"same kind of hunters" Good point never thought of that. I have not read the whole thread but have not seen sweat mentioned. Very few animals horses, humans and very few others that I don't recall sweat. Allows us to run in warm or hot temps without overheating. Dogs don't sweat except at the paws they mainly cool down by panting. Dogs and other pack animals usually hunt with a relay system one or more keeps up the chase while others rest. Humans and horses can cover lots of ground and can move away from predators (or to better food/water supply) unless the attack is very sudden.
Ironically, the characteristics that most strongly distinguish us from other animals, especially other primates, are seldom mentioned or considered in most of the commentaries we see. One such is our ability to run on two legs. Unlike our closest relatives, we do not merely scurry along for short distances with the help of our knuckles - we can race flat out for miles using only our legs and feet. A second characteristic is our nudity, our essentially furless bodies, tufted for the most part on the head and in the interstices of the limbs and the torso. A third characteristic is our ability to sweat profusely. Our boastful phrases "sweat like a pig" or "sweat like a horse" are essentially meaningless, since we sweat much more than either of these animals. Running, sweating and nudity were born of the African savanna, perhaps at the time that our ancestors moved out of the forests to become the slim and graceful Australopithicines. Out in the African sun, away from the trees, we needed to keep cool, hence our sweating, naked bodies, and we needed to protect the overactive brains that since have done such damage to our planet, hence our thatches of hair.Not surprisingly, sweating and bipedal running are two of the more important requirements for participation in marathons. And these, as Heinrich convincingly demonstrates, came about because of two other human qualities, the first being our need to hunt. Astonishing as this may sound to many in today's automated world, the human being can in fact outrun many other kinds of animals, among them members of the deer and antelope families. Heinrich cites a Navajo hunter named Yellowman who, after half a day of relentless chasing, could run a deer to the point of collapse, whereupon he would wrestle it to the ground and stifle it with his bare hands, holding a little sacred pollen in his palms so that the deer's last breath would be holy. The deer's unperforated hide would then be used in religious ceremonies.
In the recent past, Kalahari bushmen were also able to run down their prey - in the Kalahari Desert, the animals in question were antelopes - taking advantage of the heat of the day. The bushmen, thanks to their human physiology, could tolerate heat more easily than the antelopes, who are so elegantly designed that they are virtually independent of water, an excellent adaptation for a desert environment, but a disadvantage if one must outrun a human being. Instead of cooling themselves by drinking water or immersing themselves in it, they can let their body temperatures rise, yet must try to minimise the amount of heat that their bodies accumulate, to which end they spend the middle of the day standing quietly in the shade. A human runner who could never outsprint them can, by remorseless chasing and phenomenal endurance, eventually exhaust them.
Presumably, the marathon method of hunting is an ancient one, and it involves the second human attribute which, Heinrich believes, other animals probably lack - the ability to formulate and also to realise long-distance goals. "We are psychologically evolved to pursue long-range goals," he writes, "because through millions of years that is what we on average had to do in order to eat. To us, even an old deer that had not yet been caught would have required a very long chase. It would have required strategy, knowledge and persistence. Those hominids who didn't have the taste for the long hunt, as such, perhaps for its own sake, would very seldom have been successful. They left fewer descendants."
"Our ancient type of hunting - where we were superior relative to other predators - required us to maintain long-term vision that both rewarded us by the chase itself and that held the prize in our imagination even when it was out of sight, smell and hearing. It was not just sweat glands that made us premier endurance predators. It was also our minds fuelled by passion. Our enthusiasm for the chase had to be like the migratory birds' passion to fly off on their great journeys, as if propelled by dreams ...When [the hunter/runners] felt fatigue and pain, they did not stop, because their dream carried them still forward. They were our ancestors."