Из ссылок выше: люди приспособлены к бегу лучше лошадей и собак, обгоняя их при беге на длинные дистанции.
[QUOTE]Interestingly, the idea that humans are poor athletes is demonstrably wrong in one crucial respect. While humans have comparatively poor performance capabilities in terms of power and strength, we are unusually specialized endurance athletes, with surprisingly impressive aerobic performance capabilities. These capabilities are particularly remarkable for endurance running (ER), defined as running long-distances (>5 km) using aerobic metabolism. These capabilities, which have been reviewed in depth by Carrier (1984) and Bramble and Lieberman (2004), compare extremely well to other mammals, especially primates, in terms of several performance criteria such as speed and distance, especially in hot conditions.
Human ER speeds range from 2.3 to 6.5 m/s. While the latter are elite performance speeds for world-record holders, many amateurs without special training are easily capable of sustained running at 5 m/s. Such speeds are fast compared to the endurance speeds of specialized quadrupedal cursors. A dog of similar body mass to a human (65 kg) has a trot–gallop transition speed of 3.8 m/s, and can sustain a gallop at 7.8 m/s under ideal climatic conditions for only 10–15 min (Heglund and Taylor, 1988). Dogs and other quadrupedal cursors cannot gallop for long periods, especially when it is hot (see below). Thus, while a large dog can outrun a human over short distances of a kilometer or two, [B]most fit humans can [U]outrun any dog[/U][/B] over longer distances. As detailed by Bramble and Lieberman (2004), humans also have remarkable endurance capabilities even in comparison to larger cursors such as ponies and horses. The latter offer a useful, extreme example because they have been bred intensively via artificial selection for running. Horses can easily outrun humans with a maxi-mum gallop speed of 8.9 m/s for a 10 km race, but their sustainable galloping speed declines dramatically for runs longer than 10–15 min; in repeated runs over long distances, [B]horses are constrained to about 5.8 m/s for approximately 20 km per day[/B], above which they can sustain irreparable musculoskeletal damage (Minetti, 2003). By these standards, human ER capabilities are quite impressive, and explain why [B][U]humans can sometimes best horses[/U] in long distance races such as marathons[/B][/QUOTE]