Scientist: Early Humans Ran Wild

Groundbreaking new research by Professor of Anthropology Daniel E. Lieberman ’86 validates what Bruce Springsteen has been saying for years—human beings are, indeed, born to run.

In an article published in yesterday’s edition of Nature, Lieberman and co-author Dennis M. Bramble of the University of Utah suggest that adaptations designed to make humans better runners were crucial in differentiating humans from other primates.

Their work is so original because most researchers had assumed that humans were relatively bad runners and focused on walking, Lieberman said.

“Humans are really poor sprinters, and when people think of running, they think of sprinting,” Lieberman said. “A beagle could probably out-sprint a human.”

But Lieberman and Bramble looked at endurance running instead of sprinting and came to the conclusion that humans are actually excellent distance runners.

“We are completely out of the league of other primates,” Lieberman said.

One particularly original aspect of Lieberman and Bramble’s work, according to postdoctoral researcher David A. Raichlen, is that it adds “an evolutionary framework for running that has not existed before.”

The pair did this by combining their experiments with fossil evidence to show that many distinguishing features of the human anatomy, such as our large rear ends and the large distance between our shoulders and heads, were designed for running—and have little bearing on walking ability.

They conjecture that the ability to run long distances helped early humans acquire protein-rich food that allowed us to grow larger brains.

The implications of this research will be widespread, according to Herman Pontzer, a graduate student in Lieberman’s lab.

“It changes the direction of research and the types of questions posed,” Pontzer said.

In addition to his scholarly background, Lieberman said his passion for running motivated his research. While he claims he is not a very good runner, he did train for the marathon as a graduate student and looks back with nostalgia on his days living beside the Charles as a tutor in Dunster House.

“I putter around the streets of Cambridge, but it brings me enormous pleasure,” Lieberman said.

He has done many of his experiments on Harvard undergraduates, particularly on athletes.

Lieberman, whose research was featured on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times, thinks that the tremendous response to his paper can be attributed to the popularity of running.

“I think we have touched a nerve because there are so many people out there who love to run and it is intrinsically interesting for those of us who like to run to think that we are designed for it,” Lieberman said.

Lieberman met his co-author—and got the idea for this line of research—13 years ago when Bramble sat in on a class he was TFing. The two struck up a conversation about a puzzling bit of bone on the back of the human skull and came to the working hypothesis that it might work to stabilize the head while running.

Since then, the two have done a slew of experiments over the past several years, largely focused on the role of running in human evolution.