Humans have two features rare in mammals: our locomotor muscles are dominated by fatigue-resistant fibres and we effectively dissipate through sweating the metabolic heat generated through prolonged, elevated activity. A promising evolutionary explanation of these features is the endurance pursuit (EP) hypothesis, which argues that both traits evolved to facilitate running down game by persistence. However, this hypothesis has faced two challenges: running is energetically costly and accounts of EPs among late twentieth century foragers are rare. While both observations appear to suggest that EPs would be ineffective, we use foraging theory to demonstrate that EPs can be quite efficient. We likewise analyse an ethnohistoric and ethnographic database of nearly 400 EP cases representing 272 globally distributed locations. We provide estimates for return rates of EPs and argue that these are comparable to other pre-modern hunting methods in specified contexts. EP hunting as a method of food procurement would have probably been available and attractive to Plio/Pleistocene hominins.

人类具有哺乳动物中罕见的两个特征：我们的运动肌肉由抗疲劳纤维主导，并且我们通过出汗有效地消散长时间、高强度活动产生的代谢热量。对这些特征的一个有希望的进化解释是耐力追求（EP）假说，该假说认为这两种特征的进化都是为了通过坚持不懈来促进比赛。然而，这一假设面临着两个挑战：跑步的能量消耗很大，而且关于 20 世纪末觅食者的 EP 的记录很少。虽然这两个观察结果似乎都表明 EP 无效，但我们使用觅食理论来证明 EP 可以非常有效。我们同样分析了一个民族历史和民族志数据库，其中包含代表全球 272 个地点的近 400 个 EP 案例。我们提供了对 EP 回报率的估计，并认为这些方法与特定背景下的其他前现代狩猎方法相当。 EP狩猎作为一种获取食物的方法可能对普利奥/更新世古人类来说是可行的并且有吸引力。