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Here, you imagine an ancestor like Homo erectus sprinting on the grassy savanna to a patch of trees to escape one of the formidable predators that roamed over A

by kirse 17y ago

Here, you imagine an ancestor like Homo erectus sprinting on the grassy savanna to a patch of trees to escape one of the formidable predators that roamed over Africa 2 million years ago.... Our ancestors walked a lot carrying heavy weight in order to move camp and bring back as much of the kill as they could. Power walking, laden with real weight on the order of 35 to 100 pounds, is an effective modern version of what our ancestors did. Oh really? Where exactly do we confirm this through empirical evidence? I love how "science" has gotten to the point where we completely make shit up about what supposed cave-men did 2 million or 40,000 years ago (with absolutely no solid evidence whatsoever for their true daily habits) and then apply that to modern training regimens. This supposed portion of a "research paper" blows. It's about the equivalent of Gladwell's pop psychology that sounds great from a first read but has no solid scientific backing whatsoever. I don't even see a single source cited at the bottom.

Kaizyn 17y ago
Here's a thought experiment for you. If you were a hunter-gatherer out on a hunt and you succeed in killing something, how would you get that kill back to your camp? Would you leave it all there or carry as much as you were able back? Science does leave room for applying common sense, you know. Anthropological studies of modern hunter-gatherer societies also provides pretty good insight into these sorts of issues too.
- lena 17y ago
  The thing is that that already assumes way too much about how people two million (!) years ago lived. Already there are lots of differences between modern hunter-gatherer societies, so why assume that one of these ways was the way we are "evolved" to be? Not too long ago archeologists found remains of the earliest people found in my area. The theory was that they mostly killed small prey (think rabbits) and ate fruit, vegetables and insects, so there would be no need to carry back large prey. Another comment links to an account of hunter gatherers running around, tiring their prey to death, discounting the idea that people in hunter-gatherer societies do not run long distances.
_delirium 17y ago
Yeah, he could definitely do with some less off-the-cuff guesses. There's actually quite a lot of debate about it in the scientific literature, because bipedalism is a somewhat odd feature, and we don't have enough evidence to really say for sure why it evolved initially, and what pressures guided its subsequent evolution. Possibly by coincidence, I think his guess is actually in line with majority opinion, that long-distance treks had more effect than running on evolution of human bipedalism / skeletal structure / etc. But some researchers disagree, arguing that endurance running may well have had a large evolutionary role: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/krigbaum/proseminar/Bramble_Leib_2004_nature.pdf http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/krigbaum/proseminar/Bramble_Le...

by kirse 17y ago

Kaizyn 17y ago

Here's a thought experiment for you. If you were a hunter-gatherer out on a hunt and you succeed in killing something, how would you get that kill back to your camp? Would you leave it all there or carry as much as you were able back? Science does leave room for applying common sense, you know. Anthropological studies of modern hunter-gatherer societies also provides pretty good insight into these sorts of issues too.

lena 17y ago
The thing is that that already assumes way too much about how people two million (!) years ago lived. Already there are lots of differences between modern hunter-gatherer societies, so why assume that one of these ways was the way we are "evolved" to be? Not too long ago archeologists found remains of the earliest people found in my area. The theory was that they mostly killed small prey (think rabbits) and ate fruit, vegetables and insects, so there would be no need to carry back large prey. Another comment links to an account of hunter gatherers running around, tiring their prey to death, discounting the idea that people in hunter-gatherer societies do not run long distances.

_delirium 17y ago

Yeah, he could definitely do with some less off-the-cuff guesses. There's actually quite a lot of debate about it in the scientific literature, because bipedalism is a somewhat odd feature, and we don't have enough evidence to really say for sure why it evolved initially, and what pressures guided its subsequent evolution. Possibly by coincidence, I think his guess is actually in line with majority opinion, that long-distance treks had more effect than running on evolution of human bipedalism / skeletal structure / etc. But some researchers disagree, arguing that endurance running may well have had a large evolutionary role: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/krigbaum/proseminar/Bramble_Leib_2004_nature.pdf http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/krigbaum/proseminar/Bramble_Le...