Running man

Couch potatoes may disagree, but people are fairly well built to run in the heat. We sweat more per unit of body surface area than any other animal, and our upright posture exposes less body surface to the sun than would walking on all fours, and more surface to the cooling wind. On the hunt, those traits give people a distinct advantage over most quarry. In fact, Australian Aborigines and various Native American and African groups have traditionally practiced "persistence hunting," chasing antelopes or other game in the midday heat, often for hours, until the animals overheat and collapse.

During the past twenty years, Louis Liebenberg, an animal tracker and the owner of CyberTracker Software in Cape Town, South Africa, has observed the only persistence hunters still left, the !Xo and /Gwi bushmen of the central Kalahari in Botswana. He reports a success rate as high as 80 percent--and a meat yield that beats hunting with bow and arrow, club, or spear. Only hunting with dogs proved superior.

Conditions have to be just right: the days must be long and hot, and the terrain must slow down the quarry. Furthermore, the hunters must be terrifically fit--the runs Liebenberg observed lasted as long as six-and-a-half hours and covered as many as twenty-two miles. And the hunters' tracking skills must be exquisite; finding and following the quarry every time it bolts out of sight or mingles with a herd is no easy task--teamwork helps. But done right, Liebenberg says, persistence hunting is so effective that it may have helped select for the excellent thermoregulatory system, bipedal posture, and long strides that we all possess. Perhaps sadly, the practice is dying out, though the physical skill endures in those who shun couches and run for fun. (Current Anthropology)

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