Born to Run by Peter Shelton Sep 15, 2011 | 1462 views | 0 0
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That’s the subject of the bestseller Born to Run, by Christopher
McDougall – that we as a species evolved to run and in fact
became the big-brained creatures we are because we were runners.
McDougall calls homo sapiens Running Man.  McDougall also
addresses the Neanderthal riddle in Born to Run. That is the
mystery of why our stronger, hairier, highly successful cousins
vanished soon after the appearance in Europe of modern humans.
(This goes back to a column I wrote several weeks ago about the
search for a mutant gene or genes that separated us from the
Neanderthals.)  McDougall is a runner himself and actually
spends most of the book writing about the Tarahumara Indians of
Mexico, who are great long-distance runners and the inspiration
for the current craze of running barefoot. McDougall himself
became a barefoot convert.  But it is his chapter on the growing
understanding, over the last