Here is how persistence hunting works:
One person sprints after the prey. The prey escapes temporary, but the sprinter follows, but stays close enough behind to point the rest of the group to where the prey is recovering from its sprint.
Repeat a few more times, the prey collapses from exhaustion, and someone kills it with a rock.
The theory that persistence hunting played a crucial part in the evolution of man was first suggested in 1984 by David Carrier.
Carrier’s idea was based on the observation that man is one of the only mammals that cools itself by sweating. Most four-legged mammals pant to cast off heat, but they are physically unable to pant while they gallop.
Carrier concluded that if our early human ancestors could chase an animal long enough, the animal would overheat and collapse with heat exhaustion, and the humans could kill it easily.
Carrier’s idea was advanced by the Harvard paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman. In an email, Lieberman wrote:
As for anatomical, genetic, and paleontological evidence, there are so many derived features of humans that make us good at running and which have no other function, they clearly indicate humans were selected for long distance running.
He has noted that those features —arched feet, short toes, wide shoulders, long Achilles tendons —seem to have originated around two million years ago, around the time when our ancestors began making meat a regular part of their diet.
Persistence hunting, he’s argued, might have been the evolutionary driver.
Eventually, Lieberman’s ideas came to the attention of the popular author Christopher McDougall, who wrote about the theory in “Born to Run,” his bestselling 2009 book about endurance running.
McDougall argued that the features identified by Lieberman explain why we like to run marathons, even ultra-marathons, and are fairly good at it.
When we run distances, he implied, we are fulfilling our biological destiny.