Chris MacDougall, author of the much-credited work Born to Run, popularized the idea of man as a "persistence hunter." People find this idea very compelling for some reason, but I never have.
Here's the idea in a nutshell: humans are uniquely efficient runners, to the degree that teams of runners can chase down wild game on foot. That is about as far as McDougall himself goes in his book about Mexican tribespeople who run long distances in sandals.
But the fact that some groups have gathered food this way overtook the imagination of people who have never hunted game or foraged food. In their minds, we soft-footed, slow, ungainly primates are so good at slow running that we actually based our diet around hunting this way.
In this telling, plants (which don't run away) are starvation foods, used in times of scarcity.
Reddit's "Today I Learned" sub-Reddit recently featured someone who "just learned" these facts. People are continually "learning" this fact on Reddit and Twitter and TikTok and Facebook, it seems
Redditor Bareegyptianfeet tells us of his learning that "...we aren't the best sprinters, [but] our slow-twitch muscles and unique ability to sweat allow us to run steadily for long distances in hot weather to outlast prey." Rutilatus agrees that "our naturally insane metabolism is what makes it all possible. Eat some nuts, run 30 miles, finally kill the thing, carry it back. Survival." The self-proclaimed GingaNinja1427 gets close an insight when he says "Humans are the only species that can theoretically run for a full day. Edit: Theoretically as in, I could run all day (I can not)".
They are concurring with an article on the UC Davis blog that claims that "Our locomotor muscles are dominated by slow-twitch, fatigue-resistant fibers and our unique ability to sweat allows our bodies to effectively dissipate heat." But these reflections overstate what the article reports and what the abstract of the source study provides, which is: "...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."
That is to say that a novel mathematical model suggests that in certain cases "endurance hunting" techniques might be comparable to other hunting techniques in terms of the amount of food returned for energy invested. This is a pretty modest claim, especially because the database of "endurance hunts" that supports is based largely on reports of tribes with advanced hunting weapons and includes hunt scenarios that are not representative of hunts in the areas where human ancestors lived. For example, hunts in the mountainous American west where signallers on hilltops could visually track prey and coordinate teams of hunters, and hunts in the far North through crusted snow.
In short, this compares "endurance hunting" to ambush hunting in terms of its efficiency and suggests that in certain situations it might be as efficient as ambush hunting is, or maybe a bit better. That is, where you wait around or sneak up and ambush a (not-exhausted) animal with a weapon.
To say that humans "evolved" to use this mode of hunting would be basically to put a stepstool on top of another stepstool. First you have to agree that hunting formed a significant point of evolutionary pressure for humans, and then you have to believe that the form of hunting which developed in response to those pressures what endurance hunting through persistent chase (as opposed to the other tactics referenced in the study). And another stepstool on the wobbly belief ladder would be that the accounts in the database were trustiworthy and were categorized fairly, and that the mathematical models designed to evaluate their efficiency produces meaningful results that were correctly interpreted by the authors of the study.
I'll not go into the often acrimonious discussions between anthropologists about the significance and quality of the work of their peers and predecessors. But even if we grant absolute accuracy to the study authors and the anthropologists who observed the hunts, the very first step is the weakest one, wherein believers say that hunting was so important to human development that there was an evolutionary selection toward genetically-gifted hunters.
There is no serious debate that in the temperate, tropical, sub-tropical, and arid climates where human ancestors live, foraging for plants, insects, eggs and honey is a vastly more efficient and reliable way of gathering food than hunting of any kind is, ambush or persistence. Anthropologists in more recent times who took into account food gathering activities of so-called "hunter-gatherer" tribes have estimated that animal flesh makes up between 0 and 20% of total calories for these people. Put simply, they can do without them.
I'm not saying that persistence hunting is impossible, as there have been recorded instances of tribes succeeding at it. But it's undeniably a leisure activity, pursued by people who already have a secure food supply. Because while a group of successful persistence hunters can
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