persistence hunting

persistence hunting, a form of hunting in which a hunter drives prey to exhaustion with a combination of walking and running, usually in a hot environment. A number of instances of persistence hunting have been noted among modern hunter-gatherer groups. Some scholars argue that persistence hunting played an important role in human evolution, a hypothesis known as the endurance-running hypothesis. The practice is enabled by, and could further advantage, several adaptations of the human body, such as sweating, a relative lack of body hair compared with other apes, arched feet, and a long Achilles tendon. Others argue that persistence hunting was a rare endeavor, citing how ethnographically uncommon the technique is and the difficulties in employing the method in the ancient environment.

Process and ethnographic examples

The practice of persistence hunting is known from a relatively limited number of reported hunts. They were performed in disparate regions of the world, but always in flat, arid environments, such as the Australian Outback, the American Southwest, and the Kalahari Desert.

Several persistence hunts were recorded in the central Kalahari. Hunters in the area undertook 10 persistence hunts between 1985 and 2001. Eight of the hunts were done for the sake of two documentaries: The Great Dance (filmed in 1998) and an episode of David Attenborough’s Life of Mammals (filmed in 2001). In each case a group of three or four men drank as much water as possible before beginning the hunt during the heat of the day, when temperatures reached about 100–105 ℉ (39–42 ℃). They then selected an animal to hunt, often a kudu. The group then ran toward the animal, which fled from them. The hunters tracked the creature as fast as they could, in order to find the animal and scare it from its shady resting spot and into the sun again. Five of the hunts were successful. During these the animal ran until it collapsed of exhaustion. The time required for this was variable: the shortest of the hunts lasted fewer than two hours, while the longest took more than six. These hunts were often performed over sandy terrain, which tired the animal more readily.

Based on a limited number of reported hunts, a similar technique was employed by the Tarahumara in northern Mexico. Hunters chased prey, normally deer, to exhaustion before killing them with rocks or clubs. Other persistence hunts used the landscape to slow the animal, such as running it into a river or a cave. The most common strategy among the Tarahumara involved the use of traps. In a ravine, or arroyo, hunters would drive about a dozen wooden stakes into the ground at an angle and cover them with leaves. A few hunters would then chase an animal into the ravine and run it into the stakes. The duration of the hunts varied widely, from two or three hours to two or three days (with breaks when it was too dark to continue tracking the animal).

Endurance-running hypothesis and persistence hunting

Persistence hunting plays an important role in the endurance-running hypothesis, which states that the ability of humans to run long distances is an adaptation that originated approximately two million years ago with the emergence of the genus Homo. The hypothesis was first put forward in a 1984 paper authored by American biologist David Carrier. He pointed to several features of the human body that he argued were adapted to endurance running, including cholinergic sweat glands, absence of body hair, bipedalism, and an omnivorous diet that allows individuals to load up on carbohydrates in preparation for running. Because distance running would not help in outrunning fast-sprinting predators, Carrier posited that these adaptations aided in predation, meaning that persistence hunting would have been an important method of predation in the deep past. Carrier’s ideas were expanded upon by the paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman and biologist Dennis M. Bramble, who noted additional features that may have facilitated endurance running and first appeared in H. habilis and H. erectus—including shortened toes and feet and lengthened legs. The two added that endurance running may have been useful for scavenging carcasses of animals killed by other predators.

However, not all scholars accept the endurance-running hypothesis. Two University of Wisconsin anthropologists, Travis Pickering and Henry Bunn, outlined the argument against the endurance-running hypothesis in a 2007 paper. They cast doubt on the idea that persistence hunting ever played a major role in human predation, since it is a very rare method of hunting in the present and recent past. They pointed out that persistence hunting is practiced today only in arid environments, while humans evolved in comparatively wet savanna-woodlands. Further, they noted that all known persistence hunts required the hunters to engage in fairly extensive tracking, requiring advanced intellectual abilities that early members of the genus Homo may not have possessed. Pickering and Bunn also argued that early Homo did not need to be a strong endurance runner to scavenge in its environment, since it was likely better than other animals at scavenging in the wooded parts of the region.