On Sunday, two Kenyans swept the New York City marathon. Albert Korir was the fastest man. Peres Jepchirchi took the women’s race. The two achieved their remarkable feats about 1.5 or 1.6 million years after a teenage boy did something similar on the savannah of what is now Kenya.
He may not have won a race, but he ran fast and far.
Surely, this particular boy wasn’t the first archaic human capable of running on and on and on. His skeleton, however—which constitutes the oldest set of Homo erectus bones ever to have been found—hints at a suite of anatomical changes that enabled archaic humans to run long distances.
The boy is variously called Nariokotome Boy and Turkana Boy. All of his bones except for his feet and a few other small pieces were discovered in 1985 by Mary and Richard Leakey in Kenya’s Lake Turkana Basin. He was about 5’3” and probably weighed about 103 pounds. His molars were just coming in, a developmental stage that matches those of modern 11-year-old humans, though his bone growth suggests that he may have been anywhere between 7 and 15 years old.
Nariokotome Boy lived during a time approximately halfway between that of modern humans and Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis specimen found in 1974 in the Afar desert of Ethiopia. Far more closely than did Nariokotome Boy, Lucy resembled modern great apes. Her enormous upper body strength suggests that she was built for life in trees. (Falling out of one may have been what killed her.) She wasn’t stuck up in the canopy, however. The pitch of her femurs in relation to her knees is just one of several anatomical features that suggest she was capable of walking upright.
Homo Erectus and Running
But Nariokotome Boy could do more than just walk.
According to a lecture given by paleo-anatomist and biologist Alice Roberts of the University of Birmingham, Nariokotome Boy had long, strong legs and relatively short arms. He also had a thin waist that would have allowed his torso to swivel and keep him in balance while running. Built like that, he could hunt, scavenge, and escape predators—all while carrying a weapon.
And he could perspire. Just ask Sunday’s Kenyan marathon winners: on the African savannah, running in the day is eceptionally hot work. For Nariokotome Boy, it would have required the ability to sweat, and that would have required his skin to be covered with nothing thicker than a light fuzz of hair. (Lucy was furry.) According to Dr. Roberts, from a distance Nariokotome Boy would have looked very much like a modern human.
Evolution in the Human Line is a Bumpy Road
Lucy lived about 1.6 million years before Nariokotome Boy. Even so, she is probably not one of his direct ancestors. What’s more, probably neither of these specimens represents a direct ancestor of modern humans. Scientists consider Homo erectus, Australopithecus afarensis, and Homo sapiens to be three distinct species that environmental forces shaped in similar ways. The first two species overlapped in time. H. sapiens is the only one of the three to have survived to the modern era.
Congratulations to Albert Korir and Peres Jepchirchi for Sunday’s New York City marathon wins. They and all modern humans who love to run owe a lot to the extraordinary evolutionary shift that finally gave humans the shape and musculature evident in Nariokotome Boy.
