In Evolutionary Race, Humans Went the Extra Mile, Study Says

Los Angeles Times ^ | November 18, 2004 | Robert Lee Hotz, Times Staff Writer

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Humanity was born to run.

Humanity was born to run.

More than by brain size or tool-making ability, the human species was set apart from its ancestors by the ability to jog mile after lung-stabbing mile with greater endurance than any other primate, according to research published today in the journal Nature.

Indeed, human beings evolved as the cross-country stars of a primordial runner's world 2 million years before the advent of jogging shoes, tracksuits and arthroscopic knee surgery.

Mounting a challenge to the conventional wisdom about human origins, researchers at Harvard University and the University of Utah concluded that the ability to run long distances was the driving force shaping the modern human anatomy.

Such running ability could have given early humans a survival edge in scavenging on the open savannas of Africa.

The earliest humans, the researchers said, were marathon men and women from the tips of their distinctively short toes and long Achilles tendons to the tops of their biomechanically balanced heads.

"We have gone all this time somehow missing this truly important aspect of humans — this [long-distance running] behavior and its impact on the design of the human body," said University of Utah biologist Dennis Bramble, who co-wrote the study.

"Primates don't do distance running," Bramble said. "We should have recognized that humans are very odd."

[King Prout]

Humans are given an amazing mind, like no other animal, with powers of discernment. If you've been exposed to the Gospel of Christ alongside the philosophy of Epicurus, the venom of Voltaire and the wretched puke of Sartre...do you really think most people are so feeble-minded they wouldn't be able to separate the Truth from the trash?

if they base their conclusions upon empirical evidence: no, nor can they.

[Dimensio]

So...how would science go about testing for things that cannot be empirically measured?

[King Prout]

ah.
so, you are content to confuse credo and scio, to equate feelings and rational examination.
I am not.
There ends any possibility of useful discourse on this topic.

[King Prout]

you reveal yourself ever more clearly as deeply ignorant of and antagonistic to the principles of the scientific method.

as I stated earlier: the possibility ofg useful dialogue between us on this topic is at an end.

I meant it then, and mean it now.

Please do take the hint.

[mailbox1282000]

Don't take this too seriously, but I had to jab back.

You seem to share a trait that an ape or a fish or an amoeba has. This trait is the inability to think critically. A little more evolution may be called for in your line of our family tree. What's up cous'!