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History of Running

The conventional thinking among most scholars is that early man (hunter-gatherers) ran in short sprints as a matter of survival—to catch prey and escape danger—but that running, and particularly endurance running, was merely a byproduct of the ability to walk and not a natural part of our evolution. The argument goes that (1) running is less efficient than walking (you burn more calories doing it), and (2) humans are poor sprinters compared to four-legged animals (who run much faster), and so it is concluded that we were never designed, or "born" to run. In evolutionary terms, scientists would say that we were not adapted for running.

But University of Utah biologist Dennis Bramble and Harvard University anthropologist Daniel Lieberman suggest otherwise. In their research, published in the prestigious journal Nature, they claim that the "roots of running may be as ancient as the origin of the human g...

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