The Body Has Evolved To Run, So Why Not The Brain?
2 million years to run an ultra-marathon
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were, in effect, on a camping trip that lasted a lifetime, and they had to solve many different kinds of problems well to survive and reproduce under those conditions […]
— Cosmides and Tooby, 2013
Chris McDougall’s epic book “Born to Run” has been an inspiration to many runners and introduced its readers to the possible benefits of barefoot running and the legendary Tarahumara tribe — a seemingly superhuman band of distance runners remaining largely hidden from the rest of the world.
However, for me, what I found most captivating, was the suggestion that humans have, over the millennia, evolved key physical adaptations to facilitate running large distances. Indeed, research by Bramble and Lieberman (published in Nature in 2004) argues that
“[…] endurance running is a derived capability of the genus Homo, originating about 2 million years ago, and may have been instrumental in the evolution of the human form.”
