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?
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.