The Legendary History of the Two-Footed Earthrunners

The Legendary History of the Two–Footed Earth Runners (LH) took root as an art project about human's original hunting weapon: running. An impulse by the author to paint a picture of primitive humans conducting a persistence hunt, as described in the bestseller Born to Run. As an artist rarely paints just one canvas, running has been told in many stories about the history and development of humanity, both good and bad, both individual and collective. More canvases of runners began filling the walls of the garage, with written descriptions of what was happening underneath them. Was all this for an art show? A book?

Human beings have been meat eaters for 2 million years. This is despite the fact our oldest weapons are 500,000 years old. How on earth did we get meat for 1.5 million years without weapons? In a nutshell,

humans lost their chimp fur, developed the ability to sweat, started growing snappy Achilles tendons,

and began jogging about, is how it happened. The fur–covered, non–sweating herd animals that covered the Savanna instinctively ran away from these running bipeds, but soon ran into a problem. These erect, furless chimpanzees just didn't stop running! As the spooked antelope overheated and died, our ancestors took notice and started eating their carcasses. When we ate meat, our species grew bigger brains, more muscle, and got taller. We ran to get which made us better. In other words, human beings evolved to run.

As we perfected our ability to track animals' habits in order to hunt them, human beings learned to recognize cause and effect, and developed the scientific method. Humans evolved to run, and through running, evolved their thought process. LH examines the role running has played in the development of humanity during primitive times, during antiquity, and how since the beginning of the industrial revolution up to present day, most adult human beings have lost any real ability to run.

Look at what happens to an animal over time when it was created to do something and it does not do it anymore. What happens when this unfulfilled creature is still on top of the world? Is this why humanity has had a barrage of new ailments unleashed on what was supposed to be a relaxing twenty–first century (anxiety, depression, heart disease, diabetes), as well as harming the human perspective with regards to things like technology and war.

The Legendary History of the Two–Footed Earth Runners was written under the notion that humans can remove most of their maladies and extend the life of the earth with a return to running. Knowledge about where we came from delivered by art can inspire humans to do better.

-- Sam Bosworth