Bushmen Persistence Hunting a Kudu page

[OnTheBayou]

Probably some of you have seen this. I watched it two days ago and I can't get it out of my mind. There are so many messages for us within it, about IF'ing, even. About how we used to appreciate the animals we ate, now it's a slab of meat in the case. How our brains and bipedalism made us good hunters against what should be a very hostile, impossible quest.


http://tinyurl.com/5wbq6u


Some other things I noticed:


1. The total lack of upper body muscles on the Bushmen. I am more and more thinking that bodybuilding is as unnatural as a boob job.


2. They apparently didn't get the message about running barefoot. Running shoes! And regular short pants.


3. The plastic water bottle. Anyone remember "The Gods Must Be Crazy?"


4. The use of right brain hemisphere intuition to attain knowledge. Several times the left hemisphere lacked data and the right took over.


How did these few men get all that meat back to camp? I suspect the camera crew's Land Rover!


(I put this under PB Success Stories since it had a happy ending! Well, not for the kudu.......) Mark, how about a "Doesn't Fit Anything Else" category, or similar?

[Catalina]

Wow.


I really agree with you about the appreciation for the animals we eat--that is an important piece that falls through the cracks for most of us. I very much liked what the hunter did after the kill. And I like your bodybuilding/boob job analogy--perhaps much of that comes more from vanity than functionality.


Looks like they decided the gods weren't so crazy after all--maybe that Coke bottle falling from the sky was a gift!


One thing I kept thinking was that here was a man running himself practically to death when there was a Land Rover and God knows what equipment right there. I guess I'm a jaded city girl, but if I were him, I'd be thinking, "Wanna lend a hand here?" Okay, jaded AND lazy.

[Geoff]

A few other things to consider:


1. Where were the other predators and scavengers that would show up shortly after a kill? I guess the crew scared them off, but wouldn't our primal hunter need also to worry about competition poaching his kill?


2. Persistence hunting gets brought out all the time to support the argument that humans evolved to be distance runners (see the recent best seller "Born to Run"). Mark talks about it here. http://www.marksdailyapple.com/did-humans-evolve-to-be-long-distance-runners/


I'm inclined to think that persistence hunting is actually more like swimming - a behavior to which our ancestors learned to apply their physiological "bag of tricks," but not something to which we're specifically evolved (and I'm a "recovering" marathon runner so it hurts me to say that my behavior's may not be an optimal use of my genetic heritage). I wonder if it was ever really that popular among paleo folks? Seems things like running animals into traps or ambushes would be easier than running them to death. Maybe it was a "bridge" behavior from sprinting to scavenge kills after a large predator had fed and left?


3. The lack of robust upper body musculature is definitely indicative of someone who spends a lot of time travelling long distances fast, but I don't know if it's fair to say that therefore bodybuilding's unnatural. It could be that the hunters activity and body form are "unnatural." I'm inclined to think that big muscles are natural for Groks who spend a lot of time lifting and small muscles are natural for running Groks. Your body tends to shape itself to the tasks to which you set it.


4. The shoes - there's a lot of talk about why barefoot is better here, but, hey, if that guy prefers to wear shoes you can bet there's a damn good reason for it (like the burning sand). Maybe he'd do better with Tarahumara-esque sandals, but there's no denying the increased protection shoes provide his feet.


5. The intuition was cool, but the film was so stylized that it was hard for me to distinguish what was authentic from what was staged. The entire kill could have been staged for all I can tell.


I totally agree that there are a lot of good messages for us here about building a relationship with our food and the animals that give their lives so that we can live.

[kuno1chi]

Fantastic video!!!


I've done a couple of tracking workshops, and you truly do go into a different world. We were learning to track people, though ;-)

[OnTheBayou]

It wouldn't surprise me that the runner had a lift. Maybe often. But who's counting? I also found it weird that he poured precious water on his head instead of drinking it.


Regardless, I'm sure the principles are good and this has been done, with variation, many millions of times in our history. I think the Tarahumara Indians of the Copper Canyon area of Mexico run deer down.


My eyes were all wet after the kill when the hunter expressed his gratitude. I was jealous, I realized. This "We are all one" of "primitive" religions has been paved over by the Western religions, "You will have dominion over......" Eastern religions don't do much better, they may not do the dominion thing, but have their own perversion of the whole and the not whole.


I grew up extremely left hemisphered. But over the last few decades I've nourished my right hemisphere via numerous avenues. I've re-examined the Don Carlos books, become an active Quaker, read about shape shifting, shamanism, and OK, some drugs in there, too, back when! I've come to appreciate alternative ways of knowing, of obtaining knowledge.


That workshop sounds fascinating, I'd love something like that. People, kudu, it doesn't matter.

[Katt]

This was a fantastic video. I especially took note of the offering to the animal at the end.

[grandma]

Maybe grok was a marathon runner after all. Completely counter intuitive to me that Man could out run a Kudu.

[klcarbaugh]

Grandma, I don't think that much running is what most hunter gather's did. It is only recently that there are no big game in this world to easily hunt...

I watched this video a few weeks ago actually, and when I clicked on the tread, I thought it was going to be an argument about the distance running.

We are remarkably adaptable though, vegetarians have showed me that much.

[Katt]

They don't run all of that time. I read about this first in a book called "Born to Run" by Christopher Dougall, of all places. They were trying to make the case for marathoning, and it /is/ possible. But they take turns chasing the animal, keeping it nervous and moving, tracking it when they cannot see it. Then, at the end, they send their best, freshest runner in to run it down until the animal falls.


Most running animals steps are tied to their breath, it turns out. The action of running acts on the diaphram like a bellows. So it's one breath per step, and they need a very long time to cool down. Humans aren't tied to that that, can sweat to cool down, and keep going. Eventually the animal overheats and its body shuts down.

[OnTheBayou]

Did the runner in the video cover 26 miles? Non-stop? I think the 8 hour figure included the time it took to locate the herd and peel out the bull. As long as the runner didn't let the bull rest too long, he, too, could stop for water or a moment of shade.