broken gene may have turned our ancestors into marathoners—and helped humans conquer the world
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https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/broken-gene-may-have-turned-our-ancestors-marathoners-and-helped-humans-conquer-world
>Despite our couch potato lifestyles, long-distance running is in our genes. A new study in mice pinpoints how a stretch of DNA likely turned our ancestors into marathoners, giving us the endurance to conquer territory, evade predators, and eventually dominate the planet.
>“This is very convincing evidence,” says Daniel Lieberman, a human evolutionary biologist at Harvard University who was not involved with the work. “It’s a nice piece of the puzzle about how humans came to be so successful.”
>Human ancestors first distinguished themselves from other primates by their unusual way of hunting prey. Instead of depending on a quick spurt of energy—like a cheetah—they simply outlasted antelopes and other escaping animals, chasing them until they were too exhausted to keep running. This ability would have become especially useful as the climate changed 3 million years ago, and forested areas of Africa dried up and became savannas. Lieberman and others have identified skeletal changes that helped make such long-distance running possible, like longer legs. Others have also proposed that our ancestors’ loss of fur and expansion of sweat glands helped keep these runners cool.
>Despite our couch potato lifestyles, long-distance running is in our genes. A new study in mice pinpoints how a stretch of DNA likely turned our ancestors into marathoners, giving us the endurance to conquer territory, evade predators, and eventually dominate the planet.
>“This is very convincing evidence,” says Daniel Lieberman, a human evolutionary biologist at Harvard University who was not involved with the work. “It’s a nice piece of the puzzle about how humans came to be so successful.”
>Human ancestors first distinguished themselves from other primates by their unusual way of hunting prey. Instead of depending on a quick spurt of energy—like a cheetah—they simply outlasted antelopes and other escaping animals, chasing them until they were too exhausted to keep running. This ability would have become especially useful as the climate changed 3 million years ago, and forested areas of Africa dried up and became savannas. Lieberman and others have identified skeletal changes that helped make such long-distance running possible, like longer legs. Others have also proposed that our ancestors’ loss of fur and expansion of sweat glands helped keep these runners cool.
