It was never stated as jogging, though; it was walking long distances which humans were touted as superior at. We were basically mindful zombies, I suppose.
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ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The “running man” hypothesis – the idea that our ancestors a million or two years ago were casually jogging after prey animals until they dropped from exhaustion due to our supposedly superior endurance – is utter nonsense. It’s absurd on its face and there is absolutely no evidence of any kind supporting it, yet it has become generally accepted as an incontrovertible fact about our past.
The man who initially proposed this idea in the 1960s (Grover Krantz) has become utterly forgotten and is never referenced by the idea’s modern proponents, and for good reason: he was better-known as a staunch believer in the existence of Bigfoot.
Flagstaff@programming.dev 2 days ago
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Krantz talked about walking and jogging, and referenced human performance in marathons as evidence of this idea. People who push this idea today always talk about marathon runners as well.
Flagstaff@programming.dev 1 day ago
Oh. Well, then he’s half-wrong!
jagged@lemmy.world 2 days ago
What is the actually correct idea vs. The jogging forever?
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Just that we never did shit like that. It’s not something that needs an alternative explanation. People tend to assume that it was originally proposed as an explanation of our bipedal locomotion, but Krantz actually suggested it as an explanation for our big brains. He hypothesized that jogging after animals in the heat of the day (he never offered a reason for why this would have occurred only in the daytime) would have resulted in large numbers of neurons dying from heat overload, so a big brain would have allowed this neural death to happen without impairing cognitive function. This is why he proposed the endurance hunting at around two million years ago, when our brain size started increasing from chimpanzee size to modern human size, rather than around five million years ago, when our ancestors made the shift to full bipedality.
But the reasons behind the increased brain size have never really been so controversial as to require some weird explanation like this. We know that it wasn’t a simple overall increase in size, but was rather the result of an increase in the size of areas of the brain responsible for things like language and tool use, which leads to the easy inference that it was language and tool use that caused the increase in brain size.
jagged@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I suppose the question I meant was, how did we catch prey if not jogging after them forever? Or is that unknown? Just trying to update my mental model of what happened! Thanks for the info
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Group hunting most likely, since that’s something all the other great apes (gorillas, chimps and orangutans) do. There’s plenty of footage of chimps surrounding their prey and catching them that way. Also we have omnivore dentition so we ate a lot of plants, and most likely scavenged quite a bit.
In more recent times (like the last million years or so) we used spears, and contemporary hunter/gatherers (like the !Kung who featured in the bit from the David Attenborough documentary that people like to link to as “proof” of the endurance hunting thesis) often used poison with their spears and arrows, which did allow them to leisurely walk after their prey. But only because their prey had been poisoned, not because humans have superior endurance.
eah@programming.dev 1 day ago
I also liked this 1997 radio show episode.
mittyta@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Wow, cool
SSETranquility@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Freakin’ nuts that the skeletons are on display. Small world?
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Isn’t the fact that there are tribes currently using the exact same method, supposed to be evidence for it?
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s not a fact. Who has ever been documented to have done this successfully?
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
🫴
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 1 day ago
In other words, nobody has ever been reliably documented as having done this.
By far the most extensive study of the San peoples ever conducted was in the 1960s and 1970s by Richard Lee and other anthropologists as part of a Harvard study, and there was no mention whatsoever of “persistence hunting.” There was mention of their extensive use of poisoned spears and arrows, which allowed them to track and eventually kill already-wounded animals. Something that could easily be mistaken for persistence hunting.
Hundreds? I would love to see this study.