Persistence Hunting and Persistence Living

One of the first forms of hunting used by early humans consisted of chasing their prey to the point of its exhaustion. This technique is termed persistence hunting.I believe modern humans’ health and fitness would benefit greatly from a variation of this concept, which I term persistence living. Since early humans did not have weapons to kill their prey from a distance and were not fast enough to catch the animal, one way to kill it would have been to run it down over a long distance for an extended period. Because of our ability to dissipate heat by sweating, we have an advantage over our prey, who cannot do this without slowing down and panting for thermoregulation. This hunting behavior is still used today by the Kalahari bushman and the Tarahumara and Raramuri people of Northern Mexico. http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/09/leo/intlblogday/forum/read.php?1,2273

The need to obtain food has had a lot of effect on our early hominid evolution. About 5 to 7 million years ago, some humans began to walk upright. As climate change turned our forest home into sparser woodlands, those who could walk on two legs and travel miles in search of food had a distinct advantage. About 2.5 million years ago, those woodlands were now becoming a savanna or plains, and as we had now evolved into Homo sapiens with our big wise brains we needed more calories than gathering could easily supply. Large animals were a prime source of these calories — if only we could catch and kill them. At this point, we became endurance runners and persistence hunting began. Hunting in a group, one person sprints after the prey. Of course the prey escapes temporarily, but the sprinter stays close enough to point the rest of the group to where the prey is recovering from its sprint. This chase is repeated a few more times, and the prey collapses from hyperthermia and is easily killed. The current state of humanity is much different. Food is cheap and plentiful, and we do not need to work so hard to chase it down. Unfortunately, we have already been turned into efficient persistence hunting machines by our evolution’s natural selection. Now the problem is that our evolutionary gain has become our loss, and it is killing us. We have become obese and unhealthy from our inactivity and poor food choices. I feel evolution is still as active as ever. Perhaps it’s not selecting for the fittest but more for the unfittest, but natural selection is in control, and that’s where persistence living and the example set by the early persistence hunters comes into play.  http://uchem.berkeley.edu/forum/read.php?26,500711

Whether we now do it in a group or alone does not matter as long as we do it. Being active daily and eating whole, natural, unprocessed foods just as our fore-runners did can turn the force of evolution once again in our species’ favor. This must be a consistent lifestyle change that we do for our lifetime. It will take our persistence, just as much as our ancestors needed to be persistent and survive those challenging conditions they had to face. This needed change will not be easy, as our current obesogenic lifestyle will challenge our attempts to alter our unhealthy behavioral direction. However, if you do not find a way to establish new healthy exercise and eating habits as your lifestyle, you will meet a fate that will not be pleasant. - See more at:https://secure.web.emory.edu/forums/read.php?9,2117,2117#msg-2117