Goodreads Bookshelf
Who We've Been, Who We Could Be
Tonight on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviewed Christopher McDougall, the author of Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Known. I haven't read the book, but I found it totally fascinating. The book seems to center around this isolated tribe in Mexico, the Tarahumara, who (quoting from the Amazon.com description) "practiced techniques that allow them to run hundreds of miles without rest and chase down anything from a deer to an Olympic marathoner while enjoying every mile of it." And, as he notes, this includes tribesmen in their 90s! Later in the interview, he points out that
According to a new body of research, it’s because humans are the greatest distance runners on earth. We may not be fast, but we’re born with such remarkable natural endurance that humans are fully capable of outrunning horses, cheetahs and antelopes. That’s because we once hunted in packs and on foot; all of us, men and women alike, young and old together.
It's just fascinating to me to think of what human beings are capable of, physically, under conditions that bring out and condition those qualities. Modern human beings are just one version. While we don't really want to go back to living in caves and running down deer for food, but that doesn't mean that we can't learn from about our physical selves (or even our social structures) by learning about all the possibilities.