No marathons for Neanderthals

摘要

Fossilized heel bones suggest that Neanderthals were not built to run long distances. By observing contemporary human distance runners on a treadmill, David Raichlen at the University of Arizona in Tucson and his team found that athletes with shorter heel bones, or calcanei (pictured, white line), tended to run more economically - consuming less oxygen to maintain the same speed - than those with longer ones.