman says.
The researchers found 391 historical reports of endurance pursuits around the world—an order of magnitude more than what was previously known.
For example, one rich trove of information about Native Americans’ hunting methods came from the Culture Element Distribution surveys conducted by the University of California (UC) in the 1930s and 1940s. Among 141 western North American societies surveyed, 114, or 81%, practiced some form of persistence hunting.
“It’s probably a lot more ubiquitous than we understood,” says co-author Bruce Winterhalder, a behavioral ecologist at UC Davis and pioneering scholar of forager theory. “When it does work, it’s just as good, or maybe better, than other techniques.”
Sometimes running was more efficient than quietly stalking prey, the study suggests. Running costs more energy than walking, but when it’s successful, it allows for a quicker kill—and a better return on time invested.
The authors cite a hypothetical hunt of a gemsbok, a large antelope from southern Africa. At a walk, a hunter might pursue the quarry for 2 hours and cover 8 kilometers before killing it. By speeding up the chase to 10 kilometers per hour—a trot within the ability of many recreational joggers—the hunter might drive the creature to exhaustion in only 24 minutes, resulting in a fivefold greater payoff in calories gained per time invested.
When hunting faster prey, humans can rely on our unusual ability to run at a steady pace for hours and keep cool by sweating. A skilled tracker can force faster running prey into a relentless cycle of sprinting, overheating, exhaustion, and eventual collapse—then finish off the animal with a coup de grâce delivered by spear or club.
Hunters also employed slow running if faster prey could be disadvantaged by snow, rocky terrain, soft sand, or soggy ground. Sudanese hunters slogged through daylong pursuits of giraffes when the animals were slowed by rain-softened ground. Ojibwe hunters wore snowshoes to chase down elk that became exhausted by sinking into deep drifts.
Cara Wall-Scheffler, a biological anthropologist at Seattle Pacific University, applauded the new paper for adding a wealth of new examples. But she notes the study’s own findings confirm that persistence hunting was rare and that other methods were more common in the historical record. She doubts the technique was a powerful force in human evolution. “Selection acting every single day, everywhere, is more powerful, and persistence running is definitely not an everyday occurrence,” she says. “This paper actually doubles down with how unusual [it] is.”
Others remain skeptical that occasional behaviors by traditional societies offer a reliable guide to what human ancestors might have done millions of years ago. Linking the evolution of human traits to persistence running “can become a just-so story,” says Scott Simpson, a paleoanthropologist at Case Western Reserve University who has done extensive research on human evolution in Africa. “Maybe persistence hunting was part of the mix, but I doubt it was a big part.”
The authors acknowledge that endurance running represented just one arrow in the hunter’s quiver alongside other techniques such as communal hunts, traps and snares, quiet stalking, and ambush. Yet even if Paleolithic runners were more like weekend warriors than full-time marathoners, that’s still a useful skill, they say.
