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“Stand up straight! And do something about that hair!” Annoying? Sure. But such parental advice may have made humans what we are today. Because our upright stance, and relative lack of hair, may have enabled our human ancestors to run far and fast enough to capture their prey. So say scientists in the Journal of Human Evolution. [Graeme D. Ruxton and David M Wilkinson, "Thermoregulation and endurance running in extinct hominins: Wheeler’s models revisited"]
The idea that standing on two legs and shedding all that body hair might have helped early humans keep cool on the African savanna was first trotted out in the late 1980s. But those early models had our ancestors standing still in a gentle breeze. Scientists simply didn’t have the computational power to assess what might happen when those early humans had to up and chase down a meal.
The new model takes into account how hot a human would get running long and hard enough to outlast an animal galloping in the midday sun. And it shows that a hominin would have to have been as energetically efficient, and as hairless and sweaty, as we are today to avoid overheating. Homo erectus could probably have gone the distance, the scientists say. But Australopithicus probably didn’t have the legs.
—Karen Hopkin
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
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2 Comments
Add CommentI wish someone would do a followup study that compares several types of early man in a warfare efficiency and tactics. It might help us understand the extinction of branches of early humans. Can we simulate single combat or small group warfare between Neaderthal and modern man, etc.? Could Neaderthal man, who survived for eons, have been simply hunted or driven out of existence? Think of a fleeter modern man pursuing Neaderthalers or eluding them, surviving to reproduce. Small fast war bands might have an advantage similar to a charge in cavalry, by attacking from the rear, etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is a reasonable hypothesis that from time to time bands of H.sapiens attacked and killed bands of H.neanderthalensis. The extent to which this occurred, whether genocidal or merely opportunistic, may never be known as substantial evidence would need to be found to confirm the hypothesis.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you contrast this with the hypothesis proposed in the podcast which does not rely on direct fossil evidence but can be investigated by computer simiulation.