New Research Shows Humans Could Outrun T. Rex 257
bongey writes: T-Rex would have a hard time even catching an average human running, much less Usain Bolt or Jeeps, without shattering their legs into pieces. New research based on simulations that include the load on the bones show that T-Rex would have a hard time running faster than 12 miles per hour (5.4 meters per second) without bones breaking. The new research correlates to speeds calculated from adolescence sized T-Rex dinosaur footprints in 2016, which showed walking speeds to be only 2-5mph, and estimated running speeds 11-18 mph. Gizmodo notes that while T. rex was unable to pursue its prey at high speeds, high speed is a relative term. "For reference, typical humans can sprint anywhere between eight to 15 miles per hour (elite athletes can exceed 20 mph). So to outrun a T. rex, many animals -- or fictional humans -- would still have to run like hell."
Objects in the mirror... (Score:3, Funny)
...are slower than they appear
Scavenger (Score:5, Interesting)
While there seem to be a large number of people who keep thinking T-Rex is a hunter.
Have to say, I'm more and more in the camp which suggest that T-Rex is more like a vulture. T-Rex has a big noose, body for long walks, not sprints, etc.
Bear? (Score:2)
You've got a way of thinking, which actually made me think.
T-Rex might be close to a bear's behavior (grizzly bear to be exact). Grizzly bear isn't the fastest, but is surely one of the bigger if not biggest in the forest. They do pick off big prey but they also take / scavenge food from other predators like wolfs.
It seems like there are some similarity between T-Rex and Grizzly bear.
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Grizzly bears can outrun horses, elk and deer in many/some conditions which takes away from your thesis but they also take kills and carrion from wolves if the pack isn't too large.
So T-Rex may have been apex predators that often/usually fed off of the kills of other predators. The ratio of often to usually has yet to be determined.
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All animals eat crap just lying around, predators, even herbivores eat small rodents as occasion presents and fish that wash up.
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How fast a person runs today in shoes on a flat surface in a straight line is one thing. How fast our ancestors ran in bare feet on rough terrain is another. I would assume humans had the ability to change directly more quickly than a T Rex
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I would think larger animals are either hunters or veg eaters. Huge scavengers might have a hard time finding enough food to fulfill their needs.
Maybe there were enough large dead or injured things lying around, but I would expect scavengers to be on the smaller side.
If T. Rex had a big nose and hung around herds there may have been a lot of opportunity to scavenge. Basically every kill that happens in the neighbourhood is yours for the taking.
As for size, a bunch of smaller predators are fast and can use teamwork to bring down a big herbivore, but once that meal is on the ground they don't have the size to defend the kill from a big carnivore. Doesn't matter who brought it down, once they T. Rex shows up it's the T. Rex's meal.
People used to think that hyenas were scav
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Carrion eating birds like vultures and condors tend to be fairly large.
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Re:Scavenger (Score:5, Informative)
T-rex was definitely a hunter. They've found more than one example of T-rex teeth scars in triceratops that survived and had the scars heal over proving that the triceratops lived through the battle and healed up. You can't tell me the mama T-rex was defending her babies from a carnivorous triceratops, and almost all dino experts say T-rex was a hunter with such evidence. Here is a link citing an embedded T-rex tooth in a hadrosaur, so you can't say it was another animal that attacked.
https://www.theguardian.com/sc... [theguardian.com]
I quote, "This is unambiguous evidence that T rex was an active predator," the authors write in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Such evidence is rare in the fossil record for good reason â" prey rarely escapes."
I suspect only Horner is really into shaking things up for attention, like with the idea that T-rex was a vulture. More attention for dinosaurs, OK I get it, but take some of those wild theories with a grain of salt. Why would T-rex have to be incredibly fast? Why not be an ambush predator? Big cats are not faster than their prey for the most part, yet they survive by being hunters. Crocodilians can't cover ground fast, but with the element of surprise have been incredibly successful. All T-rex needed was to hide in the brush and wait, I suspect. One clamp of those incredibly powerful, the most powerful land jaws probably, bite is all that was often needed I bet.
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T. rex lassoes its prey?
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My daily hike is on a hill that the vultures also like to visit recreationally. There is also a pair of bald eagles that live there. The eagles are not faster than the vultures during casual flight. The eagles have greater control at slow speeds, that's the main difference in their movement. The vultures mating displays are done at a much higher speed than eagles, and involve a wide variety of acrobatic feats. The vultures, when they're not involved in mating or playing, tend to choose a more relaxed style
Re: Scavenger (Score:3)
Make Pangaea great again! T-Rex for president!
(Yes, I know Pangaea broke up before the tyrannosaurs came along.)
One Swallow Does Not A Summer Make (Score:5, Informative)
Their determination that this set of tracks came from a Tyrannosaur was made on the basis that there is no knowledge of any other matching species in that area at that time.
Having measured the stride of this dinosaur and estimated the height of its hips above the ground, they then used measurements taken from "living, walking bipeds" to make their claim.
Now, I'm all in favour of scientific research and analysis. I love reading about cutting edge insights to the world around us. I think it enriches our lives. On the other hand, when I read this article published on the Science website, the first thought that came to me was, "There are an awful lot of assumptions and approximations in here..."
They don't know, definitively, that this was a T-Rex.
They don't know what it was doing at the time the tracks were made [for example, if it had been stalking prey, maybe it was treading softly, moving slowly, so perhaps it's steps were uncharacteristic.
They don't know whether it was injured, or weak, or unwell. You can't determine the nutritional state of a hundreds-of-millions-of-years-dead dinosaur from a footprint, can you?
They are also assuming that things like the metabolic efficiency, the muscular strength and even the bone density of dinosaurs are all perfectly equivalent to what we see today. In other words, they are cherry-picking facts to fit their theories.
I am absolutely certain that there is some great research and excellent work being undertaken by the Team that made this announcement, but this is far, far short of science. This is assumption and theory and conjecture based upon an entirely incomplete fact base.
In one sense it is not worth being concerned over one-off articles like this. In the fullness of time we would expect scientific peer review to challenge and refine both the method of analysis and the final conclusions of this piece of work. Well, hopefully. The concern with this specific story is evidenced by the fact that it has been picked up and linked here, on slashdot. Which means it will be picked up by other science and tech news outlets and perhaps even broader news media. This is fine if the original work is robust and defensible, but in this case [at least as far as the original piece goes] that does not appear to be true... Oh well.
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This post is both everything right and wrong with science commentary today. Everything you posted is completely correct, and you've done a very good job explaining how to critically think about the assumptions and approximations inherent to an analysis. But...
What is your proposed way to more accurately measure how fast a T-Rex can run?
This is the best effort, to date, to reasonably and scientifically arrive at an estimate. If you have a better idea, do it! That's how the field of science improves - someone
Re:One Swallow Does Not A Summer Make (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes the best answer to some questions is "that cannot be determined with the available facts" and that indeed seems to be the case here.
Their methodology in determining the speed of a (assumed healthy) T-Rex (assumed to be) walking at it's best speed contains too many assumptions that _cannot_ be proven to be reliable. The parable of the blind men that each examined a different part of an elephant and gave different descriptions applies here -- It's a wall said the one that touched it's ribcage, no it's a tree-trunk, said the one that touched it's foot/leg, no, it's a spear said the one who touched a tusk, etc.
Their work is of some interest and may indeed help to determine T-Rex's top speed -- if it is corroborated with other sources that do not use the same assumptions.
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The danger is that if we accept a scientific analysis which over-reaches the facts, then we are at risk of encouraging this behaviour.
If we let supposition stand and, to borrow a line from "Dead Poets Society", we "let rumour fester into fact..." then we actually undermine the credibility of the entire scientific process. I am sorry if that comes across as a provocative or controversial claim to make, but I just think that with something like this, it's better to be cautious
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Sometimes the best answer to some questions is "that cannot be determined with the available facts" and that indeed seems to be the case here.
This! But how often do we hear of a study that doesn't come to decisive conclusions? That would not likely be good for future funding. It's fine if they're going to say..."we think it might be x because of y, and we made these assumptions". But to come out and say...most humans could outrun a T-Rex is simply bad science or poor reporting, or both.
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Their methodology in determining the speed of a (assumed healthy) T-Rex (assumed to be) walking at it's best speed contains too many assumptions that _cannot_ be proven to be reliable.
I have to disagree with your assessment of the assumptions. The assumptions cannot be proven at this time. Or ever. However, it's another things to say that they are unreliable. The conclusion could be completely wrong but the assumptions given the circumstances are necessary.
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If you want to be the blind man with his hand up the elephant's nether region claiming that elephants are a latrine, please be my guest...
The thing is, neither the authors nor doubters like me can be provably wrong which makes the paper more a declaration of faith than real science.
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Their methodology in determining the speed of a (assumed healthy) T-Rex (assumed to be) walking at it's best speed contains too many assumptions that _cannot_ be proven to be reliable.
I have to disagree with your assessment of the assumptions. The assumptions cannot be proven at this time. Or ever. However, it's another things to say that they are unreliable. The conclusion could be completely wrong but the assumptions given the circumstances are necessary.
They should be considered unreliable for a number of reasons, one of which is that it doesn't pass the sniff test. If you come to the conclusion that, were a T-Rex to try to run full-speed that its legs would just shatter, it may be that you're missing the forest for the trees, getting caught up enough in what-ifs that you don't realize the conclusion you're coming to is absolutely ridiculous on its face. A conclusion so ridiculous that you ought to have extraordinary, undeniable proof, or that it's a sign
Re:One Swallow Does Not A Summer Make (Score:4, Insightful)
Most things about dinosaurs need to be taken with a very large pinch of salt, because you're often extrapolating entire species from under half a dozen samples of skeletons. The problem is in the translation from the scientific paper to the mainstream news. The first will list all of the caveats and the limits of their model (or be published somewhere crap and ignored by most researchers), the latter will present it as truth.
One of the big problems for our society is that we often teach science as a religion with a set of facts, rather than as a process. When the facts are shown to be incorrect, people lose faith in science, rather than seeing an example of science working precisely as the process is meant to work.
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We also tend to teach religion as a science. The museum in Kentucky reputedly has humans riding dinosaurs based on no evidence at all. Now that's some fancy science!
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humans riding dinosaurs based on no evidence at all
Oh really? Then explain this! [youtube.com] Checkmate atheists.
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Belief should be a banned word when discussing science. Anyone who ever uses "Believe" when talking science either doesn't understand it or is being intellectually lazy.
Unless you're running all the researchers' experiments yourself, you're having to put some amount of "belief" in several parts of the process.
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You simply paraphrased (rather poorly) what the article clearly says.
>The analysis doesn't prove that T. Rex couldn't have gone faster, however. Because trackways are records of single eventsâ"one walk along a lakeshore, for exampleâ"the odds are that any particular set of footprints doesnâ(TM)t capture a dinosaurâ(TM)s peak performance, says Thomas Holtz Jr., a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland, College Park. Moreover, he notes, the types of sediment that are go
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Very good point. Imagine if - millions of years from now - a cheetah's footprints were examined by archaeologists of that era. The prints show an animal walking very slowly and carefully. They might conclude that the cheetah was a slow predator, unable to run at fast speeds. Of course, they'd be wrong. The chee
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The propensity to jump to conclusions is not new. See this "research" which concluded that T-Rex's are cannibals based on a SINGLE bite mark which they found on a T-Rex:
https://www.theguardian.com/sc... [theguardian.com]
This is the paper:
http://journals.plos.org/ploso... [plos.org]
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From the summary I assumed that it was based on modeling the strength of T.Rex's bones, and that the fossil data on footsteps was just included to say that the result was consistent with the apparent data.
FWIW, I doubt that T.Rex often ran even as rapidly as they are indicating. The body seems built more for striding.
"We've clocked the t-rex at 32 miles per hour." (Score:2)
They just need a bit of help [imgur.com].
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God help me. I just spent almost 2 hours on imgur.
Humans Could Outrun T. Rex (Score:2)
"Marathon runners can average 8.8mph for 26.2 miles" (from google)
Turtles < Normal Person < Marathon runners
0.2mph < Normal Person < 8.8mph
11mph < T-Rex < 15mph
We're still screwed aren't we?
Re:Humans Could Outrun T. Rex (Score:4, Insightful)
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And if they were smart humans, they waiting until the prey moved close to them, jumped out from behind a rock and startled the prey so that it had a heart attack. Then dragged said prey home.
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You're confusing average sustained speed over long distances (26.2 miles of running) with top speed.(shorter sprints). I read TFA as speculating on T-Rex's maximum speed (the "without bones breaking" part). As noted, top athletes sprint at well over 20mph, and even lesser mortals can make it into the double digits.
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Your marathon joggers go 8.8mph. World class is in the 12-13mph range.
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I don't agree. Turtles are a major threat to our ecosystem and all living life on the planet:
Ducks are birds and birds where dinosaurs. So:
Duck == Bird ^= Dinosaur
Turtles eat baby ducks. And since we have established that duck ^= dinosaur, the following statement can be resolved via mathematical induction:
Turtles eat baby ducks ^= Turtle eats Dinosaur
Incidentally, T-Rex is extinct, ergo:
Turtle > T-Rex
Quod erat demonstrantum.
I'm fortunate... (Score:2)
First they need to prove their model (Score:2)
Then apply it to Dinosaurs.
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no, wrong.
elephants(common ancestor with manatees), rhinos(common ancestor with horses and tapirs) and hippo(common ancestor with whales) are all completely unrelated species with different bone and muscle structures. none of them would be relevant to modeling something that is in the common ancestry with birds.
Obligatory xkcd quote (Score:2)
How much money?? (Score:2)
How much money we will spend on ridiculous "research" like this!
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How much money do you think this took? This sounds like the spare time work of some grad students.
If it's unladen (Score:2)
is it an African or European T.Rex?
Headline seems a bit irresponsibly worded... (Score:2)
When you consider the number of people that think humans and dinosaurs co-existed, I wish this educational opportunity had not been squandered.
Cheetah's don't outrun their prey either (Score:2)
A lot of prey is faster than the hunter. Canines and most felines will in many cases simply outlast their prey before taking it over. It's probably why humans survived so long, because we developed stamina. Humans can run and hide for outstanding amounts of time whether that is hunting or being hunted.
Predators in the wild need to account for energy spent vs energy gained as well as the danger of the prey having enough stamina to fight back when the hunt is over, predators will tend to give up soon if the p
gravity (Score:2)
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Well, the day *has* been lengthening, which means that there is less centrifugal force, which would make weight decrease, even with no actual change in gravity. And T.Rex got pretty heavy, so it might have lost half a pound that way. (That's probably an overestimate, though.)
Run like hell (Score:2)
No problem. I can say with a fairly high degree of certainty that if I am running from a T-Rex then I will, in fact, be running like hell.
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Two herbivore dinosaurs are grazing and talking about natural selection. Suddenly one of them freezes.
"Shit, a T-rex! He has seen us; we are dead!". He turns to the other, who meanwhile has started running on its chubby legs.
"Don't be sully", shouts the first "you can't outrun a T-rex"
"Sure", shouts the other accelerating still, "but I can certainly outrun you!"
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Plot twist, the T-Rex's vision is motion based, so he can't really see the still one.
So he goes after and eats the one running.
Re: Outrun the t-rex... (Score:5, Funny)
...and promptly crashes into a tree which, according to your assertion, he cannot see.
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...and promptly crashes into a tree which, according to your assertion, he cannot see.
He can see the tree, he's just not distinguishing the frozen prey from the other background.
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One fast human gets away as the more slower humans got raptured mid stride.
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You must be new here. Didn't you check the Twit Filter box?
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the Twit Filter box?
You must be new here, the css/html is broken.
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Citing an old joke is not redundant, if you're the first one who thought about it in the comments section...
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The wonders of "scientific" analysis. T Rex can't walk without crutches and bumblebees can't fly.
In maybe 50 or 100 years, genetic engineering will probably be able to produce not a T Rex, but a reptilian critter that looks a lot like one in a lot of ways and has similar musculature, skelatal characteristics ... and teeth. Anyone want to bet there won't be a few non-reptilian participants eaten at the first running of the pseudo-Rex's in Rapid City, SD in 2067?
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My guess is it'd be pretty close to the San Diego scene in Jurassic Park 2, replete with running Japanese businessmen.
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It's not clear that a T.Rex could run for hours...but at its walking pace you'd need to run.
Also, they're comparing the run of a T.Rex to the sprint of a human, but how far can you sprint? T.Rex had a quite long stride, so by the time it hits full speed it probably gone further than you could sprint.
That said, any of our ancestors who were around at the time would be about the size of shrews, and not worth T.Rex even bending over for. So the question would be more "But how fast could a hadrosaur run?".
Re:Jabba... (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't read the article and just skimmed TFS... (Score:2)
So is the calculated running speed a sprint, or something a bit more like an endurance effort?
I mean, I'm sure many of us could outrun a t-rex. For about 30 seconds, at which point our lungs will start imploding and rexy gets an easy, wheezy meal.
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Modern humans are one thing, but we were the running champions. Being undisputed masters of shedding heat and sweating led to obscenely long stalking capability. We specced for upper body strength to add points in Throw, to deliver infected wounds, then chased and harassed scared, stressed out things, haunted them day and night, in our monkeysocial packs that can navigate any terrain and run forever. We were horror movie serial killers. I'm just now adding a new thought: Maybe we captured prey live, broke i
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And 8 ton elephant can do 40km/h (25mph) (http://www.speedofanimals.com/animals/elephant), and they can travel far distances at a relatively fast pace (compared to humans), so yes, I think a 4 ton predator could maintain a high enough pace to overtake a human without having a heart attack (elephants sure can: https://www.quora.com/Can-an-e... [quora.com])
T.rex may not have been able to "run", but it could walk at about 12mph (according to this study). While the fastest man alive can sprint at just over 25mph, he won't
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Most Americans? Hardly. Too many soft drinks.
But, but, they give you wings!!!
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If running from a T-Rex was an actual concern, I would venture most people would be fit enough to pull it off.
You don't have to run faster than the T-Rex, you have to run faster than the other people running.
The T-Rex may have been capable of short burst of greater speed, similar to Crocodiles that can more at quite a fair clip to attack, but most of the time move rather ponderously.
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So, survival of the fittest?
It is not the strongest or fastest of the snacks that survive, but the one who kneecaps the others.
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Wonder how Olympic running records would be affected if a T. Rex were one of the starters...
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Wonder how Olympic running records would be affected if a T. Rex were one of the starters...
That's an easy one. They would stagnate for a lack of competitors willing to enter the race.
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There's a shirt for that. Exercise, some motivation required [woot.com]
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If running from a T-Rex was an actual concern, I would venture most people would be fit enough to pull it off.
Rule #1: Cardio
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Humans on bicycles.
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At Dinosaurs'R Us?
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Same place a fish would?
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And since not everyone is a top athlete, most of us would become a T-rex snack.
Not true. With those puny forelegs of his, I imagine he wouldn't be able to get at us Slashdotters - safely ensconced in our mom's basements.
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And since not everyone is a top athlete, most of us would become a T-rex snack.
Not true. With those puny forelegs of his, I imagine he wouldn't be able to get at us Slashdotters - safely ensconced in our mom's basements.
Speak for yourself! Not everyone here fits that slashdot nerd, living in mom's basement stereotype.
I live over my mom's garage, a T-rex could easily reach in grab me.
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OOO a rebel. I live in my mom's attic. I am pretty much Rex meat.
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It's especially hard to run 10mph in a forest, with lots of flowers, plants and rivers in your way...
You must be joking (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm really not convinced by these arguments that our ancestors were somehow multi marathon fit and could run down anything on the plain. No native peoples today do that - they wound first with spears or arrows then follow it until it dies, they don't wear it down physically!
As for running down a horse, you must be joking. Horses can gallop then trot for hours, long after even the fittest marathon runner would be in a sweaty heap on the ground panting like dog. And unless you're a first class tracker you're never going to find that horse that has probably put 10 miles between you and him in the first hour.
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Sir David Attenborough would like a word with you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o
It's not about running constantly behind the prey, it's about running it into places it can't perform to its fullest and never letting it rest. Most prey animals (young, sick, injured) are already wheezing after their first good sprint, the rest of the pursuit is making sure it can't reach somewhere to rest and cool off and occurs at a much more reasonable pace. Then when you've finally broken the animal you make
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Re:You must be joking (Score:5, Informative)
I'm really not convinced by these arguments that our ancestors were somehow multi marathon fit and could run down anything on the plain. No native peoples today do that - they wound first with spears or arrows then follow it until it dies, they don't wear it down physically!
As for running down a horse, you must be joking. Horses can gallop then trot for hours, long after even the fittest marathon runner would be in a sweaty heap on the ground panting like dog. And unless you're a first class tracker you're never going to find that horse that has probably put 10 miles between you and him in the first hour.
In the epilogue to the book "Black Elk Speaks" the author describes how the tribe that he was studying made moccasins. This describes "endurance hunting" while also shattering the silly myth that the American Indians weren't wasteful.
The story is about an Indian in his 60s who needed a new pair of moccasins. The moccasins were made of deer hide, and you had to hunt and kill the deer yourself. Nothing else was done with the deer - the entire carcass was left to rot. Only the skin for the moccasins was taken. The author was amazed that the guy chased the deer to exhaustion. Yes, the deer outran him. At first. Deer can sprint really well, just not very far. The human, on the other hand, wasn't as good of a sprinter but he easily made up for it with endurance.
When the deer was exhausted he suffocated it while saying a prayer, basically in a ritualistic manner. When the deer was dead, he took the skin.
Anyway, yes, endurance hunting is a real thing. For horses? Probably not. But deer? Yes.
Endurance Hunting (Score:2)
I would leave the carcass of any animal that had been run to death, too. It's definitely not going to taste great after that.
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No native peoples today do that - they wound first with spears or arrows then follow it until it dies, they don't wear it down physically!
Wow, at least check out Wikipedia before making ignorant declarations [wikipedia.org]. Not only are there eye witness accounts, there are even youtube videos.
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I'm really not convinced by these arguments that our ancestors were somehow multi marathon fit and could run down anything on the plain. No native peoples today do that - they wound first with spears or arrows then follow it until it dies, they don't wear it down physically!
No native peoples? Are the bushman in the Kalahari [wikipedia.org] an example of native people that you would accept.
The persistence hunt is still practiced by hunter-gatherers in the central Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa, and David Attenborough's documentary The Life of Mammals (program 10, "Food For Thought") showed a bushman hunting a kudu antelope until it collapsed.
As for running down a horse, you must be joking. Horses can gallop then trot for hours, long after even the fittest marathon runner would be in a sweaty heap on the ground panting like dog. And unless you're a first class tracker you're never going to find that horse that has probably put 10 miles between you and him in the first hour.
You assume that ancient people hunted solo. To bring down a large animal most likely would be a group hunt (especially since a single person could never eat an entire horse before it spoiled. Also a horse's first instinct when frightened is to gallop at full speed for about 1/4 mile. Getting a group to continually scare a horse periodically to tire itself out would be the best approach. Also the group could
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I'm really not convinced by these arguments that our ancestors were somehow multi marathon fit and could run down anything on the plain. No native peoples today do that - they wound first with spears or arrows then follow it until it dies, they don't wear it down physically!
Yes they do [wikipedia.org].
Of course, how common a strategy that is an open question, but the average male in those populations clearly has the capability, and I suspect an average European male could do the same if raised in those environments.
As for running down a horse, you must be joking. Horses can gallop then trot for hours, long after even the fittest marathon runner would be in a sweaty heap on the ground panting like dog. And unless you're a first class tracker you're never going to find that horse that has probably put 10 miles between you and him in the first hour.
One of the keys to persistence hunting, running the antelope to exhaustion wasn't done by beating the antelope in a well paced marathon, it was done by running a very efficient pace and forcing the antelope into repeated sprints.
Running down a horse with a rider, who can simply pi
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Hundreds of fit marathon runners vs nothing special horses over rough ground that favours 2 legs.
Now lets try it over flat grassland and what happens? Oh yeah, you get the Pony Express. I wonder why they didn't just get men to run with the post instead?
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Hundreds of fit marathon runners vs nothing special horses over rough ground that favours 2 legs.
Is your assertion that none of the horses were fit or prepared for a race? How do you know that? As for rough grounds that would describe most of places in the wild.
Now lets try it over flat grassland and what happens? Oh yeah, you get the Pony Express. I wonder why they didn't just get men to run with the post instead?
Yes because if I was a person trying to hunt down a horse I would pick the conditions which would favor the horse. Or would I pick environments that favor me?
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Yes, it was a relay system, but the horse still ran the distance way faster than any man could. As for the original marathon - legend had it he dropped dead after delivering his message. Not a great advert for it.
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They compare T. rex to humans so that we know what to expect when Dr. Clonem von Krazee extracts DNA from Cretaceous amber, and a transporter accident creates a horrible half-human, half-T.-rex, half-mosquito abomination.
Alternatively, because it's more engaging (or click-baity, if you like) to compare their computed top speed for a T. rex to a human rather than to something like the speeding limit in a mall parking lot. Which is more interesting, "humans could outrun T. rex" or "unlike you in a car, T. re
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Finally, why spend all the time studying T-Rex/Human interaction anyway? It's not as if Humans and T-Rex ever lived together.
It certainly isn't worth spending any funding on. But if you're examining the prints, and already have most of the other tools needed, it's just fun for the same reason Jurassic Park was fun to watch...get over it.
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...then meters per seconds. Totally useless units in such an article if youâ(TM)re not from the US of A.
Then don't come to a US hosted site and whine about the use of our standards. Even if they are stupid...which I'll agree to.
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I believe that oil is more from bacterial decomposition. Plants turned into coal instead. (OTOH, any decent coal was made longer ago than T.Rex was around. But maybe lignite.)