Born to run?

Could the millions of readers and followers of Christopher McDougall’s book "Born to run" have been led astray? An Australian anthropologist thinks so and has an alternative theory that could change the way you look at running forever. 

If you read Christopher McDougall’s best-selling book Born to Run, or listened to his erudite TED talks you will have heard a theory on human evolution that goes something like this:

About two million years ago our ancestors’ brain size exploded – going from “pea brained” Australopithecines to “melon head” Homo erectus. However, to support that big brain, you need a source of condensed caloric energy – meat – and the first edged weapons didn’t arrive until about 200,000 years ago. So he says “Somehow our ancestors were killing animals without any weapons.”

To explain this quandary, McDougall says we evolved as “hunting pack animals”, using our efficient running gait and cooling adaptations to chase quadruped prey, which have neither, until they collapsed from heat exhaustion providing us with plenty of brain fuel – with no claws or fangs required.

The implication is that modern humans are built to run - and if you think otherwise then you’re not only denying history. You’re denying who you are.

This “endurance running hypothesis” as that’s commonly known is an amazing and compelling idea: man the elite athlete and great hunter, taking on the African savannah with only his bare hands like a pre-historic Bear Grylls; so it’s no surprise it’s commonly accepted by both anthropologists and the mainstream media.

But there’s one problem – it’s wrong. At least that’s the opinion of Stephen Munro, a former anthropology professor at Australian National University and current curator of the National Museum, Australia.

Munro is part of a growing faction of the scientific community, including Elaine Morgan and Sir David Attenborough, who say that the endurance running hypothesis is unlikely at best.

“The endurance running model from two million years ago – I struggle with that,” Munro says. “As far as I’m concerned endurance running came later with Homo sapiens [about 200,000 years ago].”

Why we’re not born to run

Munro says the idea that early hominids chased their prey to heat exhaustion on the savannah presents some serious logistical challenges.

“Our children aren’t endurance runners – certainly babies aren’t – pregnant women wouldn’t have been and likewise for the old folk,” he says. “Supposing they were actually doing this, it would have been only the healthiest males – and maybe females – running for many kilometres at a time to hunt. But at the end they have to somehow take that meat back to the people who couldn’t run.”

Of course this would have all taken place under the watchful eye of every other predator and scavenger on the savannah, many of whom would no doubt view a pack of exhausted apes carrying a dismembered animal the same way we see a super-supreme pizza.

The idea that we evolved on the hot dry savannah, Munro states, is flatly wrong. Munro says the fossils of butchered animals point to an aquatic setting. “One of the most common animals they find is hippopotamus; there are also records of whales being butchered and crocodiles. The [fossils] that are bovid, are animals like waterbuck that spent most of their time feeding in wetland grasses.”

In addition, Munro says there are a host of problems with the way our ancestors were built that would hinder their long-distance running ambitions. Homo erectus, the first human ancestors said to have used endurance running for survival, had a heavier skeleton than any primate in history, making it even less suited to running than its evolutionary predecessors.

“As a runner, there’s no real advantage in having heavy bones”, Munro says. “Good long distance runners don’t carry much fat and they’re slightly built – they’re not big hulking guys. Homo erectus had big muscles – big muscle attachments – and we assume they would have had subcutaneous fat like modern humans do. In my opinion, they were totally unsuited anatomically for long distance running.”

Furthermore, modern humans’ sweat glands, conventionally proposed as cooling adaptations for endurance running, combined with our dilute urine make us vulnerable to dehydration and salt depletion. Without trace elements like iodine, which are relatively scarce in a savannah environment, we fall victim to hypothyroidism and mental retardation.

Right now you’re probably asking yourself: ‘Dead hippopotamuses and retarded primates? What’s all this got to do with trail running?’ In a word: everything.

Running is a primal activity, so doing it well requires understanding your origins. How can you develop a good running style when you can't even say for sure why you stand on two feet rather than four? If you don't know what environment you came from, how do you expect to make good decisions about your water and salt intake? And if you don't know what food your digestive system spent a few million years evolving to process, then how do you expect to put together an effective training diet?

More likely: born to wade

So if running wasn’t the shaping force in our evolution, what was? According to Munro and his colleagues the driving force was water.

A model that explains our evolution in terms of foraging in and around oceans, lakes and rivers, answers many questions that savannah-based models (like the endurance running hypothesis) leave dangling: our hairlessness, our ability to consciously control our breathing and the wetsuit like layer of fat under our skin.

“If you’re swimming in water…then it’s an advantage to be naked and have subcutaneous fat but also to be linear – to have the legs spine and head all in one line,” Munro Says. “People often will assume we’re linear because we’re bipedal… in some respects we might be bipedal because we have a linear body that’s good for foraging in water.”

He says spending time around water would have provided the impetus for our breath control, which is one of the pre-conditions for speech.

However, he says it’s important to note we weren’t mermaids. “I don’t think humans were ever aquatic in that they were spending all their time in the water. They weren’t fast swimmers. They were foraging beneath the water, collecting things like shellfish; things that didn’t run or swim away.”

Munro says a waterside diet – eating coconuts and shellfish and scavenging the high water mark – explains our omnivorous tendencies and also the high docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) diet needed to grow the large brain necessary for tool use.

“You can survive on that. You don’t need to be running after anything, but you need tools, because you need to be able to open the shells. Tool use is very important.”

A shoreline lifestyle would have given us the perfect conditions to evolve our problem solving and tool making skills – the successful waterside ape would need to open mussel shells one day, carve up a beached whale the next and pilfer birds’ eggs in between. Eventually, basic tool use would have led to fishing spears and other projectile weapons.

In Munro’s opinion, it was only after we’d mastered these skills and evolved into our final Homo sapiens format 200,000 years ago that we began to hunt larger land-based prey, eventually dominating the planet and learning to endurance run.

So what does that mean for runners?

If Munro’s beliefs are true then we’re not the highly evolved endurance running specialists that many experts think. Instead, running, like language, art and science, is something that we learned to do much more recently.

While Born to Run fans might be feeling a bit down right now, for the rest of us Munro’s theory answers a whole stack of questions that have probably been nagging at you since you first laced up a pair of running shoes.

It explains why getting off the couch and running an ultra-marathon isn’t as straightforward as some people would have you think. It tells us why perfect running technique doesn’t come to us all as easily as we’d like and why you need to train carefully, scientifically.

It says that if you get injured, that’s okay, you’re not earmarked for natural selection – it just means you need to use that big old Homo sapiens brain of yours to figure out what’s going wrong with your running and fix it.

At the end of the day, Munro’s theory tells us that although we’re not natural born runners, we are born to adapt, improvise and persist – and when we do that, anything is possible.

Wikileaks: implications for the communications industry.

With a few mouse clicks, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and volunteer staff of Wikileaks have picked up the chessboard of international politics and given it one hell of a shake.

It’ll take a while for the dust to settle… and it’ll be very interesting to see what the game looks like when it does.

In reality much of the changed landscape of this ‘new game’ will only affect people directly involved in the Machiavellian cut and thrust of international politics.

However the various scandals have drawn into focus some very interesting changes in the way people share information. And if like me, you’re involved day-to-day in corporate communications (an industry that you could argue is a minor league version the international diplomacy game) then you really should be watching closely. Here are a few concepts that have caught my attention:

The scientific approach to communications.
When Wikileaks published the “Collateral Murder” tapes showing a United States helicopter machine gunning civilians and journalists they didn’t just release a ten second clip… they released the full, unedited camera tapes. Sure you could see an edited version, but if you didn’t believe the conclusions they drew, you could download the unedited version and decide for yourself. It’s what’s known as the scientific approach journalism.

The idea stems from the dusty world of peer-reviewed science journals where you don’t just publish your conclusions; you publish the hypothesis, the methodology and results too. The idea is that readers can view your data and see if they draw the same conclusions, or if they like, repeat the experiment and see if they get the same results. It’s a fairly high standard to achieve, but it’s one that clearly separates objective from subjective; fact from opinion.

In the pre-digital age, cost and logistical constraints prevented the news media from using this approach. The result was an arrangement that forced readers to rely on the subjective opinions of reporters and the subjective choices of editors. It was an imperfect system, to put it lightly.

But on the internet there is no such constraint and so we see a growing number of communications organisations showing not just the tip of the inverted pyramid… but publishing the whole thing (mummies and all).

So how does this relate to someone selling mountain biking holidays, or real estate packages?

Well, twenty years ago the column inches constraint applied to corporate communications too - so you could say “trust us you’ll love it” and people would generally be happy enough with that. But as the world’s ability to transmit and process information grows it seems likely that the businesses that say “trust us you’ll love it… but if you want proof, here it is” will be the ones who come out on top.

Of course not everyone will look at that proof; not everyone has the time. But if you’re trying to convince people to buy into your idea, be it a product, political campaign or news story; and you’re not prepared to show them demonstration videos, independent field trials, customer reviews, etcetera to back it up… then you’ll need a to think up a pretty damn good reason why not.

No more porky-pies
The second revelation to come out of Wikileaks actually stems back to an essay “Conspiracy as Governance” written by Julian Assange back in 2006. In the essay, which forms the philosophical underpinning of Wikileaks Assange argues that unjust organizations by their nature will create leaks and that those leaks will have a negative nonlinear effect on them.

“The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive "secrecy tax") and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaptation.”

Once again Assange was writing is in the context of tyrannical government regimes… but again the principles apply on a smaller scale. As the world’s ability to share information increases, organizations that behave duplicitously; whether that’s over-selling a product, over-spinning their public relations activities or just plain lying; are increasingly going to find themselves outmanoeuvred by their honest competitors.

That’s not to say you can’t have conflicting points of view and it definitely doesn’t mean that everyone has to agree with everything that you do (in fact having some people vigourously dislike what you do can galvanise your supporters and actually be beneficial… but I digress). However, what it does mean is that by keeping your rhetoric and your actions in line you’ll make your organisation more effective - and more profitable.

One obvious sticking point will be the traditional difference between ‘back-of-house’ and ‘front-of-house’ communications. Communication is always going to be context specific and shifting contexts will invariably distort the meaning of the message. Anyone who’s taken their spouse to a work Christmas party will understand.

There is however a big difference between this sort of cross-contextual friction…and conspiring to deceive the public at large. It’s a hazy line I’ll admit, but with information passing between contexts more freely than ever, it’s one that professional communicators are going to have to watch very closely.

What’s your name again?
On a more technical note, it’s interesting to observe that Wikileaks was able to operate almost entirely unhindered without even having a domain name. After EveryDNS cut ties with the company claiming the denial of service attacks on the Wikileaks site were threatening its ability to serve other customers, the URL www.wikileaks.org effectively ceased to exist.

You’d think they would have been dead in the water, but the site was still easily locatable via Google at its numeric IP address: 213.251.145.96 and continued to run more or less unhindered.

So what? Well, the old marketing adage: “build a better mousetrap and the world with beat a path to your door” is generally quoted as a description of how things used to be done – before the wonders of modern marketing. It seems these days, with a little help from Google the saying is true once again… especially if you’re looking to catch very big, corrupt mice.

The cat among the pigeons.

Exploring the changing face of travel journalism and tourism marketing.

For years the travel industry has had it easy, with an almost endless supply of journalists willing to write "ooh ah, isn't it lovely" stories, in exchange for an all expenses paid holiday.

Perhaps it’s to be expected, after all most people read travel stories in the same light as plastic-wrapped men’s magazine – for a moment of escapist fantasy provided by idealised accounts written through the most deeply tinted of rose coloured glasses. Being told, “actually she’s got pimples on her bottom,” tends to ruin the effect.

But if you’re actually going to be paying your own hard-earned cash to stay somewhere, you need real information, the ‘pimples and all’ details if you will (I’m talking about travel now, not the girly magazines).

With a few exceptions – Lonely Planet being the most notable – that sort of information has been sorely lacking for far too long. I suppose not many publishers can afford to print travel material, particularly regarding high-end destinations, without the support the industry and tourism ministries to grease the wheels.

The industry holds all the aces, and that’s the way it’s been for as long as anyone can remember. Not for much longer, however. Enter the great shaper of twenty-first century society, the internet.

Over the past few years user generated content sites like Trip Advisor and to a lesser extent Thorn Tree have allowed anyone with an internet connection to act as a reviewer, telling the good, the bad and the ugly details of their travel experiences - and throwing a cat among the travel industry pigeons in the process.

So what's a poor tourism marketer to do? You can't bribe and schmoose every customer like you do travel journalists. How are you supposed to respond?

The new wisdom says three things:

1. Cut the crap - Tell people what to expect, don’t be tempted to ‘spin’ the truth or take artistic licence – if you’re a quirky B&B don’t try to convince people you’re the Ritz – customers will find out they’ll post it, and then you’ll have a crisis on your hands.

2. Get amongst it - When, inevitably you do have a ‘clanger’ of a review, don’t freak out, everyone gets them occasionally. The seven star Burj Al Arab in Dubai has been described as, “The worst hotel I have ever stayed in!!”, and Queenstown’s five-star Blanket Bay has been described as, “One of the World's great rip-offs.”

What you need to do is participate in the discussion – standing by idly while your reputation is trashed online is a great way of saying that you really don’t care what our customers think.If someone has highlighted a genuine flaw in your business acknowledge it and demonstrate that you’ve taken steps to fix the problem. If someone is just having a rant then invite them to contact you offline. Either way you’re showing that you’re paying attention, and that says a lot.

3. Harness the power - People will believe a collection of good reviews by a customer over a great review by a critic every time. So if you can work with your customers to generate positive e-publicity you’ll earn yourself a whole lot more business than by running expensive ad campaigns or trying to seduce visiting journos.

Set people’s expectations accurately, provide a good service consistently, charge a fair price and you’ll reap the benefits of the new technology.

So, for the not-so-humble-anymore customers, next time you’re about to book a hotel room for the night, take a quick look and see what other travellers have to say – you’ll be glad you did. And next time you have a really bad travel experience, don’t go screaming at front line staff or barking at junior management, just politely ask if directions to the nearest internet cafe.

Power to the people!

Who the hell is Henry Mencken?

The ultimate bigot, he was an elitist, sexist, racist and atheist - but damn he had a way with words.

I'm currently studying the history of journalism. It's an undertaking that for has involved spending an inordinate amount of time trolling the net - even more than usual - looking for gems of historical wisdom and eyewitness accounts of events from the Hindenburg to Hiroshima.

Between Google and Wikipedia, it's amazing what you can find. What's perhaps more amazing is the things you bump into by serendipitous accident - like Henry Menken.

Son of a cigar maker, Mencken never attended college, but never the less grew into a talented journalist, essayist and satirist. In the early twentieth century his pen produced cynical, elitist, atheistic, and anarchistic points of view. He was sometimes unpopular, often controversial, and is called a bigot and a racist to this day, but his words still raise a grin (at least for me) and no doubt a few hackles. Here’s my top ten:

10. “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking,”
9. “Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable,”
8. “Self-respect: The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious,”
7. “Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice,”
6. “Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents,”
5. “Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends,”
4. “Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence,”
3. “Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood,”
2. “No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public,”
1.…and the classic, “Nature abhors a moron.”

He died in 1956, after falling out of favour with the American public due to his position on the nation's involvement in World War II and a stroke that left him unable to read or write for his last years. On his tombstone was engraved the words:

“If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner, and wink your eye at some homely girl."

If you’d like to find out more, check out his wikipedia page, or Google Henry L Mencken.