I’m talking about before we figured out we could grow vegetables and fruits. Early humans are often shown as being fit and in shape, yet our diet pretty much only consisted of meat. We were hunters. So why the hell were they so fit? I thought a healthy diet mattered more than just being active constantly?
I mean, you gotta understand that we worked hard as fuck for our food. We ran that shit down for miles after miles and did lots of physical labor.
So, even if our diet was mostly meat, that didn’t mean we were unhealthy or fat. You can eat straight meat and be fit. You need the protein in the first place.
Humanity’s main method of hunting was basically just “follow prey at a steady pace and let it tire itself out before we do”. So they pretty much did a hell of a lot of cardio.
Yup!
Cheetahs are the fastest land animal for top speed and almost all fours legged animal is de facto faster than us. But two things we can do best, being smart (noticing patterns, imagination and language) and walking, we do mind bogglingly better than our nearest competition.
Those two go together.
Opposable thumbs and the brain power to use hands evolved earlier in hominids. Our line of the ancestry kept getting smarter and smarter with brains that required more and more energy as our ancestors kept evolving. To feed their enormously powerful brain, the species needed to make the body as efficient as possible, which led to our feet changing to support bipedal locomotion, which enabled our long distance hiker superpower through more efficient energy usage compared to four legged walking, even though four can go much faster, and left our hands free to do whatever we want all the time. Our bodies lost almost all hair, and evolved to sweat excessively, which gave us the ability to keep cool while we literally walked large animals to death from hyperthermia, simply by walking after them until they dropped dead.
Yup, that is my understanding. Constantly on the move, working hard, and eating lean meats since the animals were wild game not factory fattened.
Humans can do that, but I would guess they more often tried trapping, fishing, and stealthy hunting? Running after an animal over long distances isn’t ideal. It’s a great way to get hurt, animals are very fast and you can lose the trail or they go where you can’t follow, and not to mention exhausting.
Humans are believed to have risen the food chain due to our ability to sweat and endurance chase our prey the way other predators couldn’t. This concept is known as “persistence hunting” and basically involved chasing our prey at a slow but consistent rate until they exhausted themselves and we could catch them
Humans became the top predators due to “persistence hunting” which literally involved running slower than the prey but for longer distances until the prey was exhausted.