ASICS research found that respondents around the world reported spending 86 percent of their waking day not moving. Yet our bodies were shaped by a very different world, where walking, carrying, and running were part of everyday survival. Around two million years ago, our ancestors began developing a body equipped for endurance running.
These adaptations helped them keep moving over long distances. We inherited that capacity, but modern life gives many of us little reason to use it. A marathon puts that evolutionary inheritance to the test, with modern training, nutrition, and technology helping runners explore their limits.
So how would we perform lined up against the ancestors who helped shape us? Could a recreational marathoner outrun Homo erectus? Unlike other mammals, “humans aren’t especially good sprinters, but we are highly effective endurance athletes,” says David Raichlen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Southern California.
Some two million years ago, our ancestors Homo erectus lived as hunter-gatherers, spending long periods walking, tracking, and chasing food. One popular explanation is persistence hunting: chasing prey over hours until it collapses from heat exhaustion. Professor Lewis Halsey, of the University of Roehampton, says the evidence has become more nuanced.
His own research comparing humans and horses supports a human heat-endurance advantage. Humans are less adversely affected by rising temperatures than horses, although horses remain faster. Human success, he suggests, may have come from combining a modest heat advantage with pacing, tracking, cooperation, and a large brain for tactics.
Some internet speculations suggest Homo erectus could run a marathon in around 3 to 4 hours. If the estimate were taken at face value, even its slower end would beat today’s average marathon time of around 4:30 (4:17:00 for men and 4:43:00 for women, according to Running USA’s Industry Insights report from 2023). But where did the Homo erectus marathon time come from?
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