Ch. 2: Ancestors

People who regularly run long distances are often greeted with remarks like “How can you go out and just run for hours?” or “Don’t you’re knees hurt?” Many people proclaim to detest running, or claim to have inborn physical limitations to running, usually knees or perhaps the lower back. Flashbacks to football practice, gym class or that time a friend dared them to run a 5K race are evoked. Runners enjoy this, and tend to play along with the notion of running as being some strange and painful display of stoic tenacity. Runners like to be categorized and admired as a “special breed”.

The truth about running is actually quite different than the non-runner’s notion of arduous pounding. And the runners who feel pride that they can pull off what most people think is beyond their own limits are a bit disingenuous in taking credit for being “special”. With the exception of people who have specific and acute limitations brought on by traumatic injury, or very old people, the vast majority of us are perfectly suited to long distance running. Our upright posture, skeletal geometry and proportion, musculature, skin, glands, metabolism and cardio vascular system are all better suited for the job of distance running than any other animal.

Science tells us that we humans are most closely related to chimpanzees. This means (among many other things) that we have no primate relatives who share our ability to walk and run exclusively on two limbs. This ability is fundamental to who we as a species are. 5 million years ago, the fossil evidence identifies a clear diversification between chipanzees and austrolopithacus, a human ancestor who walked exclusively on two legs. Many scientists agree that 3 million years ago our progenitors were as adept at bipedal locomotion as are modern homo sapiens.[1] Homo sapiens proper did not emerge until 250,000 years ago and therefore represent only the most recent 8% of the history of perfected bipedal locomotion in primates. More strikingly, homo sapiens only gave up its hunter gatherer life style and strong dependence on nearly constant pedestrian travel around 7,000 years ago, which represents only just less than 2% of the whole of human sapiens’ history. In total, we have been divorced from our deep history as runners for slightly more than one-tenth of one percent of our perfected bipedal history.

Our evolution to bipedalism was an adaptation to environmental changes around 5 million years ago that caused the vast subtropical forest of Africa to dry up and become patches of forest surrounded by open savannah.This was result of the onset of a global ice age which created an expansion of the Sahara Desert and a drier climate in Sub-Saharan regions where humans evolved. Tree dwelling chimpanzees found themselves peering out from forested enclaves, across high growing grasslands, perhaps to other forested patches, perhaps to distant bodies of water. The urge to spend more time on hind legs and peer across the hot, dry meadows overtook certain of these archaic chimpanzees, triggering an adaptation toward a taller, upright profile, shorter arms, squared shoulders, and a head that balanced between them on an elongated and vertical neck.

So begins homo sapiens’ life as traveling species, suited to cover distance in ways that the knuckle walking chimps could not. Front and rear limbs became specialized, with the arms now free from the job of forward propulsion. The open, flat terrain of the African savannah invited longer and longer trips, enabling the ability to seek more varied foods over a wider range. The hairless skin and increased sweat cooling capacity meant that the body temperature was better controlled, enabling the increased metabolic efficiency necessary for prolonged strenuous effort. The powerful fast twitch muscles of the chimp were replaced by a higher proportion of slow-twitch fibers which are particularly suited toward long steady effort.[2]

Homo sapiens can outrun just about every other species over prolonged distances – even a horse. Other animals, though faster in bursts than we are, do not possess the physical capacity to travel over miles and miles for hours at a time. They fatigue and are eventually exhausted and unable to evade human runners. Besides our cunning and opposable thumbs, endurance running was a signature advantage to early man. Early hunters loped along at five or six miles an hour following a heard, killing the animals that dropped back from fatigue. Memory and language allowed goups of hunters to cooperate in strategy, steering herd animals to obstacles, or toward other hunters who waited with fresh legs to take up pursuit. Stone tools allowed the kill to be dressed and divided, for skins and bones to be fashioned into clothing and “hardware” for making shelter and weapons. The innovation of cooking allowed early man to more easily consume and digest meat.

The running hunters’ quarry also provided the nutrients that fed the development of the human brain. Early bipeds like Austrolopithicus were much more like apes in the size and cognitive capacity of their brains. Several million years of hunting and eating animal protein in quantities that were much greater than their chimpanzee forebears was a crucial part of the emergence of one of evolution’s most complex and adaptable systems- human cognition. The plant forage available on the Aftrican savannah of 2.5 million years ago would have been insuffient to provide the calories and amino acids necessary to support the quantities of energy that proto-humans required to develop the complex cognitive and social faculties that were blossoming during this period. [3]

The human brain is a big user of food energy. Humans use 25% of their resting metabolism for the maintenance of brain activity, whereas other large primates use around 8%, and non-human mammals use only 3-4%.[4] In this way, we can see that our minds are a direct extension of our bodies, and that the ability to travel long distances on foot made basic human traits like memory, language and the spectrum of our emotional lives possible. The chicken/egg relationship of the mind and body is clear from a historical standpoint.


Rather, the facts about our evolutionary history help us separate what is fundamental to us versus what is recently acquired, the overlay specific to our place and time. In this spirit, it is important to explore what the spiritual world of our ancient running forebears was. The pre-agricultural spirituality of hunter gatherers is often dismissed as “superstition” or only the expression of stone-age people’s lack of scientific understanding, as if ancient people simply invented stories and beliefs to explain what they failed to understand through empirical knowledge. This point of view portrays stone age people as supremely ignorant, almost like children who are lost in their world, frightened and grasping at simplistic myths as a means of coping with the bleak terror of their ignorance.

This point of view fails to understand a key aspect of pre-historic man’s consciousness: a sense of deep and universal connectedness to their experience. No better example is the spiritual culture of native Australians, who until very recently lived as they had since coming to Australia some 70,000 years ago. The oral epoch known as “Dreamtime” encapsulates much of the essence of traditional Aboriginal belief.[5] This concept links past and present in a seamless field of connectivity. The entire world, including one’s perceptions and history are part of Dreamtime.[6] Mudooroo, an Aboriginal writer says, “The Dreaming' or 'the Dreamtime' indicates a psychic state in which or during which contact is made with the ancestral spirits, or the Law, or that special period of the beginning.”

This notion of “connectedness”, is common to most pre-agricultural belief systems, including Native Americans. This notion of connectedness does not explain the world in the absence of science, as academia so blindly proposes, but rather serves to decentralize the individual’s field of perception. To see one’s self as truly connected to one’s experience, without separation between what is perceived and who is perceiving is what Buddhist philosophy might call “egolessness”, or the absence of self/other split.

Because early man lacked complex scientific and culturally layered explanations of what his experience was, he was much more reliant on (one might also say intimate with) his direct experience. The dawn of empirical knowledge, of scientific discovery and analysis, was also the beginning of our mind/body split. Was this because science prevailed over superstition, or was it because when we stopped our nomadic wandering, our “running”, we also started supplanting the activities that connected us to our world with activities that, although useful in improving our physical comfort, also divorced us from our physical selves?

Discovering what lies behind the “mask” of our own individuality, our name, our job, what we look like, what we think—this is central to the spiritual path as the Buddha experienced and defined it. It is said that on the night of the Buddha’s awakening he was able to perceive his entire karmic history, to look back on all past incarnations and see clearly the causes and conditions that brought him to the present moment. (need source here, not just Herman Hesse) This understanding was not just a form of intuitive acrobatics, but like all the Buddha’s wisdom, derived as a practical antidote for the fixed concept of self that is the basis for our confusion and suffering.

We often hear that we are all “part of the human family”. Like so much well worn and cliched wisdom it sounds true but also trite, like one of many positive affirmations meant to convince us that “it’s all going to be okay”. But the notion of “family”, of inheritance, of ancestor—is central to many spiritual traditions. In Chinese spiritual culture ancestors are venerated because our physical bodies are entirely derived from them. This belief is heavily rooted in Taoism, a collection of teachings that emphasized the union all phenomena. Taoist teachings present the human body as a microcosm of the universe, with the organs of the body directly correlating to basic natural phenomena like the seasons, the elements and spatial directions.[7] In this way, relating to our ancestors, our bodies and our environment are actually one in the same.

The spiritual runner should understand that he or she is engaging in a long lineage of runners who perfected the activity over millions of years. Genetic science and the Buddha’s teachings on karma are synonymous is some ways. Karma is the simple cause and effect dynamic that governs phenomena. Genetics is a mechanical explanation of how beings are compiled from the characteristics of their forbears, or ancestors. Our bodies contain the bodies of those ancient runners in a very literal way.