jimmboilife: Horses and humans have the most prolific sweating mechanism, most other mammals rely more on panting.
Panting actually cools you down faster and is less costly *but* you can’t run while doing it. It involves a short exhale of air from the upper part of the lungs, which conflicts with your need to seriously breathe while running.
So sweating is best for long distance.
ERRORMONSTER: As we have been taught, compared to other animals, we are literally the terminator.
We can recover from what would be life-threatening injuries for other animals and we aren’t as fast as them, but they can never get away from us. We recover absurdly fast compared to other animals thanks to our over-active scar tissue filling in every injury imaginable. Some of us have also, when times require it, performed surgery on ourselves.
Edit: all of [this](https://i.imgur.com/1IuC9AS.jpg)
Guy_In_Florida: It was literally impossible to get away from a Navajo or Comanche on horseback if he was on foot. Your horse would blast away at 20 mph for 10 minutes leaving him far behind in the dust. Now your horse has to walk. The Indian starts to run in that shuffling stride that is 2x or 3x as fast as a horse walks. Even if you run your horse again, he is gaining on you. Sooner or later you stop, you sleep, he’s there soon after.
Ayy_2_Brute: Read a great book about this by Charles Carrier called ‘Running After Antelope’. It’s about the author’s real-life attempt to chase down a pronghorn antelope to exhaustion. Fantastic read.
5raptorboy: Humans are like primate wolves, pretty much
DenebVegaAltair: This is an actual manifestation of “slow and steady wins the race”. Aesop was really onto something.
go_kart_mozart: The only question I have is what does he do now with 300+ lbs of meat when he’s exhausted and hours and hours of running away from everyone else? And those are just the other hunters I’m talking about, no idea how far away he is from the rest of his tribe.
gpriske: Every box of Oreos is a test of my endurance.
AnomalousAvocado: I guarantee you I could not outrun *any* animal.
m_faustus: I had an anthropology professor who told us a story about a guy he knew who took advantage of human endurance to capture baboons. The guy was a big athletic guy and was in Africa traveling but had run out of money and took a job catching baboons to be lab animals. He would go out to where that baboons were and just pick one of them and starting jogging towards it. The baboon would get freaked out and run away and he would just keep jogging after it. After a while the baboon would collapse from exhaustion and the guy would pick it up, put it in a cage, rest a bit and then pick a new baboon. He did this on days when there weren’t any lions about. When there were lions, he would just go back to camp and wait for the next day.
Sammweeze: I’ve always thought of humans as physically slower or weaker than virtually every other animal; this is a real eye opener. The guys in this video are the most badass hunters I’ve ever seen.
Kingsolomanhere: For anyone that has hiked the Grand Canyon, Tim Freriks recently ran from the south rim to the north rim (21 miles) in 2 hours 39 minutes for a new record. Last year Jim Walmsley went rim to rim to rim (42 miles) in 5 hours 55 minutes. Humans are the badass distance runners on the planet
diiejso: My great grandfather would do this during the US Great Depression with rabbits and other small game when he was a kid because they couldn’t afford bullets.
harry_the_heir: The book Born to Run by Christopher McDougall covers this topic really well. He goes into our history as a species and how we used to run down large prey. In fact there are people on Africa who still do this. He hooked up with a group of people from a tribe who run down deer and antelope and witnessed them do this firsthand.
He also has a lot of anecdotes in a similar vein. Like how on hot days a person can easily outrun a dog due to our ability to sweat. Also apparently there is a race somewhere (California?) where is humans versus horses for something like 100 miles. Humans have won almost every time.
The_Wack_Knight: I seen this in action. Being in the Air Force, we do this thing called FOD(foreign object debris) walks where you get on a flight line in a huge long line across the flight line itself and all walk in one direction picking up any foreign objects like trash or metal on the flight line. Anything that could be dangerous for a plane to hit or suck into its engine. As our huge 100 or more line was walking from one side to the other, a fox came out of its burrow, saw our line of impending doom (or so he thought). And started running away from us. By the end of the FOD walk he seemed very exhausted and barely got around our line of people. We werent even jogging, we literally Jason Vorhees walked him into exhaustion. Still feel bad for the poor guy. We didn’t expend really ANY energy.
ThisIsTrix: “Run”? “Sweat”? “Distance”?
Nope. I’d starve.
whater39: It sounds like we are the monster in horror movies, we just keep on coming after the prey slowly.
netmndr35: Also the ability to carry water. Other animals need to stop and drink at a place with water. Since humans can drink water on the go it allows more time and distance to chance!
s0nie: Andrew Ucles!
grumplenuts: We’re the Michael Myers of the animal kingdom.
themattbradley1: I highly recommend checking out the film The Great Dance :a Hunter’s Story. It is an hour long documentary about these three San men. They are remarkable hunters and trackers. It’s available on YouTube.
https://youtu.be/UisnHp0Oqc4
cdirty1: Walking on two legs freeing up our two hands to carry things, like water, is a big advantage in this regard as well.
rloftis6: Check out Born to Run by Christopher McDougall.
rowan771: It also helps that usually the animal would have a spear/arrow wound.
DukeMaximum: I’ve always heard it called “pursuit predation.”
Vaguely related, a couple years ago, I came across a bunch of short science fiction, told from the perspective of aliens, about how humans were basically the badasses of the universe. There were facts like, “a human can recover from any wound that isn’t immediately lethal. Aim for the head,” and “humans can track you in complete darkness by detecting disturbances in the air.” Really cool stuff.
Rafterman374: TIL how to catch a deer by hand!
Panini_Mon: Born to run my Christopher McDougall explains this phenomenon in an easy fun read if you want to know a bit more about how the human body is physically and anatomically built for distance running
Jay_Tee_G: Our ability to carry food (more than we can regurgitate) from far off kill sites to the tribe was an amazing game changer for evolution, allowing for the division of labor between the se,especially to occur as well
suburban_hyena: Humans and dogs have dangerous amounts of stamina and endurance
BloudinRuo: And I think people underestimate the distances in these hunts. Tens of miles, probably upwards of 30 during the day. And the tracking experience to follow a single Kudu or any other antelope for that distance through any kind of terrain is amazing, and has been honed through the clause of “learn this or die”.
I’ve tracked Kudu. I’ve seen *real* trackers at work. You think to yourself there’s nothing here, but then they trudge on and ten minutes later behold, there it is. It’s very much a connection with the land and the animals.
Now the real question is, when the one guy has finally succeeded and is miles away from the rest of the group, which in turn are miles away from the village, how are you going to carry a 600lb Kudu bull?
HoustonWelder: Too dumb to create arrows, guns and traps but skilled enough to run from the police.
MJWood: Seriously, this must be the most inefficient way to hunt possible. It must use more energy than any other hunting technique.
