Plague of Strength

Before I begin this installment, allow me to reiterate the point of this series- it’s to point out the futility and stupidity of high-intensity distance running- marathon training, etc.  This is not a series of blogs about the evils of endurance training, a diatribe against running in general, or a suggestion that superheroes lack physical endurance… all of which were somehow posited in the comments of the first entry in this series.  With that behind us (forlorn hope, but it springs eternal), let us move on to the science behind my supposition.

Let’s look at it from an evolutionary perspective, shall we?

In the narrative of Born To Run, author Christopher McDougall discovered what anyone who’s seen the television show Last Man Standing already knew- the Tarahumara Indians drink a lot of corn liquor and run a lot.  His book was apparently life-altering to many Americans eager to latch onto the newest, latest exercise fad, and people snatched up the Tarahumara “barefoot running” shoes just as fast as some poor Guatemalan slave in a sweatshop could turn them out.  His book, however, only presented one side of a debate so hotly contested in archaeology that it’s starting to resemble the type of battle raps that got Biggie and 2Pac whacked out.  Their vitriol is of course far more restrained, what with the fact that they’re pasty-faced academics and the pro-running side consists of impressively biased distance athletes, but it’s there nevertheless.

McDougall based his work primarily on the contentions of Dennis Bramble and Daniel Lieberman, who co-authored the article “Endurance running and the evolution of Homo” in 2004.  (Nature) Bear in mind, while considering the following, that Lieberman is described as “a short 41 year old with a receding hairline, a slight paunch, and disarming dimples” who “doesn’t look athletic” but “he has been a jogger since his teens.”(Discover)  Clearly, their argument is off to a shaky start if their physiques are any indication- much like the training advice given by a pasty-faced computer nerd should be considered dubious at best.  As the champions of this side of the debate, they rely heavily on anecdotal evidence and a bit of biology to support their theory, which is plainly stated as “man is a natural endurance runner rather than walker”.  Their initial support for this theory is pretty amusing, as they compare sprint performance between humans and two animals wildly unlike them- horses and greyhounds.  Amusingly, both of these species bear similar foot structure, in that their weight is borne on their toes, making them ill-suited to walking quickly, but well-suited to running.  Additionally, both are quadrupedal, which makes a racing comparison between humans and those animals akin to a comparison of the sexual practices of Annabel Chong and a dead lemur.  They go on to discuss at great length the ability of the human body to rotate, our ability to shed heat, our bone density, muscular asses, and the shape of our thoraxes as support for their theory, which is that humans were practically designed intelligently to be good at ER.

In wildly contradictory fashion, they admit at the end of the article that enough evidence exists in regards to humans’ innate ability to walk long distances that “it is reasonable to hypothesize that Homo evolved to travel long distances both by walking and by running” and that the utilization of ER for persistence hunting “might have been too energetically expensive and low-yield for the benefits to have outweighed the costs.”(351)  Their academic detractors are two guys by the name of Pickering and Bunn, who engendered a great deal of enmity in their jogging counterparts by nitpicking the everloving shit out of the “ER and Homos” article cited above.  As I’m unwilling to pay $20 for the dubious privilege of reading that article and can glean the bulk of their argument from Liberman and Bramble’s counter-rebuttal.  Pickering and Dunn, it seem, have their heads just about as far up their asses as Bramble and buddies, as they decided to directly attack every point in the Homo article rather than producing actual sound evidence that would contradict the hypotheses and logical stretches taken by the joggers.  As such, this duty would seem to fall to me.

I actually own this book, and it’s not half bad.

I’ve read a wide array of books ranging from the patently absurd to the utterly useless and back again, and never once, outside of born to run, did I hear of a method of hunting that involved three people chasing a single small animal for 18 miles until it dies of exhaustion.  The only methods resembling persistence hunting of which I read were used to hunt big game during the Ice Age, and it consisted of an ambush, in which the animal is injured via projectile or by a series of dashes at the beast with spears, attempting to make serious but not mortal wounds and then retreating, and then following it at a walk until the beast collapses of blood loss and died.  This is apparently the way mammoths were hunted by Ice Age hunters, and involved an entire tribe moving nomadically across the plain to follow their food source. Evidence exists from the Pleistocene period that even Homo Habilis, Erectus, and Heidelbergensis used this sort of method, and one site in Germany provides solid evidence of this- wooden throwing spears were found in situ with the remains of ten butchered horses.  (Thieme)

Early humans (the Cro-Magnons) relied heavily on big game hunting as a subsistence strategy, and are credited in large part with the megafauna die offs in the Upper Paleolithic.  (O’Niel)  For those of you still clinging to Born to Run like it’s some sort of cock-sucking machine slash Bible slash security blanket, you’re fucked- no three fucktards looking like they’ve got cancer of the AIDS were running down mammoths and stabbing them to death in droves.  If they were, their diets wouldn’t suck to the degree they do now. Additionally, no person with the ability to run 400 miles in 5 days would have the muscular strength necessary to kill megafauna with a glorified sharp stick- they’re too fucking skinny to do so.

Persistance hunting, by if you’re curious, consists of a couple of guys chasing a single animal through the desert until it collapses from overheating and exhaustion.  The !Kung hunters, for instance, typically run 30 km in teams of three on each antelope hunt, returning with an amount of meat so paltry when shared out amongst the group that any financial advisor would mock them for having a return on investment lower than current cd rates.  The pre-Homo Sapiens sapiens anscestors of the !Kung, not being fucking idiots, abandoned this method of food gathering along with everyone else- at the advent of the spear (i.e. at least 400,000 years ago).(Thieme) Although the !Kung are among the couple of groups still credited as utilizing this method, the !Kung Bushmen and the Tarahumara indians of Mexico, but it’s really a misrepresentation.  Neither of these groups really eats any meat (the Tarahumera get most of their calories from corn, and subsist on a diet consisting of only 10% protein, 10% fat, and 80% carbs), and that which they do is farmed.  Consequently, the Tarahumera have abandoned the practice except to display their running skills for Westerners,and the Bushmen rarely eat the meat they kill by running it to death.  Lest you still doubt anyone who would dare defy the mighty writings of the Born to Run jackass, even his beloved Lieberman and Bramble freely admitted in their rebuttal to Pickering and Bunn that “ER is no longer common among living foragers” and admit that their theory is thus “a puzzle”, even to themselves. (Liberman, et al.)

Extant stone age societies like the Ache of Paraguay (who actually eat meat) move through the forest continuously, hunting peccary.  They walk briskly or jog lightly and then sprint to close on their prey.(Devany 49)  They are so fast, in fact, that even the 50+ year olds amongst them could outrun collegiate sprinters who studied them.  (Hill)  This falls in line with the evidence offered by Peter McAllister, who cited the fact that tracks have been found in Australian that appear to show a group of humans running at high speeds, one of whom was moving at 37 KPH (22.2 MPH) through a muddy lakeshore… and his lengthing strides indicate that he was accelerating.  (McAllister 25-26)  Similarly, most of the paleo authors seem to agree with Art Devany, who contends that we’re better suited to walking and sprinting than running long distances (Devany 98), in part due to the fact that that long bouts of intense aerobic exercise cause harmful oxidation (Devany 100)  In stark contradiction to the assertions of Liberman et al, Robb Wolff even uses the example of the Bushmen in the Paleo Solution, though he mentions them as walking, rather than running, 15-19 miles a day- a statistic that falls in line with the suggestions by various writers that the !Kungs’ occasional persistence hunting is almost entirely ceremonial.(Wolff 149)

In spite of these compelling facts, Bramble and his little buddy persist in their total lack of faith in the badassedness of humanity and stick to their guns.  Having apparently never seen the pants-shittingly sweet flick The Edge, in which a geriatric Anthony Hopkins offs a bear with a sharp stick, or having conducted a simple google search on ancient hunting methods, Bramble and Lieberman insist that “spears are used to dispatch prey that have been immobilized or incapacitated by traps, hunting dogs, or other such means.”(Liberman et al 435)  An attempt to kill an animal with a large stick is just too scary and dangerous, insist Bramble and his pals, as “one well aimed kick or impact with an animal’s horns  could cause serious, potentially fatal injury.” (Ibid.)  Of course, they’ll admit that it has been done on the same page, but the fact that it has occurred is meaningless, due to the fact that their arch-nemeses failed to describe how such a thing could have occurred without endurance running or projectile weapons.  Compound this with the alleged fact that “early Homo  was neither strong nor powerful” (Liberman 436), they couldn’t have simply competed with more powerful predators.  I’m not certain where they derived this fact, as it’s fairly well documented that every other primate species is more powerful than modern Homo sapiens sapiens due to their muscle fiber composition.

Oh, don’t think I’m done, fuckers.  Not by a loooooong shot.  In fact, I’ve not even finished cutting up this baby and burying it underneath its dumbassed evolutionary bed.  Still to come, another post about the evolutionary evidence against ER, one about the sports science against it, and then a practical application of sensible training techniques to increase endurance without being a fucking jogger.

Sources:

Bramble DM, Lieberman, DE.  “Endurance running and the evolution of Homo” Nature 18: 234 345-352
Chen, Ingfei.  Born to Run.  Discover Magazine.  5/28/10.
Devaney, Art.  The New Evolution Diet.  2010.
Hill, Kim.  Hunting and Evolution. (1982) J Hum Evol 11: 521-544.
Lieberman, DE, Bramble DM, Raichlen DA, Shea, JJ.  The evolution of endurance running and the tyranny of ethnography: A reply to Pickering and Bunn. J Hum Evol 53 (200&) 434-437.
McAllister,Peter.  Manthropology.  2010.
McDougall, Christopher.  Born to Run.  2009.
O’Neil, Dennis.  Early Modern Human Culture.  http://anthro.palomar.edu/homo2/mod_homo_5.htm
Thieme, Hartmut.  Lower Palaeolithic hunting spears from Germany.  Nature 385, 807 – 810 (27 February 1997)
Wolff, Robb.  Paleo Solution. 2010.

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