
Originally Posted by
Christopher McDougall, Born to Run
You don’t stop running because you get old, the Dipsea Demon always said. You get old because you stop running….
“And it’s true for both genders,” Dr. Bramble continued. “Women show the same results as men.” That makes sense, since a curious transformation came over us when we came down from the trees: the more we became human, the more we became equal. Men and women are basically the same size, at least compared with other primates: male gorillas and orangutans weigh twice as much as their better halves; male chimps are a good one-third bigger than females; but between the average human him and the average human her, the difference in bulk is only a slim 15 percent. As we evolved, we shucked our beef and became more sinuous, more cooperative … essentially, more female.
“Women have really been underrated,” Dr. Bramble said. “They’ve been evolutionarily shortchanged. We perpetuate this notion that they were sitting around waiting for the men to come back with food, but there’s no reason why women couldn’t be part of the hunting party.” Actually, it would be weird if women weren’t hunting alongside the men, since they’re the ones who really need the meat. The human body benefits most from meat protein during infancy, pregnancy, and lactation, so why wouldn’t women get as close to the beef supply as possible? Hunter-gatherer nomads shift their camps by the movements of the herds, so instead of hauling food back to camp, it made more sense for the whole camp to go to the food.
And caring for kids on the fly isn’t that hard, as American ultra-runner Kami Semick demonstrates; she likes to run mountain trails around Bend, Oregon, with her four-year-old daughter, Baronie, riding along in a backpack. Newborns? No problem: at the 2007 Hardrock 100, Emily Baer beat ninety other men and women to finish eighth overall while stopping at every aid station to breast-feed her infant son. The Bushmen are no longer nomadic, but the equal-partners-in-hunting tradition still exists among the Mbuti Pygmies of the Congo, where husbands and wives with nets pursue the giant forest hog side by side. “Since they are perfectly capable of giving birth to a child while on the hunt, then rejoining the hunt the same morning,” notes anthropologist Colin Turnbull, who’s spent years among the Mbuti, “mothers see no reason why they should not continue to participate fully”