Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

by Christopher McDougall

  Lieberman kept looking, and found an even more telling comparison: the top galloping speed for most horses is 7.7 meters a second. They can hold that pace for about ten minutes, then have to slow to 5.8 meters a second. But an elite marathoner can jog for hours at 6 meters a second. The horse will erupt away from the starting line, as Dennis Poolheco had discovered in the Man Against Horse Race, but with enough patience and distance, you can slowly close the gap.

  You don’t even have to go fast, Lieberman realized. All you have to do is keep the animal in sight, and within ten minutes, you’re reeling him in.

  Lieberman began calculating temperatures, speed, and body weight. Soon, there it was before him: the solution to the Running Man mystery. To run an antelope to death, Lieberman determined, all you have to do is scare it into a gallop on a hot day. “If you keep just close enough for it to see you, it will keep sprinting away. After about ten or fifteen kilometers’ worth of running, it will go into hyperthermia and collapse.” Translation: if you can run six miles on a summer day then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom. We can dump heat on the run, but animals can’t pant while they gallop.

  “We can run in conditions that no other animal can run in,” Lieberman realized. “And it’s not even hard. If a middle-aged professor can outrun a dog on a hot day, imagine what a pack of motivated hunter-gatherers could do to an overheated antelope.”

  It’s easy to picture the scorn on the faces of those Masters of the Universe, the Neanderthals, as they watched these new Running Men puffing along behind bouncy little Bambis, or jogging all day under a hot sun to return with nothing but an armload of yams. The Running Men could get a load of meat by running, but they couldn’t run with a belly load of meat, so most of the time they carbo-loaded on roots and fruits, saving the antelope chops for special, calorie-boosting occasions. Everyone scavenged together—Running Men, Running Women, Running Kids, and Grampies—but despite all that team activity, they were more likely to dine on grubs than wild game.

  Bleh. Neanderthals wouldn’t touch bugs and dirt food; they ate meat and only meat, and not gristly little antelopes, either. Neanderthals went Grade A all the way: bears, bison, and elk marbled with juicy fat, rhinos with livers rich in iron, mammoths with luscious, oily brains and bones dripping with lip-smacking marrow. Try chasing monsters like those, though, and they’ll be chasing you. Instead, you’ve got to outsmart and outfight them. The Neanderthals would lure them into ambushes and launch a pincer attack, storming from all sides with eight-foot wooden lances. Hunting like that isn’t for the meek; Neanderthals were known to suffer the kind of injuries you find on the rodeo circuit, neck and head trauma from getting thrown by bucking beasts, but they could count on their band of brothers to care for their wounds and bury their bodies. Unlike our true ancestors, those scampering Running Men, the Neanderthals were the mighty hunters we like to imagine we once were; they stood shoulder to shoulder in battle, a united front of brains and bravery, clever warriors armored with muscle but still refined enough to slow-cook their meat to tenderness in earth ovens and keep their women and children away from the danger.

  Neanderthals ruled the world—till it started getting nice outside. About forty-five thousand years ago, the Long Winter ended and a hot front moved in. The forests shrank, leaving behind parched grasslands stretching to the horizon. The new climate was great for the Running Men; the antelope herds exploded and feasts of plump roots were pushing up all over the savannah.

  The Neanderthals had it tougher; their long spears and canyon ambushes were useless against the fleet prairie creatures, and the big game they preferred was retreating deeper into the dwindling forests. Well, why didn’t they just adopt the hunting strategy of the Running Men? They were smart and certainly strong enough, but that was the problem; they were too strong. Once temperatures climb above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, a few extra pounds of body weight make a huge difference—so much so that to maintain heat balance, a 160- pound runner would lose nearly three minutes per mile in a marathon against a one hundred-pound runner. In a two-hour pursuit of a deer, the Running Men would leave the Neanderthal competition more than ten miles behind.

  Smothered in muscle, the Neanderthals followed the mastodons into the dying forest, and oblivion. The new world was made for runners, and running just wasn’t their thing.

  Privately, David Carrier knew the Running Man theory had a fatal flaw. The secret gnawed until it nearly turned him into a killer.

  “Yeah, I was kind of obsessed,” he admitted when I met him at his lab in the University of Utah, twenty-five years and three academic degrees since his moment of inspiration at the dissecting table in 1982. He was now David Carrier, Ph.D., professor of biology, with gray in his push-broom mustache and rimless round glasses over his intense brown eyes. “I was dying to just grab something with my own two hands and say, ‘Look! Satisfied now?’”

  The problem was this: Chasing an animal to death is evolution’s version of the perfect crime. Persistence hunting (as it’s known to anthropologists) leaves behind no forensics—no arrowheads, no spear-nicked deer spines—so how do you build a case that a killing took place when you can’t produce a corpse, a weapon, or witnesses? Despite Dr. Bramble’s physiological brilliance and Dr. Lieberman’s fossil expertise, there was no way they could prove that our legs were once lethal weapons if they couldn’t show that someone, somewhere, had actually run an animal to death. You can spout any theory you want about human performance (“We can suspend our own heartbeats! We can bend spoons with our brains!”) but in the end, you can’t make the shift from appealing notion to empirical fact if you don’t come up with the goods.

  “The frustrating thing is, we were finding stories all over the place,” David Carrier said. Throw a dart at the map, and chances are you’ll bull’s-eye the site of a persistence-hunting tale. The Goshutes and Papago tribes of the American West told them; so did the Kalahari Bushmen in Botswana, the Aborigines in Australia, Masai warriors in Kenya, the Seri and Tarahumara Indians in Mexico. The trouble was, those legends were fourth-or fifth-hand at best; there was as much evidence to support them as there was that Davy Crockett kilt him a b’ar when he was only three.

  “We couldn’t find anyone who’d done a persistence hunt,” David said. “We couldn’t find someone who’d even seen one.” No wonder the scientific community remained skeptical. If the Running Man theory was right, then at least one person on this planet of six billion should still be able to catch quarry on foot. We may have lost the tradition and necessity, but we should still have the native ability: our DNA hasn’t changed in centuries and is 99.9 percent identical across the globe, meaning we’ve all got the same stock parts as any ancient hunter-gatherer. So how come none of us could catch a stinking deer?

  “That’s why I decided to do it myself,” David said. “As an under-grad, I got into mountain races and had a lot of fun at those. So when it came to how humans breathe differently when we run, I think it was easier for me to see how it could affect us as a species. The idea didn’t seem as strange to me as it would for someone who never left the lab.”

  Nor did it seem strange to him that if he couldn’t find a caveman, he could become one. In the summer of 1984, David persuaded his brother, Scott, a freelance writer and reporter for National Public Radio, to go to Wyoming and help him catch a wild antelope. Scott wasn’t much of a runner, but David was in great shape and fiercely motivated by the lure of scientific immortality. Between him and his brother, David figured, it should take only two hours before eight hundred pounds of proof was flopping at his feet.

  “We drive off the interstate and down a dirt road for a few miles and it’s a wide and open high desert of sagebrush, dry as a bone, mountains in every direction. There are antelope everywhere.” That’s how Scott later painted the scene for listeners on NPR’s This American Life. “We stop the car and start running after three—a buck and two does. They run very quickly, but for short distances, and then stop an
d stare at us till we catch up. Then they take off again. Sometimes they run a quarter of a mile, sometimes a half mile.”

  Perfect! It was playing out exactly as David had predicted. The antelope weren’t getting enough time to cool off before David and Scott were yip-yip-yaahooing on their tails again. A few more miles of this, David figured, and he’d be heading back to Salt Lake with a trunk full of venison and a killer video to slap down on Dr. Bramble’s desk. His brother, on the other hand, sensed something very different going on.

  “The three antelope look at me like they know exactly what we’re proposing, and they’re not the least bit worried,” Scott continues. It didn’t take him long to find out why they were so calm in the face of what should have been impending death. Instead of flopping over in exhaustion, the antelope pulled a shell game; when they got winded, they circled back and hid in the herd, leaving David and Scott no idea which antelopes were tired and which were fresh. “They blend and flow and change positions,” Scott says. “There are no individuals, but this mass that moves across the desert like a pool of mercury on a glass table.”

  For two more days, the two brothers chased mercury balls across the Wyoming plains, never realizing they were in the midst of a magnificent mistake. David’s failure was unwitting proof of his own theory: human running is different from any other running on earth. You can’t catch other animals by copying them, and especially not by using the crude approximation of animal running we’ve preserved in sports. David and Scott were relying on instinct, strength, and stamina, without realizing that human distance running, at its evolutionary best, is much more than that; it’s a blend of strategy and skill perfected during millions of years of do-or-die decisions. And like any other fine art, human distance running demands a brain-body connection that no other creature is capable of.

  But it’s a lost art, as Scott Carrier would spend the next decade discovering. Something strange happened out there on the Wyoming plains: the lure of the lost art got into Scott’s blood and wouldn’t let go. Despite the hopelessness of that expedition, Scott spent years researching persistence hunting on his brother’s behalf. He even created a nonprofit corporation devoted to finding the Last of the Long Distance Hunters, and recruited elite ultrarunner Creighton King—the Double Grand Canyon record holder before the Skaggs bros came along—to join an expedition to the Sea of Cortez, where word had it that a tiny clan of Seri Indians had preserved the link to our distance-running past.

  Scott found the clan—but he found them too late. Two elders had learned old-style running from their father, but they were a half century out of practice and too old to even demonstrate.

  That was the end of the trail. By 2004, the hunt for that one person in six billion had lasted twenty years and gone nowhere. Scott Carrier gave up. David Carrier had moved on long before, and was now studying physical-combat structures in primates. The Last of the Long Distance Hunters was a cold case.

  Naturally, that’s when the phone rang.

  “So, out of the blue, I find myself talking to this stranger,” Dr. Bramble begins. He looks like an old cowpoke, with his shaggy gray hair and crisp rancher’s shirt, and it’s a style that perfectly matches the dried animal skulls on the walls of his lab and his enthralling, gather-round-the-campfire storytelling. By 2004, Dr. Bramble says, the Utah-Harvard team had identified twenty-six distance-running markers on the human body. With little hope of ever finding the Last Hunter, they decided to go ahead and publish their findings anyway. Nature magazine put them on the cover, and a copy apparently made its way to a beach town on the South African coast, because that’s where this call was coming from.

  “It’s not hard to run an antelope to death,” the stranger said. “I can show you how it’s done.”

  “Sorry—who are you?”

  “Louis Liebenberg. From Noordhoek.”

  Bramble knew all the top names in the running-theory field, which wasn’t hard since they could fit around a diner booth. Louis Liebenberg from Noordhoek he’d never heard of.

  “Are you a hunter?” Bramble asked.

  “Me? No.”

  “Oh … anthropologist?”

  “No.”

  “What’s your field?”

  “Math. Math and physics.”

  Math? “Uh … how did a mathematician run down an antelope?”

  Bramble heard a snort of laughter. “By accident, mostly.”

  It’s eerie how the lives of Louis Liebenberg and David Carrier spiraled each other for decades without either of them knowing it. Back in the early ’80s, Louis was also an undergraduate in college and, like David, he was suddenly electrified by an insight into human evolution that few others believed in.

  Part of Louis’s problem was his expertise: he had none. At the time, he was barely twenty and majoring in applied mathematics and physics at the University of Cape Town. It was while taking an elective course in the philosophy of science that he started wondering about the Big Bang of the human mind. How did we leap from basic survival thinking, like that of other animals, to wildly complicated concepts like logic, humor, deduction, abstract reasoning, and creative imagination? Okay, so primitive man upgraded his hardware with a bigger brain—but where did he get the software? Growing a bigger brain is an organic process, but being able to use that brain to project into the future and mentally connect, say, a kite, a key, and a lightning bolt and come up with electrical transference was like a touch of magic. So where did that spark of inspiration come from?

  The answer, Louis believed, was out in the deserts of southern Africa. Even though he was a city kid who knew jack about the outdoors, he had a hunch that the best place to look for the birth of human thought was the place where human life began. “I had a vague gut feeling that the art of animal tracking could represent the origin of science itself,” Louis says. Then who better to study than the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, who were both masters of animal tracking and living remnants of our prehistoric past?

  So, at age twenty-two, Louis decided to drop out of college and write a new chapter in natural history by testing his theory with the Bushmen. It was an insanely ambitious plan for a college dropout with zero experience in anthropology, wilderness survival, or scientific method. He spoke neither the Bushmen’s native tongue, !Kabee, nor their adopted one, Afrikaans. He didn’t even know anything about animal tracking, the reason he was going in the first place. But so what? Louis shrugged, and got to work. He found an Afrikaans translator, made contact with hunting guides and anthropologists, and eventually set off down the Trans-Kalahari Highway into Botswana, Namibia … and the unknown.

  Like Scott Carrier, Louis soon discovered that he was losing a race against time. “I went village to village looking for Bushmen who hunt with bow and arrow, since they’d have the tracking skills,” Louis says. But with big-game safaris and ranchers taking over their old game lands, most of the Bushmen had abandoned the nomadic life and were living on government settlements. Their decline was heartbreaking; instead of roaming the wilderness, many of the Bushmen were surviving on slave wages for farm jobs and seeing their sisters and daughters recruited by truck-stop bordellos.

  Louis kept searching. Far out in the Kalahari, he finally came across a renegade band of Bushmen who, he says, “stubbornly clung to freedom and independence and wouldn’t subject themselves to manual labor or prostitution.” As it turned out, the search for One in Six Billion was just about mathematically correct: in all the Kalahari, only six true hunters remained.

  The renegades agreed to let Louis hang around, an offer he took to the extreme; once installed, Louis acted like an unemployed in-law, basically squatting with the Bushmen for the next four years. The city kid from Cape Town learned to live on the Bushman diet of roots, berries, porcupine, and ratlike springhares. He learned to keep his campfire burning and tent zipped even on the most sweltering nights, since packs of hyenas were known to drag people from open shelters and tear out their throats. He learned that if you stumble upon an
angry lioness and her cubs, you stand tall and make her back down, but in the same situation with a rhino, you run like hell.

  When it comes to mentors, you can’t beat survival; just trying to fill his belly every day and avoid pissing off, for instance, two black-backed jackals mating beneath a baobob was an excellent way for Louis to begin absorbing the wizardry of a master tracker. He learned to look at piles of zebra dung and distinguish which droppings came from which animal; intestines, he discovered, have ridges and grooves that leave unique patterns on feces. Learn to tell them apart, and you can single out a zebra from an exploding herd and track it for days by its distinctive droppings. Louis learned to hunch over a set of fox tracks and re-create exactly what it was doing: here, it was moving slowly as it scented around for mice and scorpions, and look, that’s where it trotted off with something in its mouth. A swirl of swept dirt told him where an ostrich had taken a dust bath, and let him backtrack to find its eggs. Meerkats make their warrens in hard-pan, so why were they digging here in soft sand? Must mean there’s a den of tasty scorpions….

  Even after you learn to read dirt, you ain’t learned nothing; the next level is tracking without tracks, a higher state of reasoning known in the lit as “speculative hunting.” The only way you can pull it off, Louis discovered, was by projecting yourself out of the present and into the future, transporting yourself into the mind of the animal you’re tracking. Once you learn to think like another creature, you can anticipate what it will do and react before it ever acts. If that sounds a little Hollywood, then you’ve seen your share of movies about impossibly clairvoyant FBI profilers who can “see with the eyes of a killer.” But out there on the Kalahari plains, mind-throwing was a very real and potentially deadly talent.