The other main predator that also hunts in this fashion? Wolves/dogs. There's a theory that it was this overlap in hunting styles that made us natural "partners" and led to the close relationship we have today.
Wolves and dogs can't do this over nearly the same distance humans can — they shed body heat through panting and can only keep up a run for 3-6 miles[0]. Humans can run marathons.
Edit: I should say, wolves/dogs can run for long distances too, at a slower gait. But they can only out-pace human marathon-distance runners for a few miles before overheating.
Edit 2: Found a source[1]: "Dogs can gallop for only about 10 to 15 minutes before reverting to a trot, and so their distance-running speed tops out at about 3.8 meters per second." As commenters below have pointed out, yes, if it's cold enough, this doesn't matter ;-).
Well, I don't know much about wolves, but I know dogs sometimes naturally track interesting prey over long distances by scent. They don't have to travel fast, they just have to travel on average faster than their pursued prey.
I don't know. In Herzog's "Happy People: A Year in the Taiga," you see a dog keeping up with a snowmobile at a constant pace for several hours. (Edit: the dog ran 150 kilometers nonstop at a snowmobile's pace)
Sounds consistent with Walking with Cavemen in which they related the hypothesis that the human nose is so protruding so that it can be breathed through for temperature control, rather than by panting which loses water.
I also recommend the book he wrote by the same title, featuring some of the same essays/articles featured in the broadcast and a good deal more. If you're in the US it should be no bother to find, but if you're abroad it'll take a bit of searching (or ordering from the US)
I watched the YouTube "Lost in Taiga" videos in Russian and they mention that the whole family traveled for two days (with overnight camping) over to eat the killed animal. Whether it was this 30km one or a different one is unclear.
I thought the same thing and was especially shocked that the technique could ever be used in the Siberian taiga (both because of the cold and the dense vegetation). Compare this to a quote from the above wikipedia article "Scientists, posit that early tracking methods were developed in open, sparsely vegetated terrain such as the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa."
Between the barefoot hunting and the persistence hunting, this story seems like it's tailor made for Born to Run.
Well it's an endurance method vs a distance method. "Run your prey ragged" I guess. You could do that on steep mountainsides just as quickly (perhaps even more quickly) than open plains. You'd just need to not lose site/sound of them in the dense forest which should be doable.
On the other hand, I guess they did not know/had not rediscovered tanning, because
> A couple of kettles served them well for many years, but when rust finally overcame them, the only replacements they could fashion came from birch bark. Since these could not be placed in a fire, it became far harder to cook.
they did not replace their kettles by a leather cauldron.
They're readily available in bark and some leaves, though you'd need to know how to extract it.
A simpler alternative is "brain tanning", there's an old saying that each animal has enough brain to tan its hide which is probably true enough for basic purposes. Brain tanning is still the way native americans do their tanning (colonists brought vegetable tanning to the americas, and modern mineral and chemical tannings arose during the 19th century)
If they didn't have tannin from tree barks, they could have used brain tanning (from the brains of the animal they killed) or made rawhide (which doesn't require tannins).
Come to think of it, our legs (including associate muscles like the gluteus) are indeed disproportionately large for our overall body size.
It would be interesting to know how do we measure up against other mammals in terms of... uh... I forgot the technical name, it's the ability to absorb and metabolize oxygen. It's determined by lung size among other things, and it's a strong predictor of endurance.
Add to that a large brain, capable of planning, and driven by purpose and by an understanding of the concept of time in general and future in particular.
Large legs, oxygen metabolism, brain capable of long-term planning - well, that's the perfect trifecta that could produce an excellent endurance runner.
I'm shocked that this could work on the Tundra. It was always my understanding that endurance running required a hot climate so that humans' superior cooling system could win out.
Animals on the tundra would probably have thick coats or other insulation and might be able to overheat themselves in the right conditions. A human could shed its clothing to cool down.
It's also possible that potential prey in this area is not well adapted for outrunning endurance hunters, which might make them easier to run down than animals that have been hunted by runners for thousands of years.
It's interesting that they stumbled on the persistence hunting technique so naturally. Indirect evidence to support the Endurance running hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis).