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Drop your unpopular opinions here because c/unpopularopinions is filled with popular opinions
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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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The "running man" hypothesis -- the idea that our ancestors a million or two years ago were casually jogging after prey animals until they dropped from exhaustion due to our supposedly superior endurance -- is utter nonsense. It's absurd on its face and there is absolutely no evidence of any kind supporting it, yet it has become generally accepted as an incontrovertible fact about our past.
The man who initially proposed this idea in the 1960s (Grover Krantz) has become utterly forgotten and is never referenced by the idea's modern proponents, and for good reason: he was better-known as a staunch believer in the existence of Bigfoot. Also, for no reason I've ever been able to figure out, his skeleton and the skeleton of his favorite dog are on display at the Smithsonian.
Isn't the fact that there are tribes currently using the exact same method, supposed to be evidence for it?
That's not a fact. Who has ever been documented to have done this successfully?
🫴
In other words, nobody has ever been reliably documented as having done this.
By far the most extensive study of the San peoples ever conducted was in the 1960s and 1970s by Richard Lee and other anthropologists as part of a Harvard study, and there was no mention whatsoever of "persistence hunting." There was mention of their extensive use of poisoned spears and arrows, which allowed them to track and eventually kill already-wounded animals. Something that could easily be mistaken for persistence hunting.
Hundreds? I would love to see this study.
I don't know what's stopping you from opening links on the page I provided.
Indeed, nothing written before 2000 is true, the humanity and the planet actually never reliably existed before the new millennium.
That is persistence hunting, you nincompoop.
Lol, you know what name-calling as a form of argument means, don't you? And no, that isn't persistence hunting, that's hunting with poison. Your own link includes injury as a reason this might work, and being poisoned could be considered as an injury, but tracking an injured animal is a form of scavenging and is nothing special or unique in the animal world. What is special and unique (or would be if it were true) is the ability to pick out a healthy animal and simply walk or jog after it until it drops, and that is what makes the endurance hunting claim such a "popular opinion" -- and by opinion I mean something not supported by any facts.
Your link is to a very brief Wikipedia page, and I cannot read this "2024 study" without paying a subscription, which I'm not going to do. Since you've obviously actually read that study, you must know that that's an obstacle. If you actually have a copy, I'd love to see it instead of just the abstract which I was able to read. That being said, as a former Anthropologist I'm reasonably certain the authors used the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample for their work. Having read nearly all of the ethnographies that the sample draws from (there's really not much else for Anthropology students to do other than actually going places) I can assure you that there is no mention in them of anything like persistence hunting. Plenty of mentions of stalking and concealment and the use of spears and bows and arrows and poison, but there was never any controversy over these human activities.
'Former anthropologist' but can't find how to open the paper, eh? Took me two clicks from the Wikipedia article.
It was never stated as jogging, though; it was walking long distances which humans were touted as superior at. We were basically mindful zombies, I suppose.
Krantz talked about walking and jogging, and referenced human performance in marathons as evidence of this idea. People who push this idea today always talk about marathon runners as well.
Oh. Well, then he's half-wrong!
What is the actually correct idea vs. The jogging forever?
Just that we never did shit like that. It's not something that needs an alternative explanation. People tend to assume that it was originally proposed as an explanation of our bipedal locomotion, but Krantz actually suggested it as an explanation for our big brains. He hypothesized that jogging after animals in the heat of the day (he never offered a reason for why this would have occurred only in the daytime) would have resulted in large numbers of neurons dying from heat overload, so a big brain would have allowed this neural death to happen without impairing cognitive function. This is why he proposed the endurance hunting at around two million years ago, when our brain size started increasing from chimpanzee size to modern human size, rather than around five million years ago, when our ancestors made the shift to full bipedality.
But the reasons behind the increased brain size have never really been so controversial as to require some weird explanation like this. We know that it wasn't a simple overall increase in size, but was rather the result of an increase in the size of areas of the brain responsible for things like language and tool use, which leads to the easy inference that it was language and tool use that caused the increase in brain size.
I suppose the question I meant was, how did we catch prey if not jogging after them forever? Or is that unknown? Just trying to update my mental model of what happened! Thanks for the info
Group hunting most likely, since that's something all the other great apes (gorillas, chimps and orangutans) do. There's plenty of footage of chimps surrounding their prey and catching them that way. Also we have omnivore dentition so we ate a lot of plants, and most likely scavenged quite a bit.
In more recent times (like the last million years or so) we used spears, and contemporary hunter/gatherers (like the !Kung who featured in the bit from the David Attenborough documentary that people like to link to as "proof" of the endurance hunting thesis) often used poison with their spears and arrows, which did allow them to leisurely walk after their prey. But only because their prey had been poisoned, not because humans have superior endurance.
Thanks for the info!
Further reading
I also liked this 1997 radio show episode.
Wow, cool
Freakin' nuts that the skeletons are on display. Small world?