According to Centralpets.com, a camel can travel between 80 and 120 miles in one day, with a rider.
I used the kangaroo because of the fact it expends less energy the faster it travels and it would normally eat at night, although Kangaroos are generally considered nocturnal they can and will travel distances during the day. If a man was chasing a kangaroo over 100Km I think the kangaroo would win easily.
Yannis Kouros holds a superlative human record of 303km in 24 hours. Compare this to an average horse result of 250km in 20 hours (http://aera.asn.au/vera/reports/2001elmhurst.html) carrying a rider and with stops for vet checks. And that was over uneven terrain, not on a track. Highly comparable results.
Scott and Michael Modzelewski completed 160km in 24 hours. Horses have covered 160kms in under 10 hours carrying riders (same reference). Even allowing for the Modzelewskis having rougher terrain that still gives the record clearly to the horse.
So it looks like it’s fairly clear that humans are not the fastest animal over 100km+. But considering that we are tiny in comparison to a horse we make an incredible showing to be in their somewhere near second place. A medium sized bipedal ape manages to stay in the same league as a large ungulate that has legs twice as long.
The horse is probably the animal when it comes to endurance runs. That we are able to mount a credible challenge to it provides a lot of support for the cursorial hunter concept. It’s hard to imagine why else humans would be so over-engineered in this department.
Humans are one of (if not the) the best heat-adapted land mammals. Sweat glands, lack of hair, fingers and toes, and whatnot. Crank the heat up and a human will outlast anything. Even a wolf would collapse from heat-stroke.
Hmmm. So what’s up with camels? Do they sweat???
I have never heard anything to the effect that roos are good over long distances. I think the quote regarding springiness is only suggesting that they use relatively less energy the faster they go, not absolutely less energy. Roos like all grazing animals are probably basically sprinters, just able to keep it up long enough to get away from predators.
Princhester roos are one of the undisputed champions over distance. They are reasonable sprinters, but they are definitely not restricted to sprinting. They are well adapted to arid conditions and can travel for many hours non-stop daily between feeding grounds and water supply, and at speeds that would put a man to shame. I’m not sure they could make better time than a horse over long distance, although it wouldn’t surprise me. They certainly use far less energy than a horse while doing it.
Of course horses are also grazing animals, and are anything but ‘basically sprinters’, as can be seen for the endurance figures I gave above.
In the Iditarod dogsled race, the faster teams cover 120 miles a day under severe weather and terrain conditions. Even if these conditions were more suitable to a human, presumably the dogs could run slightly faster as well. I would challenge any human to attempt a foot race with these dogs for one day. And the dog teams don’t just cover this distance for one day but 9-10.
For the past 22 years in Wales they have held a man vs. horse marathon. Man has yet to have beaten a horse with rider. It is only 36 kilometers though. There is a quite large cash reward for the first person to beat a horse and rider in the race. horse vs. man marathon
Imagine pitting a man running against a man on horse in a New York to L.A. cross country race. Is there any doubt that the horse would come in first?
By the way the homing pigeon can go about 800 kilometers (500 miles) in about 10 hours. I know its not a land animal but that is pretty darn fast.
Kinthalis:
In 1985 when I was ~26, I walked 46 miles in one afternoon without stopping for food and rest, and I’m a typical Western-civ non-athletic rider of buses and trains.
I’m sure if I trained up for it I could do 100 miles nonstop in a single day without food or rest, even now that I’m a couple decades older. I could’ve gone much farther on the day in question if my feet hadn’t hurt so damn much – this was all on city sidewalks in very new boots that hadn’t been fully broken in yet.
is this thread implying that Man has what it takes physically to outlast other larger land animals like the horse? i don’t see how that can be possible?
Most creatures run in a fashion that is a long long way from energy-efficient.
A typical quadruped, already in full run, pulls the front two legs forward and jams them down — bam! — the body arches or otherwise reshapes so as to allow the back legs to keep moving forward for a bit and then — bam! — back legs go down and the back, butt, and front leg muscles work to re-stretch the body forward, pushing off from the back legs, pushing those front legs forward, and the cycle repeats itself.
The number of quadrupeds who run that way who could leave us so far in the dust over 50, 100, 250 yards, as to make us look really pathetic is, umm, not small. The cables of their muscles and tendons and the architecture of their bones suit them for this. Watching a big cat (or even a small kitty-cat for that matter) doing the cat-dash thing is watching poetry in motion. But they don’t get to save much energy and transfer it from one stride to the next. Those “bams” described above are places where the paws (or hooves) pretty much stop moving with very little elastic body parts taking up some of the energy in such a way as to reimpart it to the next stride. These fast creatures re-accelerate their legs from essentially a standing start over and over and over again. (They do of course benefit from their bodies’ ongoing forward momentum, as well as from the perfect angles of their leg joints and whatnot, but the bodies aren’t dragging the legs along as passive passengers – the animals have to yank those legs from back there to up here, they have to accelerate them, and the place they have to accelerate them from is bam! flat on the ground and static motionless).
Our motion is different. Our cabling and architecture is all about rubber-band rebound, conservation of motion in the foot. Our feet bounce us forward as we land on our heels, weight shifts forward as our bodies pass over our ankles in mid-stride, stretching on the achilles tendon, which pulls the heel up, rocks us up onto our toes, from which we push off and lift. Our feet never have that “bam!” moment when they are providing an anchor point for other feet to pivot past or for the body to arch away and push off from – the foot of a human runner retains forward motion, and its internal workings via heel, ankle, achilles tendon, ball of foot, and toes all enables the transfer of impact and inertia to springing us forward without us having to re-accelerate our own feet with each stride.
that makes sense. thanks for the reply.
Yes and no. What you say about human sproingyness is Bam! true enough. But surprisingly, it turns out that quadrupeds are Bam! pretty well evolved to do what they do. Quadrupeds have a number of different gaits, and speeds within these gaits, which they’ll Bam! (Warning - .pdf) select for best efficiency.
To my own surprise, it appears that the sproingyness we have is Bam! not especially efficient unless you happen to only have two legs to play with. We had to evolve it after standing up.
Note also that most of these cites agree on one thing - quadruped travel mechanics is an underresearched field, and there’s a fair bit of disagreement among whoever the hell studies these things.
With regards to the OP, if it comes to a human and an equine, I’ll put fifty bucks on the horse, at any distance.
Yeah, I’d hate to think I had to run down a damn horse. Wouldn’t want to go up against a camel, either.
But in the veldt a tiny pack of us could take off after a herd of gazelles or antelope. We could do what neither the gazelles & antelope nor the cats and wolves and other fast-spring predators could. It was our adaptation.
Acknowledged. I’ve seen footage of horses switching gaits. They may lose momentum on each footfall but they’ve got a whole lot of other energy-conserving strategies going for them – ways in which a very small motion, an easy twitch of a specialized muscle, brings a hoof from way back there to way up here, as folded-up parts become extended parts all in the same motion; and how trotting, with the front and rear legs in synch is efficient in this range, and then galloping, with the front and rear legs in opposition, becomes more efficient…
Still, we’re damn good at the long-distance thing. It really stands out given how nonathletic we are stacked up against other animals in so many other categories. It’s like Eastern New Mexico University making it to the Final Four or SUNY at Stony Brook obtaining a berth in the Sugar Bowl or something. In the final round for the long distance killer-marathon we have camels and horses and hey, would you believe it, homo sap!
Oh, I dunno. While I wouldn’t want to race a horse, I’ll take one on any day in the discus hurl. 
Seriously, I think humans would do better if we had to. We don’t exactly live the life of nature, red in tooth and claw, these days. Humans have had tools to make things easier for quite a while; even your basic pointy stick can save a lot of running around. Once you’ve invented the pointy stick, you usually only have to chase injured animals.
A healthy, feral adult human could perform some remarkable feats. Including, I have to grant you, giving a horse a good run for its money, and maybe winning (at longish distances, of course). You’re right – long-distance racing would be where he’d shine. I bet he’d at least qualify for the tree-climbing event.
If there were a competition for using tools as a method of adaptation to varying climates and climatic changes, though, humans would be a shoo-in for the gold in both the freestyle and synchronized events.
quothz:
Would you rather enter as a contestant against the chimpanzee, bonobo, kittycat, and opossum in the treeclimbing event, or go up against the horse, camel, kangaroo, and wolf in the long-distance marathon?
My dad has an 11 year old kittycat that had the poor idea of sleeping in the engine compartment of the pickup truck where it was warm back when he was a wee kitten of 10 months. Had to get stapled back together and was lucky to have all working parts still connected when it was done. I have personally with my own two eyes seen that cat go up a pine tree at a rate of about 2 seconds per every 10 yards, and he’s getting on in his days (doesn’t catch half as many squirrels and bring them back for Daddy-approval as he used to).
It’s not with ease that I’d embrace the idea of trying to walk/run Black Beauty and the Budweiser team into the ground, but there’s no way in hell I’d go up against that dilapidated kitty cat. And I have a sneaking suspicion the bonobos might clean his clock in a fair climbing test.
Whoah, there. First off, I’m strictly talking about a feral human - one raised like a wild animal. I bet he or she could climob pretty damned quickly. Second, I’m saying our hypothetical wild but healthy homo sapiens would qualify to compete, not win - a mountain lion or similar-sized cat would probably take gold.
I just meant to highlight the fact that humans can climb at all, which is one more advantage over many (most?) other quadripeds, especially those that are likely to be strong distance runners.
*Disclaimer: I’m sort of drunk; if I’m somewhat incoherent or belligerent, that’s why.