People tell me I’m slow.
Yeah well, you’re slow.
Everybody’s slow.
We’re all slow.
Yaaaaay!
If you’ve ever raced a cheetah and you’re not named Usain Bolt, you probably lost.
Or heck if you even tried racing against your cat, I bet you still lost.
From horses, to dogs, to birds, it seems the entire animal kingdom is faster and stronger
than we are.
Why?
Well we evolved to fit into our own ecological niche.
But even compared to our nearest relatives, the chimpanzee and bonobos, we are considerably
weaker.
We weren’t always this way.
According to Dan Lieberman, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University, our “chimp-like ancestor
was like a power athlete that was much stronger and faster than humans, but they had no endurance."
But we traded our brawn for bigger brains and the ability to outrun our prey in a long
distance hunt.
When our ancestors evolved from being mostly tree dwellers to savannah walkers, they probably
traded strength and speed for endurance.
This is creatively called the endurance hypothesis.
Some researchers believe that humans evolved a unique predatory style.
Rather than a fast and furious chase, like a cheetah or Vin Diesel, humans take the slow
and steady, wear-down-your-prey-till-it-collapses-from-exhaustion kind of action.
And this takes very specific types of muscles.
By comparison, cheetahs have muscles that are tailored to reacting quickly so they can
reach top speed of around 70 miles per hour.
But the tradeoff is they get exhausted quickly, they have no endurance.
While we can never run that fast, we can run for a long time, maybe longer than any other
animal.
Sure less exciting than a high speed chase, but incredibly effective.
But you’re also slow because you’re weak!
Don’t feel bad, we all are, comparatively speaking.
One of our closest relatives, the chimpanzee is about twice as strong as a human.
Because they’re arboreal and spend most of their time in trees, most of their strength
is concentrated in their arms.
Our ancestors probably had similar muscle strength to a chimpanzee around six million
years ago according to a study published in PLOS One.
The researchers found that in the few million years since, human beings evolved dramatically.
Our brains got bigger, specifically in our prefrontal cortex, the part that deals with
long term goal planning.
They found that the prefrontal cortex was RADICALLY different in humans from that in
chimpanzees, monkeys, and mice.
It seemed to have evolved 4 times faster than the other parts of the body.
And that’s because in part, humans started to evolve social structures that allowed us
to, say, work together as a team to take down bigger prey.
But there is a downside to a bigger brain.
A bigger brain consumes more energy.
Our brains consume 20% of the energy we use, which is a lot compared to other animals.
So where did the energy come from?
Maybe from our muscles.
The researchers also found our ancestor’s MUSCLES changed rapidly too.
Very rapidly, about 8 times faster than the rest of our body.
So researchers believe that to deal with the energy demands of a bigger brain, our ancestors
evolved smaller muscles to compensate.
But more research is needed.
You may think this contradicts the Darwinian principle of “survival of the fittest,”
but “fit” in this context doesn’t mean physical fitness.
It means an organism fits in a niche long enough to reproduce, so the genetic lineage
survives.
And it’s not that being a smart wimp is always better than being a big dumb ox or
vice versa, it’s a matter of what’s most beneficial for an organism based on its environment
and competition.
If coming down from the trees and learning to make fire means one day your offspring
will populate the globe, it’s probably worth giving up looking like a species of Mr. Universes.
That’s evolution.
CTA video So you can’t outrun a cheetah but you can
definitely out-walk it.
Julia covers the endurance hypothesis in more detail here.
If you had the option to be ripped but also couldn’t form basic sentences, would you
take it?
Mash your keyboard in the comments, subscribe for more, and I’ll see you next time on
DNews.