Cost of transport*

As evolutionary biologist David Carrier pointed out in an influential 1984 article, when they think about the evolution of human locomotion, people usually think about walking, and rarely consider that we can also use those legs to run. To his mind, “The feature that differentiates hominids from other primates is not large brain size, but the set of characters associated with erect bipedal posture and a striding gait.

Humans are often considered to be poor runners, at least in comparison to quadrupeds like horses and dogs, and it is true that our sprinting abilities pale next to theirs. We can’t run nearly as fast as other animals (a greyhound, for example, can run 40 miles per hours, and the champion cheetah attains speeds of 70-75 miles per hours, compared with our paltry sprint times of 20-something miles per hour.) And we burn more calories during it, our “COST OF TRANSPORT,”* a term from animal physiology that refers to the amount of oxygen consumed per unit of body mass for every unit of distance traveled, it up to twice that of other mammals our size. This means that human beings are not particularly efficient runners either.

And yet, if you could hold a marathon for all the world’s beasts, in a Noah’s Ark or long-distance races, somehow compensating for differences in body size, the human runners would be close to breaking the tape first, leaving all but a few other species in the dust, including all of our closest relatives, the primates. Wild dogs and hyenas can run for long periods, as can the migrating ungulates such as wildebeests, but they are exceptions. Monkeys and apes just can’t compete when it comes to so called endurance running. Even horses, well known for their running feats, can falter when racing against humans, the horses need to rest more often, of a human runner can win in the race continues for a sufficient distance, particularly over uneven surfaces. On a more practical note, people from various parts of the world, both historically and today, have been able to hunt animals such as antelopes or kangaroos, simply by running after them until the prey collapse from exhaustion. ~ Page 145/146