Humans have the highest capacity for endurance and for a very long time we hunted not by being smarter but by literally following animals until they got tired and gave up before we did.
I believe certain breeds of dogs and horses can keep up with us, but only because we bred them to.
Early human to wolf: “You stalk. I stalk. Stalk together?”
Wolf: “Us BFF4Eva hairless ape”
The most enduring love story in human history.
That, plus we are good at throwing things and we sweat. Which means we have range and we can cool off while still being active.
The thing with a lot of animals is also that they’re pretty dumb.
They could potentially out walk us, it’s the most energy efficient way of moving, but what they actually do is run off when they see a human, then when they no longer see the human, they take a break. At which point the human catches up. At which point they run off again. Repeat multiple times.
The human simply has to keep walking, while the animal keeps running off. If the animal instead walked, the human would never or take far longer to catch up, because the animal would tire itself far less.
I mean it’s not dumb, it’s evolution. Can you imagine a deer “just walking” away from any other predator?
To follow an animal often required tracking it when it ran out of sight. Our sense of smell stinks, so we looked for clues on where it went. That’s smart
Our sense of smell isn’t bad. We’re great at detecting minute variations in smells as well as detecting rotting things in very little quantity.
