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The following article has just been published in Nature.  Access to the
full article is confined to subscribers (and I'm not one of them :-)

I shall order a hard copy of the article through my library when it
arrives over here (in Australia).  In the meantinme, you will, I am sure,
find the conclusion at odds with some of the Evolutionary Fitness
asumptions and so worth further examination.  (The only other serious
support for a Paleo origin on distance running that I am aware of is that
put forward by Paul Shepard in his 'Back to the Pleistocene')

Endurance running and the evolution of Homo

DENNIS M. BRAMBLE AND DANIEL E. LIEBERMAN

Striding bipedalism is a key derived behaviour of hominids that possibly
originated soon after the divergence of the chimpanzee and human lineages.
Although bipedal gaits include walking and running, running is generally
considered to have played no major role in human evolution because humans,
like apes, are poor sprinters compared to most quadrupeds. Here we assess
how well humans perform at sustained long-distance running, and review the
physiological and anatomical bases of endurance running capabilities in
humans and other mammals. Judged by several criteria, humans perform
remarkably well at endurance running, thanks to a diverse array of
features, many of which leave traces in the skeleton. The fossil evidence
of these features suggests that endurance running is a derived capability
of the genus Homo, originating about 2 million years ago, and may have
been instrumental in the evolution of the human body form.

Keith

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