Natural Born Runners

A new study, it seems, would support the idea that the evolutionary advantage humans developed as predators was distance running. A Yahoo News summary:

E. Africa grasslands influenced human evolution: study

Grasslands dominated the cradle of humanity in east Africa longer and more broadly than thought, says a study published Thursday, bolstering the idea that the rise of such landscapes shaped human evolution.

According to the so-called "savannah hypothesis", the gradual transition from dense forests into grasslands helped drive the shift toward bipedalism, increased brain size and other distinctively human traits.

First outlined in the 1920s, the theory suggests that our most ancient upright ancestors learned to walk on two feet, in part, to peer over tall grass in search of prey and predators.

Rather than simply plucking fruit from trees, they had to become shrewd hunters and move longer distances in order to survive.

The notion has been debated for more than a century, however, with some scientists saying other forces were more important in driving humans to assume their signature posture. . . .

I bring this up because it's part of the central thesis of the book Born to Run, which I blogged excessively last summer. Here's a link to the post I did pulling out the key points of the relevant argument, that humans were meant to hunt by running their prey to death.