Persistence Hunting by Modern Hunter-Gatherers

1. What they did

Endurance running may be a special human ability that shaped how the human body evolved. Two ideas explain why early humans would have needed to run long distances: to reach carcasses before other scavengers, or to run animals down to exhaustion (persistence hunting). Some researchers had suggested persistence hunting would cost too much energy for too little return. Louis Liebenberg used his own observations of !Xo and /Gwi hunters of the central Kalahari in Botswana to test how efficient it really is.

• Historical records. He reviewed accounts of persistence hunting in the Kalahari, among Native American peoples, and among Aborigines of northwestern Australia.
• Observing persistence hunts. He recorded ten persistence hunts between 1985 and 2001. The first two he joined on foot (1985 and 1990). The other eight took place on two expeditions with film crews (1998, and 2001 for the BBC’s Life of Mammals), when he followed the hunters by vehicle. On two 2001 hunts a Global Positioning System (GPS) device recorded the route.
• Comparing hunting methods. On field trips at Ngwatle Pan and Lone Tree, he recorded the attempts, kills and meat yields of hunting with dogs, persistence hunting, bow and arrow, club and spear, and the springhare probe, and estimated snaring yields from another researcher’s data.
• Local knowledge and participation. He took part in the tracking, recorded observations with a tape recorder, camera and notebook, and interviewed hunters in camp in the evenings, with the help of translators.

2. What they found

The persistence hunt

• Hunts take place in the hottest time of day, at about 39 to 42 °C. The hunters drink as much water as they can, chase the animal, then track its footprints at a running pace. The animal stops to rest in the shade, and the hunters must find and chase it again before it has rested enough, until it is exhausted.
• Three or four hunters start together; a team can track much faster than one person. The fittest runner takes it easy at first, then finishes the hunt alone.
• Of ten persistence hunts recorded, five succeeded, all on kudu. The shortest successful hunt took under two hours. Others covered 25 to 35 km in 3 hours 35 minutes to 4 hours 57 minutes, at average speeds of 6.3 to 10 km per hour.
• The challenge is less the speed than the heat, soft sand, thick bush and keeping to the right trail. Losing the tracks was the main reason hunters gave up. The hardest moments come when the animal rejoins its herd, circles back on its own tracks, or when other antelope cross the trail.

Local knowledge

• Hunters choose species by season: steenbok, duiker and gemsbok in the rainy season, when wet sand forces their hoofs open and stiffens the joints; kudu, eland and red hartebeest in the dry season, when they tire in loose sand.
• Kudu bulls tire faster than cows because of their heavy horns; cows are run down only if pregnant or wounded. After a full moon, animals have been active all night and tire more easily. The best time is the end of the dry season (October and November).
• When following a herd, trackers look to either side of the trail for an animal that has broken away: the weakest animal usually leaves the herd to hide when it begins to tire.
• The tracks show when the animal is tiring: its stride becomes shorter, it kicks up more sand, and its resting places get closer together.

Success rates and meat yields

Method

Attempts

Successful

Success per attempt

Yield (kg per day hunted)

Dogs (5 days)

5

3

60%

24.8

Persistence hunt (46 days)

2

2

100%

5

Bow and arrow (46 days)

41

2

5%

2.9

Club and spear (46 days)

11

5

45%

1.6

Springhare probe (46 days)

29

4

14%

0.1

Snaring (estimate from Lee 1979)

about 5

• On the filming expeditions, 3 of 8 persistence hunts succeeded (37%). Some of these hunts would not normally have been attempted: one on gemsbok in the wrong season, and the hunts that followed three days after a success because the camera crew had missed the kill. Leaving out these five hunts gives 4 successes in 5 attempts (80%) and about 4 kg of meat per day.
• Bow-and-arrow hunts often failed: stalks fell short of the 25 to 30 m shooting range, arrows missed, or a wounded animal took hours or days to track and sometimes escaped or was taken by other predators.
• In 1990 the hunters ran the whole hunt; in 1998 and 2001 the hunter sometimes walked. The author notes this may show a decline as the last persistence hunters age, or may just reflect differences between three individuals.

Heat and the body

When the author ran with the hunters, he stopped sweating and showed early signs of heat stroke. The hunters recognised this at once, told him to wet his hair, wash his face and sip water slowly, and explained that a hunter must constantly compare his own condition with the animal’s.

3. What they concluded

• Under the right conditions, persistence hunting is an effective method with a good success rate and meat yield: higher than bow and arrow, clubs and spears, or the springhare probe, about the same as snaring, and lower only than hunting with dogs.
• Because a persistence hunter can make mistakes and still succeed if he keeps the trail, the success rate per attempt is much higher than with bow and arrow, where the hunter usually has only one chance.
• Before dogs were domesticated, and before the spear-thrower and the bow and arrow, persistence hunting may have been one of the most efficient forms of hunting. Endurance running may have been useful not only for scavenging but for hunting, and both may have been crucial in human evolution.
• In Appendix A the author suggests that endurance running probably began with scavenging, and that water containers and tracking skills were prerequisites for persistence hunting. Simple persistence hunting may have begun with “systematic tracking” (following visible footprints) in easy, sandy terrain. “Speculative tracking” (reading signs, forming a hypothesis about what the animal is doing and predicting where its tracks will be) would be needed in harder terrain and may be a very recent development. Shifts in the animals hunted at sites such as Klasies River Mouth might show when these forms of tracking appeared.
• Persistence hunting is known to be practised only by men, but women are also highly skilled trackers.

4. How tracking was or was not used

Tracking is at the heart of this paper. In persistence hunting, the hunters follow the animal’s footprints at a running pace, sometimes leaving the trail to pick it up further ahead, and must pick out one animal’s tracks from those of its herd or other species. They read signs of tiring in the tracks (shorter stride, more sand kicked up, closer resting places) and, the author explains, try to think like the animal to predict where it is going. The hunter Karoha described feeling he takes the kudu’s energy as it tires. Other hunting methods also involved following fresh tracks: to stalk animals with bow and arrow, to find animals in burrows or sleeping under bushes, and to follow wounded animals. The author took part in the tracking himself.

5. Tracker or observer certification

Reported but not validated. The hunters’ tracking expertise is the subject of the author’s long field research and is shown through their hunting results, but no certification or formal test of their skill is reported in this paper.

6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

• A GPS device recorded the route of two 2001 hunts; Figure 1 maps Karoha’s route running down a kudu bull on October 13, 2001, showing the kudu crossing its own tracks and joining other bulls.
• Field notes were time-stamped through three failed hunts (Table 2), recording runs, walks, temperatures, lost spoor and the kudu mixing with other animals.
• A four-wheel-drive vehicle was used to scan for fresh tracks on the filming trips, and the hunters were allowed to refill their two-litre water bottles during the hunt for safety.