Born to Run with Chris McDougall and Herman Pontzer

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk’s sports edition.

We’re titling this one, Born to Run, because we’re going to get to the bottom of what’s going on evolutionarily, biophysically, when the human body decides to run.

Away from things or toward things.

We’re running people right here.

I got as my co-host, Gary O’Reilly.

Good to be here again.

Doing authenticity to this program, being a former professional athlete.

And occasionally runner.

Also, you turned sportscaster before we got a hold of you.

Great to have you on sports edition.

And Chuck Nice, our stand-up comedian.

Good to be here.

Can’t wait for our show on Pink Cadillac.

Since we’re doing a show on Born to Run.

Oh.

You guys would have jumped on that if I wasn’t black.

You would have jumped right on it.

Completely.

That’s correct.

Or it was just a failed joke.

One of those two.

You can say that.

I’m just out that conversation.

In the show, we’re featuring my interview with Chris McDougall, who was the author of the book Born to Run.

We’ll be jumping into some clips because we had some private time with him to tell us what he was about and what his research has been on what it is to go barefoot in this world whether or not you’re running or walking.

That’s interesting.

As always, we bring in some academic expertise into the mix.

So let me just introduce for you Dr.

Herman Pontzer.

Herman, welcome to StarTalk.

I’m tickled to be here.

Very excellent.

So you are an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke and you think about what it is to be human, which I love.

How do we get to be this way, this crazy way we are and what does it mean for today?

And you wrote a book, and I think for those who see this in video, that might be on your back show.

What a coincidence.

Who put it there?

That’s surprising.

That’s surprising.

I love single word title books, burn.

The economics of life, calories are the currency.

So we did a whole explainer video on calories, by the way.

So that’ll dovetail nicely with this episode.

So let’s just get straight into this.

So, Herman, you got your PhD back in 2006, and do you remember the title of your thesis?

Oh, God, locomotor energetics and economy and evolution in Homo erectus.

So I was all about how changes in the skeleton, which we can document, you know, humans have been split from chimps and bonobos for about 7 million years.

And so there’s a big change that happens around 2 million years with the evolution of our genus, genus.

I have to correct you because I’m the one out there fixing it when people don’t understand it.

It’s not that that’s when we split from chimps, is that when we and chimps split from each other.

Ah, I was being too simple, Neil, you’re right.

I’m going to be up in your face.

That’s fine.

When our two lineages split, the last time chimpanzees and us all here shared a grandparent was 7 million years ago.

And then for 4 million years or so, 4 or 5 million years, we’re kind of just these bipedal apes walking around, walking around on two legs, but basically like Ewok style.

And then around 2 million years ago, you see these changes that happened that are, the anatomy changes enough, brain changes enough that we say, oh, that’s us.

That’s more like us than animals.

That’s genus Homo.

And along with that comes these changes in our legs and our pelvis.

And so I was very curious as a young PhD student, what that meant for how many calories it takes to walk.

So we populated the entire earth upon exiting Africa.

And so that seems to me a lot of walking and running.

At what point did we have this, if not ability, certainly the urge to do so?

Yeah, I think it’s the ability to do it is the key thing.

And here’s what’s interesting.

People often say that that has to do with running and it might in a kind of tangential way because the way we run, the way we’re able to explore a landscape changes the way that we can eat, right?

It changes the menu for us.

And all of a sudden our menu works worldwide.

But it isn’t like we, we did walk into Eurasia and eventually we walked into North America, but it isn’t like we went there straight away, 100 kilometers a day kind of thing.

It’s more of a population expansion.

So it’s the same way that tree species expand their range is kind of the way that we expanded our range, I think.

But that was possible.

Oh, because the trees didn’t walk.

But neither did we in the sense that, neither did we in my point.

Okay, I had not fully appreciated that.

It wasn’t one single nomadic tribe going thousands of miles.

No, that’s right.

And this is what really separates us from the other apes, right?

Because chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangs, the reason they are getting decimated with climate change and forests getting cut down is that they can’t live anywhere else.

They can’t, right?

They can’t go anywhere.

They’re done.

You cut down our forests and we’re like, I guess we’re going to live in this place now.

And Chuck, I like the way Herman is on a first name basis with the orangutan.

You call them the orang.

The rest of us, we have to use the full name, orangutan.

I mean, once you’ve handled as much orang urine as I’ve handled, I feel like there’s a familiarity there.

And the cool thing is that you can brag about it.

Now I need to know if that was intentionally handled.

Or they just pee on you.

No, I pay a lot of money for that orangutan urine.

It’s a little too much information there.

Doc, I’m going to go to our first clip.

Please, please.

Please don’t tell me that this happened in a hotel in Russia.

That’s all I’m saying.

That’s all I’m saying.

That is the sign that we should go to our first clip.

So again, we’re featuring my interview with Chris McDougall.

He’s a journalist who studied anthropological tribes and their running habits.

And he learned quite a bit.

And so let’s pick up on some of what he wanted to share with us about our transition from what was it?

Homo erectus to Homo sapiens.

And is there anything that we still have that other animals don’t?

Because I feel pretty vulnerable when I’m out there in the wild.

Check it out.

You know, there is a professor, Dr.

Dennis Bramble, who was kind of curious about the same thing.

You know, as a morphologist, he’s wondering, why do we give up strength and speed?

Because you know, when you’re on all fours, you’re stronger and faster.

And just to be clear, a morphologist is a person who doesn’t study the genetics as much as sort of the what you look like and your general form for how you then function.

Is that a fair definition of a morphologist, just to so we’re on the same page there?

He’s basically taking apart the tinker toys and looking at the raw parts.

And so what he’s looking at is the human body as an element of engineering.

You know, we have all these raw parts.

How do we assemble it?

And what he what he was perplexed by is creatures that are all fours are stronger and faster.

And at some point in our evolutionary history, we decided, hey, rather than being strong and fast, we’d rather be like skinny and weak.

So why do we make that’s the ticket that will help us dominate the planet.

Let’s get skinny and weaker, skinny, weak and slow.

So he’s like, this makes no sense.

Why didn’t we stay on all fours when we could climb trees and we could compete and fight with a lower center of balance?

And what he discovered was the second we went upright, a lot of other component factors came into place.

When we came upright, we became these hairless mammals full of springy tendons that could vent heat by perspiration as opposed to respiration.

And at that moment in our lives, we made an evolutionary shift from being strong, speedy animals into being slower, but slower animals with greater stamina and endurance.

And along with that came this whole other grab bag, sort of engineering features, such as like the nuchal ligaments.

And what he thought was really cool was at the moment the fossil evidence went from Australopithecus into Homo erectus, you see something showing up in the back of the skull, which is this little hollow groove.

And that hollow groove is there to sustain a thing called the nuchal ligament.

And the nuchal ligament only does one purpose.

It stops your head from bobbing around when you run.

And so at that moment in our lives, in our history, we went from being walkers into runners.

And along with that became this whole new ability we never had before.

So doctor, I have to ask, why did we give up strength and speed?

This doesn’t seem to be the wisest move any species could make.

Because if you’re out there in the wild, you’re going to need both of those to survive.

Weren’t we happy with strength and speed?

What gives here?

Well, the problem is that if you’re an ape, right, and you live in a world full of food in these rainforests, you don’t have to go very far to get it.

And so you can go ahead and specialize in strength and be good at getting up in the trees and bolting from a leopard if it chases you.

But it doesn’t give you the endurance you need to be able to cover all the ground you need to cover if you’re going to move into more barren habitats like savannas, or for that matter, if you’re going to hunt and gathering.

Because as soon as you start hunting, there’s a lot less food on the landscape for you than there is if you just eat plants, because there’s just fewer animals and plants around.

So you got to cover more ground.

That means you need endurance.

That means something’s got to give.

So it was survival?

Well, it was food, right?

So it’s survival and reproduction.

I would count that as survival.

The energy that you’re getting though, yeah, you need to survive.

But the reason you need those calories is to reproduce.

That’s what evolution really cares about, right?

It cares about making babies.

So it’s both.

It’s both sides of the coin.

When we are getting smarter, isn’t that like the biggest thing?

And you don’t need to be big and strong when you’re smart, as evidenced by nerds running the world today.

You just don’t need it.

I mean, let’s be honest.

I mean, Batman versus Superman, Batman wins.

Why?

Because he’s smarter than Superman.

You know, that’s basically the deal.

Doc, before we get to that bit of the brain kicking in, and I’m sure we’re going to do that later in the show, nuchal ligaments are one thing, but having a ligament in my neck that’s stronger and keeps my head stable doesn’t really enable me to run, does it?

So what happened between the great apes and our ancestors for us to be able to become these 50, 100 mile runners?

What goes on?

What springy tendons?

What bits and bobs do we acquire?

Yeah, yeah.

So legs get longer, the pelvis gets a bit narrower, and so all of that is helping keep the forces that come up through the, as your foot hits the ground, bam, there’s an equal and opposite force, as we all know, that comes back up through your skeleton and keeping those, keeping your pelvis narrow helps you handle those forces.

Having longer legs means you’re covering more ground per stride, which means if you, this is a fun one, if you have a, when you buy a cup of coffee, that’s wherever you buy your cups of coffee, to go, you get a top on that coffee.

Why?

Because if you don’t, you slosh it around as you’re walking, even though you don’t notice that, because everything seems still to you, your body’s going up and down, up and down, up and down with every step.

If you have longer legs, there’s less of that roller coaster up and down, up and down, which means less energy, because every time you go up and down, there’s energy loss there.

And so longer legs save you calories when you walk and run.

So longer legs, narrower pelvis, bigger joint surfaces to handle the loads of all this stuff, all these things are changing.

And then he talks about, here we go, there’s a phrase I’ve just learned from this interview.

Ventilation through perspiration is better than through respiration.

So I sweat through my skin rather than pant like a dog or something like that.

Is that where we are?

Yes, that’s another big one.

We get hairless, right?

And we get humans are the sweatiest animals on the planet, 10 times more sweat glands per unit of area of your skin than any other primate for sure.

And I think they’re not the other mammal.

And horses can sweat up a storm.

They can sweat.

They can.

They’ve got a little short hair to help them do better at that.

But they still don’t sweat as well or as much per surface area as we do.

And people say you sweat like a pig, but actually pigs don’t sweat.

So we’re some funky folks.

Pigs don’t have pores.

We’re some funky folks.

And that’s what that gets to actually is that it isn’t just the frame that changes, right?

It’s also this engine.

And so one of the things that we’ve been looking at in my lab is how metabolic rate changes and how you can burn energy faster and higher and longer, right?

We can rep our engines for longer than the other apes can too.

So that’s a whole other thing that changes, not just the frame, but also the engine.

Well, let me get back to my interview with McDougall.

And I have to ask him, what did our ancestors do with those anatomical changes?

There’s one thing to have the changes, but is there something, can you do anything interesting with it?

Let’s check it out.

How did the human brain get so big, so fast?

Because humans arrived on the planet, Homo erectus, about two million years ago.

The first projectile weapons arrived about 10,000 years ago.

Just to be clear, a projectile weapon, you don’t mean cannon, you mean throwing, you mean the ability to throw.

Or like a bow and arrow, a spear, things like that, things you’re throwing.

And so the problem is this, you have humans with a brain developing very quickly, getting really big and fat, really fast.

That kind of brain requires a lot of caloric energy.

Yet the first bow and arrow only shows up about 10,000 years ago.

So you have more than a million years where we’re eating a lot of stuff to sustain this energy sucking brain, yet we don’t really have the weaponry to bring down big game.

So the question becomes, how the heck are humans eating calorically dense proteins when they don’t have the weapons to kill them?

And the theory becomes it was our ability to run long distances, to do what’s known as persistence hunting, to go out there on a savanna as a group, run long distances and chase our prey into heat exhaustion.

And here’s the fascinating part about this is they’ve actually done this in Africa and watch indigenous groups chase antelope and kudu into submission.

And it takes exactly as long to run an antelope into heat exhaustion as it takes the average marathon or to run a marathon.

Yeah, so it’s interesting that, you know, we sort of recreationalize this survival behavior that we’ve evolved to do, which is to run down animals to exhaustion, which is probably an important piece of how homo erectus made its living.

Wait a minute.

So they can improve the marathon by having them chase an antelope.

They’ve got to run into the bulls the wrong way around.

So tell me about this high density food, because you’re Mr.

Calorie Man.

If I don’t have weapons yet to take down an animal, I still need the high calories to sustain my brain.

Where am I getting the calories from?

So you’re getting it from, if you’re a hominin like us, you’re getting it from two things that other apes don’t have.

You’re getting it from a fair amount of meat, which, you know, hunter-gatherers kind of balance about half their calories from meat, half their calories from plants, and you’re getting it.

So that’s how we got the meat from wearing them out.

Well, from wearing them out.

But also, so here’s the other thing.

We also cook our food, right, which Chris doesn’t get into there, but, you know, cooking is also a really big deal because it helps you digest your food sort of externally and you get a lot more bang for your buck that way.

And then also, you know, don’t forget, you still got a lot of the group that’s out getting plant foods.

And so that’s helping to fund the whole thing, too, because even if you’re really good at running, it’s still a pretty risky endeavor to kind of go spend your day trying to run something down.

You come home empty handed, you’re done.

But if you can share with people, hunt and gather, now you’ve got something that’s a winning strategy.

So, Doug, are we now migrating with herds, major herds?

We’ve seen, we’ve all watched David Attenborough on TV show us these thousands and thousands of beasts traversing continents and countries and things.

Are we now following them or are we just like go out, hunt, come back to base?

Probably the second one.

Wait, wait, wait, Gary, when you said now, you mean back then?

Back then, now.

Okay, now, because I know I’m not doing that.

Getting you calm.

I did once follow the Grateful Dead.

Does that count?

Oh, there.

No.

I don’t know.

Were you feeding along with them?

Were you eating the Grateful Dead as you went?

I mean, that would be the…

No, just binging on Jerry Garcia, Ben and Jerry’s.

So that’s an interesting question.

We don’t know for sure, but probably not migrating with them because again, it’s hunting and gathering.

And so the way that that works is we agree where we’re going to end up at the end of the day.

So we’re coming home at the end of the day to the same place and maybe that place moves week to week or even month to month or something like that.

So you can kind of migrate over time, but you’re probably not following herds.

The way you can figure this out, this is interesting.

You could actually get the isotopes in the fossilized teeth because there’s a different isotopic signature in the rainwater and in the surface water of oxygen isotopes as you move from north to south because of the gradient of temperature and evaporation.

And there’s also, there’s other isotopes you could use also to track location.

And we could do that, right?

We could find out is, does somebody end up with a tooth isotope signature that’s hundreds, maybe thousands of kilometers away from where we find them.

And that would be the way to find out.

But that hasn’t, nobody’s shown that yet.

So that’s not there waiting to be, to be just demonstrated.

So I grow my tooth earlier in my life.

That’s right.

Later in my life, I’m now a thousand miles from where that happened.

So that tells you a lot.

Yeah, exactly.

In fact, they use it to like track wildlife finds and all this kind of stuff.

You can do it.

Anyway, that’s exactly what you would do.

Okay.

So just to be clear and correct me if I’m wrong, Herman, I’m going to show off my little bit of knowledge here.

So water molecule H2O has two hydrogens and one oxygen.

And native oxygen has 16 particles in its nucleus.

But isotopic oxygen has 18 and it’s got two extra neutrons.

And so if you have water with oxygen 18 in it mixed together with water with oxygen 16, oxygen 16 is going to evaporate slightly more preferentially to the one with the oxygen 18 because it’s lighter.

And so if you were in more the climates closer to the equator, your ground water supply will have more oxygen 18 relative oxygen 16.

Did I get that right Herman?

That’s it.

That’s it.

In a nutshell, exactly how it works.

I want a gold star for that.

Points for you.

I didn’t know we were getting gold stars handed out.

This is a new thing.

I think Neil’s already won a bunch of gold stars.

It looks like.

Okay.

But Herman, what it means is you can’t detect this if they only go east west, only if they go north.

You would have to use other things.

So there are other isotopes in the landscapes, for example, strontium isotopes can vary depending on the rock in the ground and how that seeps into the water.

So you can actually use a whole…

You’ve got many tools.

You can use.

Okay, cool.

Yeah.

Very cool.

Yeah.

All right.

We’re going to take a break.

But any fast questions on this before we go to a break?

Gary.

Is this…

This assistance herding, if I am running 55 miles to hunt down this beast, I’m doing a lot of running.

Is it worth it?

Because the calories I expend as to the calories I get back.

And are you going to haul the thing back to the tribe?

Exactly.

That doesn’t sound like it makes sense.

If it’s big enough, you probably move camp.

Yeah.

So the hunter gatherers I work with, it’s a community called the Hod’s in northern Tanzania.

If they get something really, really big, they might move camp for a few days.

But even a zebra, which is pretty dang big, they’ll haul back to camp.

Yeah.

In pieces.

Not all at once.

So, wow.

Maybe they capture it and not kill it, then they can walk it back.

That’s a great, excellent idea.

Better yet, let’s just ride it back.

Make it do the work.

Brilliant.

Chuck, that is completely brilliant.

They were only domesticatable.

Let’s take a quick break.

When we come back, more of my interview with Chris McDougall and we have in studio today for Professor Herman Pontzer who thinks all about the evolution of what it is to be human.

We’re back, StarTalk Sports Edition.

We’re talking about running, walking, how these became things that humans do.

And I’ve got Professor Herman Pontzer, Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University.

And that’s North Carolina, if I remember correctly.

Is that right?

And Chris McDougall, who’s a journalist who’s written about this.

So we’ve got the journalist and the scientist together, which is a brilliant and deadly combination of knowledge and insight and life experience that we’re bringing to the page here.

And I want to start off first thinking about our brains.

And about our ingenuity outstripping evolution.

Is that a thing that can happen?

And let’s go straight to our next clip with Chris McDougall and get to the bottom of it.

Check it out.

Yeah, it’s one of those kind of mysteries of the evolutionary trail.

The best kind of scenario you can come up with is that as the planet was warming, there was a new genetic offspring, a new adaptation.

A homo erectus baby was born that was more comfortable standing upright.

And that person was able to run.

And it became those homo erecti who were able to run long distances that began to thrive on the planet.

So, and as they were able to thrive, they had the protein energy which fueled the expansion of this brain.

What intrigues me is eventually our brain has other sort of smarts going for it.

And then we perfect projectile weapons, right?

So as you said, the bow and arrow, ultimately the gun.

So we don’t have to chase a damn thing, okay?

You could stand a hundred meters away and take down your protein for the next week.

And so this talent, let me call it that, this skill set, this genetic skill set that we have as humans, would lose the need to continue to be honed once we develop tools of killing.

Is that a fair claim to make?

That’s exactly right.

Once again, our ingenuity has outstripped our evolution.

It’d be kind of fun experiment to do right now, whereas it takes three hours to catch a kudu.

How long would it take for you to hit a button on your phone and have a burrito show up at Chagor?

So it’s not only how long, it is what is your investment of calories to obtain those calories?

To obtain calories required more calories than what you earned, you’re a dead species quickly.

You will go extinct fast.

So you need, so it’s gotta cost you fewer calories to get it than to eat it.

So yeah, that’s a whole other, that’s a whole work, a whole nother nother there.

You’re absolutely right.

We get a lot more calories per hour of work now than we used to.

So your average blue collar worker in the United States today, with an hour’s worth of wages, can go to the store and easily buy 20,000 kilocalories of food.

So that’s enough for like a week.

If you’re a Hazan man or woman, like community I work with hunter gatherers, an hour’s worth of work gets you somewhere between a thousand and 2000 calories of food.

So that’s 10 times less, an order of magnitude less than you or I can get just kind of in our daily lives.

It’s a huge change.

So absolutely, and then we can talk about how that contributes to obesity and all these kinds of issues that we have now.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

The one other thing I’d add is this.

Go ahead.

Weirdly, you talked about, well, a species can’t exist if it burns more calories to get the food than it gets in the food that it requires.

True, but do you know?

But because we use fossil fuel energy to produce our food, we burn eight kilocalories of energy to produce one kilocalorie of food on a single shift.

Ooh.

We are in, we’re circling the drain here.

So we gotta figure that one out.

That’s a whole separate question.

One other thing that we can do, not for that, which you just said, but in terms of the obesity aspect, cause it makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint that our bodies are kind of designed to work for food.

So maybe we should have the evolutionary diet where all your food is just on a little cart that you gotta chase around for a few hours before you get to eat.

I like it.

Well, you know, the supermarket, all the food’s under two feet of dirt.

You got to get it out with a digging stick.

Yeah.

This is not going to catch on.

Just saying right now, I’m not digging for my food.

Instead of whole foods, it’s whole food.

Big a whole food.

I’ll tell you what too, when you dig for two hours to get the carcass, because all this also has to be a carcass and not like a little chop, you’re going to eat the zebra testicles, you know?

You’re going to eat the spleen.

You’re going to be like, dang it, I worked for it.

It’s going to change everybody’s mentality about what’s good food.

No, no.

I’m going to tell you the truth.

I’m doing that anyway.

What an insight into the nice household.

Daddy, what’s for dinner?

Whatever I can dig up.

You’re going to eat everybody, you zebra testicles, damn it.

So, I mean, Doc, if our brain is developing, right, at what rate is it developing in terms of our anatomy?

Because we really haven’t changed in about 2 million or so years.

But have our brains changed at a greater rate?

Yeah, so I guess I’ll push back on Chris a little bit there, because the anatomy, the running anatomy shows up, you know, 2 million years, 1.5 million years ago.

Brains don’t really get big, like this big, until, you know, maybe half a million years ago.

Even our species doesn’t show up until 300,000.

600,000 years ago.

Well, 300,000 years ago for Homo sapiens, right?

And so, our brains are super expensive.

Your brains run the equivalent, you know, it’s the equivalent of running a 5K.

A full college education is like $400,000.

I’m starting calories.

Elite college education here, but go on.

Unless your parents are Hollywood elites, in which case.

They’re all in jail now, yeah.

Oh, that’s right, oh good.

Is that a case of ingenuity getting ahead of your, where you’re supposed to be?

Yeah.

So once we get this brain development, Doc, do we then start to think, well, I’ll hit the speed dial for the burrito.

I won’t have to go dig myself and chase myself my protein.

I mean, what sort of point are we when we no longer need?

Have we gone through this running phase to find our food?

Yeah, our body is designed for something that our brain has just completely rendered obsolete.

Yeah, that’s true.

I would say I’d push it back further than the speed dial for your pizza.

I’d push it back to farming.

I was about to say, domestication and farming would have to be, because at that point, your food, you’re growing your food and you’re growing your meat.

And your food comes to you, yeah.

Right.

Yeah, that’s right.

And we change our foods.

We breed them so that they produce more calories.

An animal, a domesticated livestock has twice as many fat calories on it than a wild animal does, the same size.

And even what you feed it, even what you feed it, like there’s grass-fed and then there’s corn-fed and the difference is one is fattier and one’s more sinewy.

You know, one Thanksgiving, I said, you know, I’m gonna get a wild turkey this Thanksgiving.

I cooked that wild turkey, didn’t want a damn bit of meat.

I said, give me my Purdue chicken back.

That’s the classic way to say you should drink your wild turkey, don’t eat it.

So, I mean, at what point are we finding ourselves going from coming out of forests and woodland into savanna to then finding ourselves herding, farming and settlements?

What sort of timeline is there between?

That’s a long time, because we’re moving into savannas and hunting and gathering two and a half to two million years ago, let’s say.

And you’re not farming until 12,000 years ago.

So if you thought about the whole, you know, the history of the genus Homo, 95, 98% of it and you can do the math quickly, is hunting and gathering.

And it’s just this last blink of an eye.

Okay, so this is a tiny bit off topic.

So with respect to that whole brain thing and us getting our food, when do we see these communities dotting the earth in such a way that they stay by water and then they’re fishing communities?

That’s a transition from the plains living to coastal living, yeah.

Coastal living.

So what’s amazing about genus Homo is it isn’t just on the savannas.

They are everywhere.

And then as soon as we find them, they’re everywhere.

Like says poof, right?

Every landscape.

And so we see them on coastal areas.

We see them in the mountains.

We see them in the savannas.

That hunting and gathering strategy is a world beater.

And they’re just absolutely everywhere.

And you’re gonna see pockets everywhere doing different foods kind of things depending on what’s around.

Okay, so in spite of Uber Eats on speed dial, the fact is there’s still cultures out there where running is the kind of running you do to chase down an antelope.

They’re still doing it just for fun.

And Chris McDougall studies just that.

Just check it out.

If I’d say, hey Neil, there’s one thing I can give you, a little pill that’s gonna blow out obesity and diabetes and depression and suicidal fixations.

It will basically cure every leading cause of death in the United States minus one or two.

Would you take the pill?

Yeah.

Okay.

What if I told you that pill is for free?

You don’t have to spend any money.

You go out your door and you can get it in 45 minutes.

Yeah, I know where you’re, okay.

I see what you’re doing there.

All right.

So they have a level of health sustained just by this habit that they have that puts them in a very special place, especially relative to the rest of the Western world.

So here’s a fascinating thing too, another series of components, either coincidence or correlation, but the Taro Mata are non-violent.

They are very communal.

They are not capitalistic.

They don’t accumulate a bunch of stuff.

Their cancer rates are believed to be very low.

Their depression rates seem to be very low.

Very low instances of cardiovascular disease.

Basically, anything that would win you multiple Nobel Prizes today, they’ve had for 10,000 years.

And so maybe the question is why do they run?

The question is why don’t we?

Wait, wait, so were they all hiding under a rock?

How is it that you, in this, the 21st century, end up discovering them?

How come this, all this wasn’t out 100 years ago, or 200 years ago, when anthropologists are running amok, or European anthropologists are running amok all around the world, riding up every culture that’s even a little bit different from their own?

Well, I think for two reasons.

One is the question that you looked at.

You know, we don’t want to run, it’s not fun.

The thing about it is the supposition is that running is this kind of unpleasant thing, and if people do it, they’re kind of weird.

And where that comes from is the fact that, you know, evolutionarily, we develop two things at once.

You know, a body designed for movement and a brain designed to save calories at all costs.

And so what we’re always trying to do is avoid emergencies where we’re going to deplete our caloric reserves.

And so for most of our evolutionary history, it made a ton of sense for us to not run, only run when you have to.

But the difficulty is we basically removed all the emergencies from our lives as soon as we got vehicular transportation.

Up until about 100 years ago, everything was human powered.

And then suddenly nothing is human powered anymore.

And so the difficulty is our brain is still telling us, dude, stay on the sofa.

You never know when a saber-tooth tiger is gonna come after you.

But the tigers are now gone.

And the reason why anthropologists and others haven’t really focused on the taro mara is I think that they were sort of written off as this own special little oddball group doing its own special thing, that there wasn’t a universal transferable skill.

And I think that’s what we’re starting to rediscover today.

Interesting, very interesting.

So this is kind of like an anthropological bias.

So the taro mara is a tribe in Mexico that he studied and he hung out with them and wrote about them.

And I’m still amazed that they were mostly unknown to the rest of the western world that completely surrounds them, north and south and to the left and right of them.

So I’m intrigued by that.

And so, Herman, would you say that this skill that they have of just loving to run, running great distances over great amounts of time, that this is just leftover from this period of time where we evolve that to chase down our envelope?

Yeah, I think it’s leftover.

I think it speaks to this capacity that humans have to run that we don’t always use, but that we, you know, some cultures have really taken advantage of economically to run down prey, some just do because it’s fun, like the Tarahumara.

I pushed back a little bit on what Chris was saying there.

I don’t think it’s that people have ignored running in other cultures.

I think it’s very specific to where you live, right?

So the hodges of who I work with, they don’t run.

And in fact, we-

And where are they based?

They’re based where?

They’re in Northern Tanzania, Savannah, classic Savannah landscape, exactly where you’d expect.

And they might run and they don’t.

And we know this because we have them wear little wearable GPS when they go out.

So we have like 2,000 people days of speed and location.

And we can tell they never run.

And they’re still as healthy as the Tarahumara.

They have low blood pressure, you know, no cardiovascular disease all the time.

So you have to be active to be that healthy, but you don’t have to run specifically.

And you know, I think it’s like any other capacity that humans have that not all cultures express the same degree.

The Tarahumara like to run, but not everybody does.

Plus you left out the fact that there’s no Krispy Kreme vendors.

I know, it’s diet and exercise of course, but yeah, sadly.

And every time you kill a zebra, it’s just still testicles.

There’s no Krispy Kreme in there either.

I still want to do what Chuck says.

You don’t kill them, you ride them back and then…

Ride them back and snack on them on the way.

That’s brilliant.

I mean, that’s what dairy cattle would do, right?

That’s basically what that is.

Okay, so let’s leave the zebra testicles behind for the moment, hopefully forever.

Is it a fact that through our evolution, humans are kind of bored to do anything high energy?

Is it that kind of thing we’ve got going on here?

Yeah, I think that’s where we’re coming down now.

And that’s actually a lot of the work that Kris has talked about, a lot of the stuff that he, you know, motivated our field to look into more deeply is, okay, well, humans can run.

Absolutely, that’s true.

Let’s follow that up and see, does everybody run all the time, where, when?

And it’s been really fun to kind of see how that plays out.

So like I said, we don’t see the HODs running as much, but absolutely groups do.

And what it seems to be is that humans are involved to be high-energy apes, basically, right?

We have these engines that run hot.

We have these high metabolic rates.

We are able to do endurance stuff that other apes cannot do at all, including running if we want.

We also can walk a lot, you know, we can cover a lot of ground that way too.

So it’s kind of running as one piece of this overall endurance ape.

Herman, so if a gorilla is chasing you, can you outrun it?

If you can make the first 50 feet, you probably will be alright.

Oh, very good to know.

Look at that, good to know.

I was going to say, the problem is 25 feet in, he’s on top.

Damn, halfway.

Halfway.

Good thing is though, gorillas are not very violent, so that’s a good thing.

Is that true?

Is that true, Herman?

If they feel that you’re a threat.

No, I mean, in terms of approaching, you know, being a threat, they’re not.

Like, if you’re threatening them, you’re in trouble.

But they don’t go, a gorilla is like this.

Hey, look, man, I’m not looking for any trouble.

That’s a gorilla in a nutshell.

But if you bring me trouble, you’re going to get it.

Okay, all right.

I’m not looking for any trouble.

But if you want some.

Chuck, I’m going to write a paper with you on this, on gorilla behavioral ecology.

We’re going to, that’s it.

Guys, we’ve got to take a quick break.

But when we come back, we’ll have more of my featured interview with journalists and anthropology seeker, Chris McDougall, and we have in studio Dr.

Pontzer, Herman Pontzer, because he’s telling us all about how we became human and what mattered having done so.

And we’re going to look into Dr.

Pontzer’s new book, Burn.

Hey, it’s time to give a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons, Alex Ornelas and Albert Hulk.

Guys, thank you so much for all that you do to make this show happen.

Without you, we couldn’t make it.

And for anybody else who would like their very own Patreon shout out, please go to patreon.com/startalkradio and support us.

We’re back, Sports Edition, StarTalk.

We’re talking about human evolution for running and walking, featuring my interview with Chris McDougall.

He’s a journalist and a sort of amateur anthropologist who studied the Mexican Tarahumara tribe.

And all they do is run all day and night.

And they never sleep, apparently.

When they’re not running, when they’re not doing anything else, they’re running.

Okay, and we’re trying to get to the bottom of that.

But Chuck Nice, you tweet at Chuck Nice Comic.

Thank you, sir, yes, I do.

Yeah, and Gary, you tweet at My Three Left Feet.

Yes, I do, sir.

Get an anthropologist to look into that.

Please do.

If we can, all right.

And let’s go straight to that first clip just to get to the bottom of who the Tarahumara actually are, check it out.

You know, Neil, every time I would go to a doctor and ask them about why I was injured, I got the same answer, which is running is bad for the body.

And I believe that bias has really affected how we look at the Tarahumara.

Now, about them as a tribe, how mixed are they with the Spanish influence on the Americas going back, I guess, now 400, 500 years?

Or they have sort of a more pure lineage from those who were first peoples in the Americas?

From a social standpoint, they are very reclusive.

You know, when the Conquistadors arrived, the Mayans and the Aztecs fought back and were decimated.

The Tarahumara retreated and hid, and that’s why they’re in the Copper Canyons.

They have deliberately isolated themselves.

Physiologically, have they mixed with other peoples?

Absolutely.

So it’s not like we’re talking about some kind of like thoroughbred bloodline.

That’s not what the trail is here.

The trail is that they maintain the same practices.

It’s not that their bloodline has remained separate.

It’s that their behavior has remained the same.

Do we know of any other cultures or tribes in the world that carry on this way?

Yeah, you know, and that’s what’s so cool about it is, first of all, when you look at sort of mythology and folklore, every group has a story about people running animals to death.

It’s universal.

Every culture in the world, from Mongolia to Ohio, there are folklore about people running animals to death.

So there is sort of an evidentiary trail that’s going on.

As far as today, you know, the San people, you know, the Kalahari Bushmen, to this day, still run animals to death.

So that’s kind of the cool thing about it is, you have these myths, so it had to come from somewhere.

And in those few pockets where people still live by persistence hunting, they still practice the same tradition today.

And it is interesting to me that you can run them to death, and this requires no weapons at all.

So Herman, so in that brief exchange, we touched on some earlier topics as well.

I’m just wondering, is this ability to run we’ve sort of preserved in our sports, I guess?

You know, I guess that was an urge, because we can.

Does your line of anthropological research come into modern times, or you just back when, before there was the Olympics?

Yeah, well, I’m interested in how the body got to be the way it is, you know, physiologically and anatomically, and all of that change, you know, that changes so slowly, that that kind of, that story gets boring about 10,000 years ago.

And you have all these really recent changes that happened with farming and being sedentary, but those aren’t evolutionary changes so much as lifestyle changes in our bodies, you know, ours we use the same way.

Are you saying the, all of civilization is such of a blip on your timeline, you’re not even interested in it?

Yes.

Yeah.

People get boring, the only thing that’s interesting is that we change the way we do our, you know, that we get energy.

We start getting energy more explicitly from the things we farm and then from fossil fuels, which is its own story.

Is there a bias?

Because for medical doctors to say, you’re running too much, running is bad, you’ll hurt your knees, the musculoskeletal system, it cannot handle as much running as you’re doing, even training for marathons.

You don’t want to run too many marathons because the one you’re training for, you’ll be…

So I’ve read and I’ve heard about all this.

Meanwhile, we have this tribe in Mexico that’s the opposite of this.

So is this a bias?

What’s going on here?

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, I think you have a Western medical world that sees Americans, your typical American off the street, typically white Americans, by the way, typically males, as that’s what normal humans are, right?

And so if that’s your blinded view of what normal is, then you’ve got a really strange idea about what the body can handle, because it’s true that if you are completely out of shape and you start running training for a marathon, yeah, you might hurt yourself, right?

You kind of, if you grow up in it, that’s a level of training right there.

And then if you just be careful about how you start, anybody can start, but yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I always enjoy my trips to the doctor because it’s funny, it’s the anthropologist meets the MD and we have different perspectives on how the body ought to work.

And you just head into a fight the whole time, right?

Wouldn’t it be true that, I mean, from if you look at these other indigenous people, they were never running on pavement.

Oh, that’s another big thing, absolutely.

Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.

And also they have low levels of inflammation, right?

So arthritis is as much as anything, an inflammation disease, and we have high levels of chronic inflammation, which is your immune system just kicking away, being active without any reason.

Here in the States and in the industrialized world, you got low levels of background inflammation in places where people are active all the time.

Would you say the Olympics is a way to try to remember these roots that you study?

Yeah, I like it.

I mean, you know, I’m not sure if like curling really gets us back to our roots.

You’re synchronized swimming.

You know, when I go to the Hobbs, I don’t see a lot of synchronized swimming.

Not a big thing with the Hobbs to do, but…

They’re missing out, Doc, really.

The beauty of synchronized swimming.

You got to love that.

I’ll bring some pictures next time and try to engender that kind of appreciation.

We had a sports court here in our sports edition one time.

And the question is, should certain activities be turned into Olympic sports?

And one of the questions was, what was it, Gary, gaming?

Oh, there was e-sports versus break dancing.

And your decision, sir…

I forgot.

I was the judge.

Yes, I was.

So your decision was based on the fact, would it have appeared on the side of a Greek urn?

And therefore, e-sports had nowhere to plug in, so it didn’t care at all.

I can imagine break dancing on the side of a Grecian urn.

I’m going to tell you, I’ve seen a few Grecian urns where it looked like they were break dancing.

There you go.

But none of them hunched over a computer.

But I think, Neil, you’ve made a great point there.

With the Olympics, and we’ve always seen it as the pursuit of excellence, I think there’s another thing behind it where we retain the ability to jump distance, jump over something, run further, run fastest, stuff that basically, Dr.

you will have studied in a natural environment.

So the anthropology games, that’s what we should have.

I got some great ideas for us, guys.

Or you have a, you pull out a subset of the Olympics that come closest to what we evolutionarily developed out of what you studied for us.

And then that becomes the anthropology games.

Javelin stays, for sure.

Javelin stays.

Javelin stays.

Wrestling definitely stays.

So the discus, what would that be like a dinner plate?

You just get to throw as many dinner plates to all sorts of people.

So it says pass the fried chicken.

I’m not getting up here.

I’ll fling it to you.

That’s ridiculous.

Come on.

I mean, what kind of, I guess maybe that’s going to cross the river.

You skip across the stones across the river.

So it’s all going to have a natural.

If you actually have this Mexican tribe compete against anyone else who is sort of training as a runner in the traditional ways, let’s see what happens out of that.

Check it out.

You know, part and parcel with the Tatumaras ability to run long distances is the fact that they’re not necessarily interested in what we’re interested in.

You know, we sort of glorify a gold medal and a Nike sponsorship, and that means nothing to them.

And so in the past, a couple of times they have brought Tatumara runners to the Olympic Games and 26 miles and they would finish at 26 miles, kind of middle of the pack, unimpressed by the whole spectacle.

You have 26 miles, dude, that’s that’s the warm up.

When’s the race start?

That’s right.

Yeah, yeah.

Bring in the 50 mile race.

There you go.

Which is exactly what happened.

So in the mid 1990s, there was a race, the Leadville Trail 100, which is the premier ultra marathon in the United States at the time.

And a group of Tarumata runners were brought up from the Copper Canyons to compete in Leadville and they just devastated the field.

It was like nine of the top 10 runners were Tarumata and the 10th guy had to stop to tie his shoe.

Otherwise, it would have been a clean sweep.

Wait, wait.

So this is a hundred mile race.

I didn’t even know such a race existed.

Yeah.

It actually began as a horse race.

It was a horse race in California and then one guy thought, well, my horse is sick, I mean, I’ll just run it myself.

And he discovered that he was capable of running a hundred miles.

And so the mid 1990s, this began in Colorado at 12,000 feet.

And when the Tarumata who had never trained, didn’t really know about the race were brought to the starting line, it just took off and devastated the American runners.

So Reebok actually sponsored the trip because they wanted to have a commercial with these indigenous tribe runners in their shoes.

And instead, right before the race, they went to the town dump, got some old tires, cut out a sole and then strapped on a pair of old car tires and threw away the Reeboks and competed in the race in homemade sandals from the dump they made that morning.

So Herman, the tribes you studied in Tanzania, what kind of similarities do you see between them and the Tarumara?

Yeah, well, so they’re both really active all day.

They’re both getting as much physical activity in a day as you and I get in a week.

So they’re super physically active.

The difference is that the folks I work with don’t run to accumulate all that activity.

They’re mostly walking or climbing trees to get honey or digging the ground to get tubers, that kind of thing.

Well, so tell me, how does this play out in calories?

Because your book, Burn, is all about that.

And it seems to me, if I’m running all day, I’ll be burning more calories than if I’m not running all day.

And so, what gives here?

Yeah.

When we think of calories, we think of exercise.

But of course, we burn a lot of calories just to stay warm-blooded, right?

That’s right.

I mean, your brain burns 300 calories, kilo calories a day.

Your liver does the same.

I mean, your immune system is up and down all through the day and your stress-free activity.

So, you’re burning calories on everything, you got 37 trillion cells, they’re all burning calories.

You’re burning calories, play or pay or play, you’re burning calories, no matter what.

That’s right.

And so, actually, some of the earliest work that we did with the Hadza group was to go out and measure how many calories you burn every day.

So, we use this cool isotope tracking technique that allows us to figure out how much carbon dioxide the body is expelling every day.

And if you expire carbon dioxide, it has to be calories.

And so, it’s this really precise way to get calories per day with these men and women in the Hadza community.

And even though they’re really physically active, five times more than Americans, they burn the same number of calories every day as men and women in the US and Europe and other industrialized countries.

So, their activity isn’t changing the number of calories, it’s changing the way those calories are spent.

So, pressing the button on the remote is real exercise then.

That’s what you’re saying.

Now, here’s the problem, Neil.

It’s not.

And so, your body’s going to find a way to burn that energy.

So, it’s sort of like, it isn’t sort of like, how do they spend so few calories?

It’s like, well, how do we spend so many?

And the answer is, we’ve got sky-high inflammation levels, then we have, we react to stress too much.

We have higher cortisol and adrenaline levels.

So, our bodies are doing all this overactivity stuff that’s really bad for you.

So, we burn our calories through worrying.

Yes.

It’s true.

It’s true.

Absolutely.

And anyway, it’s bad for you to not spend those calories on exercise.

You spend them on exercise.

That’s what we’re evolved to do.

If you spend them clicking your remote, that’s it.

So tell me, what is the main point in your burn book if we’re going to make this a bestseller?

What are people going to get most out of it?

They are going to find out how diet and exercise actually affect your body, right?

How the calories in that we take away the diet, how your body burns all that off and all the things it does every day and how things like exercise and activity actually affect the way that your body works.

You got to do both.

This book tells you how and it gets away from all the fad BS stuff because as somebody who actually does research on this, it pains me to see the diet books and the fad, metabolic code and all this stuff.

It’s like, come on, man.

Yeah, Herman, I have to share that sentiment.

I had a task that I needed to do, which would take me 30 hours, but it’s a mindless task.

So, I said, why don’t I binge every single Netflix documentary on nutrition and food?

And so, I watched 20 or so documentaries.

And not only did most of them contradict each other, it was sad.

What kind of mixture, I don’t want to quite call it full up pseudoscience, but it was what people wanted to be true, or felt like should be true, or was consistent with their new age philosophies.

And I was very disappointed in it.

And this is what people are paying attention to.

Yeah, so hopefully this book is a corrective to that.

I mean, there’s nobody, there’s so few real voices of real scientists out there in the diet and nutrition space.

There’s plenty of books.

There’s people with MD after their name.

But, you know, so hopefully this is a corrective to that.

And people get excited.

We talk about the haza, we talk about some other fun field stuff.

People get excited about the science of metabolism.

We don’t have to make stuff up.

So I want you to grade a tweet that I once posted, okay?

I’ll tell it to you.

Give me A, B, C, D, E, or F.

Okay, here’s the tweet.

If physicists, if a physicist wrote a diet book, it would contain one sentence.

Burn calories at a higher rate than you consume them.

That’s it.

That’s it.

How do you get there?

Yeah, the problem is you’re not going to make any money with that.

No, you know, so it’s been fun watching the reaction to my book.

And one of the reactions I’ve got was, this book sucks.

There’s no simple diet strategy.

Where’s my fad diet?

Where’s the cure-all diet?

This one food you eat that makes them pounds melt away.

Everybody wants that.

Yeah.

But that’s why it’s a multibillion-dollar industry, because it’s not about health.

It’s about psychological manipulation, you know, which can sometimes lead to health.

If somebody, you know, if somebody believes in it enough and sticks to whatever the prescription is, they might end up losing weight and looking like they won.

But it’s because they ended up doing what you both just said.

Yeah.

And then they become an evangelist.

That’s the other side of this.

If somebody finally finds what works for them to lose weight, then that’s the only thing that works.

And everybody else has to do it, too.

Well, I’m delighted that in this show we have two sort of remarkable books that we’re talking, you know, McDougall’s book, Born to Run and Herman, your book, Burn, you can’t argue with that title.

Burn, baby, burn.

It seems to me that some combination of those two books would do us all well to heed the insights and advice gleaned within them.

So Herman, take us out with some reflective final thoughts.

Well, energy is really at the core of it all, right?

You got to turn energy into babies if you want to be a successful species and humans are really good at that, which is why we are all over the planet, the most dominant species.

And the task for the next generation is to get responsible, not just good at getting energy out of our environments and turning it into babies, but responsible about it and do it in a way that doesn’t crash us out because forever is a long time and there’s no guarantee we’ll be here in a million years.

Well, very important point.

What’s the average life expectancy of a mammal species?

It is about a million years or so.

So we are only on the first third here of our time.

First third.

Will our brain make that shorter for us or longer?

Isn’t that interesting?

I mean, in one way, it specializes us towards this way of living that could kill us because we were able to invent nuclear weapons.

On the other hand, it gives us this adaptability to be able to figure it out.

So which wins?

I don’t know.

You tell me.

I’m asking you to damn anthropologists.

That’s why I’m asking you.

We only look backwards.

Nice.

Oh, you got it.

I see.

All right.

So you’re not going to go in the crystal ball.

I will say trauma and stress breeds wisdom and innovation.

And I’d like to think that we will outlive our own weaknesses and to see another day.

This has been StarTalk Sports Edition.

Gary O’Reilly, always good to have you and Chuck there as my co-host.

I want to thank Mr.

McDougall, who shared with us his wisdom and insights, being a journalist reporting on anthropological tribes in Mexico.

And Professor Herman Pontzer, always good to talk to you.

We’ve known each other before we recorded StarTalks and it’s good to have you.

And you’re into some really good, interesting stuff and let this not be your last time on our show.

That’d be great.

All right.

Excellent.

I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

As always, keep looking up.