Marathon the norm?

[caters]

My Kepler Bb humanoids are hunter gatherers. The gathering isn't so much about food as it is about water. And even though they can grow plants, they still have to hunt. This adds up to a long daily distance.

Long distance is anything past 2 miles. I personally walk around 1 mile over hours and hours on average. I am a modern human, not a hunter gatherer so that explains the short distance over hours and hours.

But I would think that a hunter gatherer would walk at least a 5k if not more every day. That is a lot and leg cramps are the last thing on their priority list. It is much more important that they hunt and gather water and reproduce than it is that they rest their legs due to cramps. Leg cramps or any cramps for that matter are high on my priority list, partly because every month, I have cramps.

So with this hunter gatherer type society, I was wondering, is a marathon a reasonable daily distance or would an ultramarathon be more reasonable or would a half marathon be more reasonable?

I mean yes, it depends on age, stride length, and several other factors but what is a reasonable minimum daily distance for a hunter gatherer? It would be more than a 5k, that's for sure.

 

[CupofJoe]

There is a big difference between running and hunting.
A runner tries to cover as much distance in as short a time as possible. And at their full effort may only do it 2-3 times a year. People have done daily marathons [one man did 401 Marathons in 401 days] but it usually has a toll on their body as they loose weight, strain muscles and joints as humans are not designed to do this. Leg cramps come from pushing the body beyond it's ability to adapt to the activity. I get them a couple of hours after a really long swim if I don't rehydrate properly. If you push the body hard an long enough you can get auditory and visual hallucinations, lower the body's resistance to infections and a host of other issues. Anecdotally I heard of someone becoming Diabetic because of the shock to the system with their weight loss when they started Iron-Man training [without medical assistance].
A hunter will be trying to do as little as possible to get what they need. They will have to do it day after day so they will want to use as little energy as possible. The more energy they use the more food they have to find. Unless they are chasing down their prey, they will probably not run very much or very far. Better to collect fruit or wait for the prey to fall in to a trap...
How far you need to walk to get a day's worth of food and water depends on the conditions. There are place in our world today where people will walk 5km to get clean water and another 5km to carry it back, while others walk all day to collect enough to eat. In other places it might mean just going to the river bank and fishing...
I think I'm fairly fit if I can cope with a week long hiking holiday that averages 15km a day over very hilly terrain.

 

[Svrtnsse]

You may find it interesting to read up on the Raramuri people: Rarámuri people - Wikipedia

I'd say they are more the exception than the norm though.

When it comes to people who run/walk regularly leg cramps probably aren't much of an issue. Their bodies are used to the exercise and they know how to deal with it.

Personally I walk a lot. It's a little less then two miles to the office and I walk there and back and while it was a bit of a bother at first I eventually got used to it and I pull that off without issues (sorry to hear you're having issues with cramps - I missed that bit when first reading the post).

Like CupOfJoe says, I think the issue is mainly with the conditions these people live in. If they have to run longer distances in order to gather what they need, then they'll do that, and they'll pull it off. If they don't need to do it, then they'll stay closer to home.

For me, if I'm walking slowly and stopping to take pictures, I'm doing around three miles per hour. It wouldn't be unreasonable to think that someone out gathering supplies, and who's in a a good shape and used to it pulls off a similar pace.

 

[Russ]

There was a really interesting article about calorie expenditure amongst hunter/gatherers in a recent Scientific American, the main topic on the cover was weight loss. You should check it out.

The bad news was that they burned, on average, no more calories than a person doing an average desk job.

 

[Vaporo]

Well, a marathon is 26 miles. Traditionally, 7 leagues (21 miles) is about what a man is able to walk in one day. So, yes. I would have no problem believing that people accustomed to long-distance walking could regularly do 26 miles in a day.

Interestingly, early African hunter-gatherers may almost never have needed to run at all. They probably used endurance hunting, which meant simply chasing the prey until it was so tired that it couldn't run anymore or it collapsed from heatstroke. They could simply quickly walk or slowly jog behind their prey until it gave in, saving their strength for the final mad dash to secure the kill.

 

[Michael K. Eidson]

Travel for hunting purposes also depends on what you're hunting, what resources the hunter has to help with the hunt, and how plentiful game is in the area. If game is plentiful, the hunter will hide and wait for something to come by. If the game is not plentiful, the hunter may send out dogs (if available) to track down game and corner it somewhere, at which point the hunter comes up and does the killing. As was already said, the hunter will not want to expend any more energy than necessary. If game is plentiful in the area, the hunter society might not wish to move to another locale right away.

As for gathering, this also depends on how plentiful food, water, whatever is being gathered are in the area. Again, if an area is found where desired items are plentiful, then the gatherers may choose to stay in the area for awhile.

 

[Malik]

A 5K is nothing.

Human beings are an apex pursuit predator. Our eyes, our brains, our legs, our heart and lungs, are all tuned to allow us to out-endure anything else on the planet. We are the Terminators of the animal kingdom. There's some speculation that our relationship with the dog resulted from the dog being the only animal that could keep up with us. Horses move faster and move heavier loads, but they have to rest far more often than we do, and you have to take far better care of them. We're omnivores and fast-movers.

I run 3 or 5 miles -- about 5 or 8 km -- every morning (the route I take depends how I feel), over small hills. Five miles takes me about an hour. It's an easy trot; I don't even breathe hard. This isn't my workout, either. This is just waking up and getting ready for the day.

26 miles in a day is completely doable. It's not even that big of a struggle. That's ten hours of daylight, at 2.5 miles per hour. That's a leisurely stroll. I could do it in half that if I had to.

The maniacs who run ultramarathons -- the 50K, 100K, and even 100-mile (160km) "fun runs" -- do it at little more than a walk. Assuming you're in good shape and you have fuel (either carbs or fat) and water, you can hold 3-4 mph at a brisk walk or an easy jog all day. We're literally built to do it. I covered 94 miles in five days on foot with a full combat load (ruck, weapon, ammo, no armor) in the Horn of Africa. I wasn't real happy about it, though.

The thing about hunting on foot and covering that many miles is that unless you're out on a savannah and you're literally running your prey down, you're moving really, really slowly. In traditional bowhunting, we call it "stillhunting," because you're taking one step every 10-30 seconds, and you spend most of the time in the woods frozen and looking around. Step . . . look . . . look . . . look . . . look . . . look . . . step. Any faster than that and you'll spook your prey, which could be five feet away, hiding in the underbrush. Even when you shoot a large animal and it runs out (they all do; big animals almost never drop dead in their tracks; see the archery thread), the first thing you do is sit down and wait an hour or so, because if you give immediate chase, you'll spook it, and it will get up and run again, and there's a good chance you'll never recover it. I've tracked a wounded deer for hours over miles of mountains (not my shot; a buddy blew the shot).

Muscle cramps are generally caused by lack of flexibility, lack of conditioning, dehydration, and lack of electrolytes. A tribe of hunters that has been walking / running 20+ miles per day since they were old enough to stand may not even know what "leg cramps" are.

 

[staiger95]

Here is a quick internet search result. Hope it helps:

Stacy Hackner, bioarchaeologist
Written Aug 6, 2014
When we talk about modern hunter-gatherers, we're usually talking about the Hadza, who graciously allow themselves to be fitted with pedometers and accelerometers and are subject to numerous anthropologists watching their daily movements. The most recent study has men walking 15-18km per day and women 12-15. However, not everyone walked every day, and the men walked fewer days than the women. The Hadza men have been shown to be more efficient runners than the women, but this is only because they practice running more frequently (live prey runs away, but wild root vegetables tend to stay in place when chased).

It's important to bring the paleoenvironment into the question: if ancient humans lived in a lush environment, they might not have needed to walk very far at all. If the environment was more arid, they'd need to go farther to collect resources. Additionally, they are likely to have been semi-nomadic, moving every few months with the seasons; this reduces the distance walked each day, but moves them a considerable distance over the landscape.

As with all archaeological questions, we don't really know. For further reading, see articles by DA Raichlen and DE Leiberman.

 

[FifthView]

^I'd read an article about a study of the Hadza that gave a different range, about 9.3-13.5 km per day for the men.

"Hadza men walked much farther per day (11.4 +/- 2.1 km/day vs 5.8 +/- 1.8 km/day) which is consistent with other hunter-gatherer research, according to the authors."​

I think much would depend on the availability of food, seasonal variations (migrations of game), and so forth. Plus, these are averages, so some days there'd be less travel and some days there would be more. But I'm just guessing; no first-hand evidence, heh!

 

[skip.knox]

26 miles of course means 13 miles out, 13 back. It really means less than that as a hunting area, for neither hunter nor prey move in a straight line. So you're really looking at a circle about 20 miles in diameter (ten miles along the radius). This is going to vary seasonally, too. Game moves.

BTW, hunter-gatherers also fish. It's not like they have to run down prey every day. Maybe only for Sunday dinner.