Racing Key to Human Evolution
Racing is possibly as old as man himself.
As an activity, a simple physical activity, it is difficult to imagine a time when man did not run against another – man, woman, or beast.
Indeed, many evolutionary biologists and anthropologists now hold that running – or racing, more or less (the distinction exists in many but not all cases) – is a big section of the reason behind how we became human in the first place.
These thinkers and researchers believe that it was the potential to run, run after prey and so in a sense to race against them, that allowed us to get the meat which lead to the progression of the human brain.
It is thought that the urge to run is an innate one.
Together with our ability to sweat, racing after prey allowed the otherwise physically unremarkable speices that we are to procure enough protein to develop ever larger cranial volumes.
Just look at kids, and how they will naturally run after each other.
As scientists have long acknowledged, playtime behavior has evolutionary roots.
Among humans, the highest facet of many of our most basic physical pastimes entails running, giving chase.
We are nowhere near the fastest animals on the planet, to be sure, but there appears to be none that can match our stamina and capacity to keep running.
Certainly, there is no evolutionary reason for the ability to sweat other than to run long distances.
Before the progression of projectile weapons such as slingshots, boomerangs, and bows and arrows, human beings hunted by simply running down their prey, running them to exhaustion, literally running them to death.
For not being able to sweat meant that they had to stop in order to cool down, providing, in time, the perfect opportunity for human beings to close in for the kill.