Both of my parents are Anthropologists. So before I could walk, I had been going to Anthropological meetings and listening to the adults as they talked. I learned that if you just sat around and were quiet, you became part of the furniture and adults would just talk as if you weren't even there. In a way, my brother and I were "child anthropologists" studying the anthropologists at their conferences.

One conversation that was striking to me at the time, was a discussion about a movie where they hunted and chased a giraffe on foot. In the movie, the narrator said the San hunters followed the giraffe for days, never letting the animal rest ... but the secret, working it's way though the anthropologists at the conference in whispers, was that the San were tired and thirsty and so the filmmakers gave them a ride in the jeep to chase down the animal. Getting let into the "secret lie," as a kid, was so interesting that the laughter as they described the "behind-the-scenes" shenanigans has stayed with me for decades.

I think the movie they were talking about was "The Hunters" filmed in 1958 which showed a 13 day hunt of a giraffe. What was depicted in the film "The Hunters" was that the San Ju/’hoansi hunters in the film snuck up, shot a giraffe with a poisoned arrow, then tracked it on foot over days, waiting for the poison to take effect, and essentially hunting the giraffe to exhaustion.

Years later, "The Hunters" director/filmmaker publicly admitted to adding "entertainment enhancements" to his movie. This meant that the "Persistence Hunting" story of the giraffe was false. But the damage to the public's imaginations regarding the myth of "persistence hunting" was done. 

What did he admit to? 

That the film was shot over years with different San,  with different giraffes, that the poisoned arrow was shot from a moving jeep, the San were riding in the filmmaker's jeep chasing the giraffe, and that the San returned to base camp each night because "without the reassurance of the supplies in his Jeep, the Ju/’hoansi might not have been prepared to pursue the giraffe for as long as five days since they could have died of thirst out in the middle of the Kalahari." Some have also suspected that the giraffe was taking so long to die that it was shot with a gun to get that final dramatic collapse on film. But, by the time these issues were admitted ... the film had ingrained itself into the mindset of the public having "learned" that early humans' evolution of endurance helped them to become top of the food chain.

Later it was found that MANY infotainment nature films did similar things because they were more interested in captivating the audience than telling an honest story. You can't sell as many shows or gain as many advertisers if the story is "We chased it and it got away" or "We watched and it did nothing."  For example it was discovered  Disney faked the lemmings running off a cliff by pushing them into a river, and that often their shows/movies about nature were staged for entertainment.  "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom," was found to do similar things as described in the movie named "Cruel Camera". The movie talks about the faking of the lemming scene, how wolves were forced into fighting mountain lions, etc.

If you watch the video "Cruel Camera" and then watch "The Hunters," you see similar film making "drama" techniques like cuts between the giraffe and the San supposedly "hours away" and back and forth shots supposedly showing "action." 

I didn't really think about how much damage to science these nature infotainment movies can cause until I got into an argument with an avid runner who was telling me that humans are the best in the animal kingdom for running. They based their argument on something they called "human persistence hunting." My conversation partner had seen one of those movies as a kid (probably Attenborough's Life of Mammals ), believed this story and was reciting myths like "humans are one of the few animals that sweat, are more efficient runners (two legs vs four), etc.

I thought it was time to discuss this myth of humans as persistent hunters:

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The Origins of the Theory

There is archeological evidence of early humans having used tools to break open bones of larger wild animals in early human campsites. That evidence of humans eating larger animals led to two theories.

  • (Theory 1) "MAN THE HUNTER" : Top of the food chain! Master of all! 
    or
  • (Theory 2)  "Humans were opportunistic scavengers" who went after the bits that were uneaten by top-level predators like crocodiles and saber-toothed cats.

Literature is filled with the hero being "lionhearted" and the antagonist being the one who skulks in the shadows as a scavenger.  "MAN THE HUNTER" sounded great as if we were the royalty of the animal kingdom and destined to be better than other animals.  But what about the science to back up this statement?  How could our ancestors take down prey animals that were faster, stronger, and evolved to run from even faster/stronger predators like saber-toothed cats? 

The theory of persistence hunting was postulated in 1984 by David Carrier in his doctoral thesis at the University of Michigan .  Carrier wrote that ancient humans could have caught these animals with primitive tools based on his two additional guesses that "man is one of the only mammals that cools itself by sweat" (without evidence) and has "efficiencies on two legs that are not found with 4 legs" (without evidence). Both criteria are necessary to support the theory of human persistent hunting.

There's another assumption there as well which Henry Bunn, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, identified in 2006.  Bunn realized that if you are going to chase an animal that is much faster than you, at some point it will run out of sight and you will have to track it. Tracking would require earth soft enough to capture footprints and terrain open enough to give prey little place to hide and disappear. However the terrain was probably not soft during the time period in the areas discussed by the persistence hunting theory as it was mixed savanna woodland, not open plain.  Bunn and Travis Pickering, wrote their objections in 2006 questioning the persistence hunting theory.

"MAN THE HUNTER" continued through popular culture with people repeating the statement that "humans sweat and all other animals pant." In 2015, Harvard paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman presented his theory for human persistent hunting in "Human Locomotion and Heat Loss: An Evolutionary Perspective" in the journal "Comprehensive Physiology." Lieberman stated, (without evidence)

"One of the most distinctive aspects of human anatomy and physiology is an increased capacity to cool through sweating ... It is a specialized form of heat exchange that derives from other forms of evapotranspiration, notably panting. Consequently, before discussing the origins and evolution of sweating, it is useful to first consider panting, which is the primary mechanism of cooling in all non-human mammals."  (emphasis added).

Lieberman noted that features — arched feet, short toes, wide shoulders, long Achilles tendons — seem to have originated around 2 million years ago, around the time when the genus Homo evolved and our ancestors began making meat a regular part of their diet. Persistence hunting, he’s argued, might have been the evolutionary driver. Perhaps,  but running as a scavenging animal would have done the same thing.

It makes one wonder, why Lieberman published this in a medical journal instead of an anthropological / archeological one where the peer review process would perhaps have caught some of these statements which I find almost laughably false.

To Summarize: The persistent hunting theory would need to have the following evidence to support the theory.

  1. The fossil records should show humans' tool damage on prey fossils before animal damage on those same fossils.
  2. A review of other hunted animals that supports this "sweat vs panting" theory.
  3. An analysis of human energy expenditure vs prey animal energy expenditure that shows humans are better in long distance running/endurance.
  4. An scientific experiment showing a human successfully doing a persistent hunt to chase down an animal like this to exhaustion with nothing but stone-age tools.

Unfortunately for the persistent hunting theory and Lieberman's paper:

  1. None of this evidence was presented in these papers.
  2. Subsequent studies have shown that each one of these claims fails.

Let's look at each of the four pieces of possible supporting evidence.

The Evidence

Point 1. Humans Hunted. Tool damage vs Carnivore Damage:

A study came out in 2017 using 3D microscopy which was able to "discriminate between stone tool cutmarks, mammalian carnivore toothmarks, and crocodile toothmarks at a 98% confidence level." The paper showed  some of the earlier studies mis-identified human toolmarks which were actually crocodile toothmarks. This study also reinforced the findings that human tool marks were AFTER carnivores. 

Even so, a meta-analysis of early papers which didn't make that distinction between crocodile marks and stone tool marks still came to the conclusion that early humans were mostly carcass foraging.

So Point 1, that humans were the hunters is not as supported as humans were the scavengers. So that first factual point needed to support the persistent hunting theory is weak.

Point 2. "Only humans sweat ... non-humans pant".

This is just factually wrong. I have no idea how this made it past the peer review process. Let's just take a few of the animals which might have been "persistence hunted"

Given the overwhelming scientific evidence of finding sweat glands and observing these non-human, four-legged, mammalian, animals sweating, we can definitely state that point 2 "only humans sweat" is unsupported by evidence.

 

Point 3: Humans are more efficient than 4 legged prey animals and showing that shows humans are better in long distance running/endurance.

Scientists tested actual energy expenditure of a variety of animals vs humans and prehistoric humans and found

When looking at all of the data points, both hominids fall within the 95 percent prediction interval for mammals. Statistically speaking, that’s the range you’d expect 95 percent of predicted mammalian net transport costs to fall within on average. In other words, modern humans and A. afarensis fall within the normal realm of variation for mammals. There’s nothing special about the energetics of their walking, Halsey and White conclude.

And now let's look at Lieberman's statement

"most mammals are able to walk or run long distances only in relatively cool conditions, but humans are the sole species of mammal that excels at long distance trekking and running in extremely hot conditions."  

Sole species of mammal? What does Lieberman state is as "long distances?" A popular event in recent years is something called an "ultra marathon." Elite athletes train to run 50 km and in some cases 100 km.

In 2009 professional ultramarathoner Christopher McDougall wrote Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen.  He interviewed Lieberman who explained that a successful persistence hunt probably began with scaring the quarry into a long gallop on a hot day.

"If you keep just close enough for it to see you, it will keep sprinting away," he said. "After about 10 or 15 kilometers' worth of running, it will go into hyperthermia and collapse."

Ten or Fifteen kilometers? Thanks to GPS, we can tag animals and see how they roam about on an average day:

So GPS tagging data shows animals normally going 5 to 10 times farther than elite human athletes in an ultramarathon.

There is also, interestingly, a competition each year between humans and horses for 50 miles  called Man vs Horse Marathon which has on it's results page humans will sometimes beat the horses . However ... that as a test for this crieria is completely useless because the restrictions on the race ( https://managainsthorse.net/ has a link to the full rules ) are that

  • Horses are ridden by humans so the horses have to carry not only extra weight of the human, but also the saddle, gear, human's water, etc.
  • Horses are mandated to stop periodically and mandated to have periodic stopped vet checks (rules now state that vet stoppage times are subtracted from Horse times)
  • Humans are NOT mandated to stop periodically and/or have health checks
  • There are places allowed for humans to have refreshments along the race.

Even being forced to carry a human, carry the human's gear ... the horses nearly always win.

So Point 3 for supporting human persistence hunting falls as well.

Point 4. Replicating a persistence hunting event.

All of the above is experimental evidence that disproves the underlying statements that went into the theory of human persistent hunting. But there's another experimental test we can do. We can do a persistent hunting experiment and see if someone can chase down an animal until it is too exhausted and collapses. That test has been done repeatedly.

And how did these experiments of doing persistent hunting go? Badly.

Evolutionary biologist David Carrier and his brother, Scott, who wrote the 2001 memoir Running After Antelope, tried Persistent Hunting in Wyoming. They failed writing

"The antelope ... used the terrain to ditch us."

Just as recently as 2020 ultramarathoner Wolfe was interviewed for the article: This Ultra-Runner Is on a Quest to Persistence-Hunt a Pronghorn and stating has been attempting Persistent Hunting for FIVE YEARS without success

This is the first day of Wolfe’s fifth year trying to run down a pronghorn .... Run the antelope back and forth until one starts to tire. Single out the tired one, then step up the pace—seven-minute miles, six-minute miles, maybe faster—until that one tired antelope is so overheated and exhausted it can’t run anymore. Once the animal is so tired it can’t get away, Wolfe will walk up to it, take an arrow out of his quiver, and kill the antelope. .... [Wolfe's attempts]... As he sits on the ground with a skinned-up knee ... He tells me that even if he is successful one day and somehow runs an antelope to exhaustion before killing it at close range with his bow, ...

One might argue that this was just one person and humans could have hunted in teams. This experiment has been tried also. A team of 10 ultramarathoners in 2011 in the article "On the plains of New Mexico, a band of elite marathoners tests a controversial theory of evolution" attempted and failed to chase down an antelope to the point of exhaustion.

If the theory holds up, the antelope I'm watching will eventually tire and the men will catch it .... Now they're within 25 feet of a panting pronghorn buck ...."I'm trying to scare him," Houghton continues, "make him use up adrenaline .... The pronghorn continues around the valley for another five miles. ... They chase it over the hill and discover that the weary animal has gone the other way.... The men agree that Esposito could have easily shot the antelope had the pistol been accessible, but that would have voided the experiment. Their goal was to prove a point about their evolutionary advantage, not their novice gunslinging skills. They didn't quite succeed...Yimer and the Texans may not have been surprised by their failure, but ...

This has also been documented in scientific journals. Quoting from T.R. Pickering, H.T. Bunn / Journal of Human Evolution 53 (2007) 434 - 438

Over the course of 20 years, ...  Eight [persistence hunting events] were prompted by Liebenberg so that they could be filmed for television documentaries ... Further, only three of the eight prompted [Endurance Persistence Running] hunts were successful, even though those hunts were commenced from a vehicle and hunters refilled their water bottles during hunting. [O]ur understanding of the paleoenvironment, paleoecology, and archaeology of early Homo sites, reviewed here, makes us dubious about their further suggestion that ER [Endurance Persistence Running] might have been employed regularly and successfully in service of that foraging pursuit.

And what does "successful" mean? The author doesn't say, but given the history of infotainment documentaries and intense pressure to create ANY kind of success, and the fact that the only "successful" ones started with vehicles, doesn't support with evidence the theory of persistence hunting.

Conclusion:

This doesn't mean that early humans didn't hunt or capture meat. They obviously did. There is plenty of evidence that humans were able to

  • be scavengers,
  • able to use traps and poisons (like the San of the Kalahari)
  • stampede a herd to drive animals off cliffs

But given

  • the lack of scientific data to support persistent hunting,
  • the repeated failure to have a successful persistent hunting event even with world-class ultramarathoners using great hydration, nutrition, and running gear
  • Lieberman's lack of understanding about animal physiology like sweating or just how much farther GPS tracks show animals are recorded as traveling vs what he wrote as possible
  • An updated fossil analysis using 3D scans to distinguish crocodile bites from stone tools showing that scavenging was more prevalent

It's pretty clear that persistent hunting is one of those myths concocted by someone to justify a world view that humans are "more special" than animals and has no more scientific basis than the "science" coming out of the Disney movies in the 1950s about nature.