----- Original Message -----
From: Tom Bridgeland <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Saturday, February 23, 2002 2:10 pm
Subject: Re: Paleo and extreme exertion
> > I haven't finished "Lights Out" yet, but the authors say that
> paleo humans
> > only exercised strenuously when running for their lives, or when
> trying to
> > kill something. So they rarely experienced extreme exercise.
>
> Hunting can be pretty energetic, even if you are not running after
> animals. Try it some time.
Yes. I remember seeing a film once about modern hunters in africa. They
wounded a giraffe with a spear or arrow, as I recall, and spent an
entire day chasing it until it collapsed from loss of blood. I suspect
that could have been a common modus operendi for paleo hunters who
lacked the kill power of high powered rifles. Predatory animals often
follow that approach, wounding an animal and following it 'til it
becomes easier to kill. Our bodies have muscle fibers for both short
bursts of energy and for drawn out expenditures of energy. This seems
to me consistent with the idea that our ancestors engaged in activities
that required both sorts of muscles and that such activities continued
for many hundreds of generations. We are left with bodies needing that
sort of activity (and the need to eat meat). Hunting large animals
using sharpened sticks and stones probably meant sudden intense bursts
of energy when you ran out of hiding to hurl something at a herd and
hopefully wound an animal followed by many hours, or even days, of
chasing and trailing your prey. This would vary with the animal and
your tactics. In some cases, if you wounded an animal badly enough, you
and your buddies might have spent an intense 20 minutes or so jabbing
at the arteries while dodging its horns to finish the job. I read that
the pattern of injuries on the skeletons of even neo-lithic hunters
indicate very rough lifestyles. Supposedly the only modern
professionals with similar injuries are rodeo riders. In any case, once
you killed a large animal, you then had to butcher the thing and carry
the meat home. All of this would have been a lot of hard work.
> >
> > They feel that modern humans who exercise three or four times a
> week at the
> > club doing strenuous activities are only harming themselves in
> the long term
>
> Likely true. My college coach had us running up to 15 miles a day 7
> days a week. We ranked in the top 20 nationally year after year, but
> every year at the end of the season so many of the guys were broken
> down with injuries and colds that we never even made it to nationals.
> That guy was just stupid, IMHO. 3 days a week is my max now. Exercise
> competes for energy with other systems of the body, such as
> healing/building.
I'm not suprised that that sort of extreme stress on the body would
have bad effects, and I suspect that is more than our evolutionary
inheritance has really prepared us for. But we don't have to take it to
such fanatical extremes. My own experience is that regular, pleasantly
hard exercise has benefited my health. I also wonder how much of the
problem in those extreme marathon-mania type cases is from dehydration.
Getting enough water is critical to a properly functioning immune
system.
John Battle
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