Here’s what happens. I’ll assume you wish to take the fast approach and run the horse full out until it collapses. The horse will go rapidly into oxygen debt, not being able to breath fast enough to replace the oxygen it’s using. As the fatigue poisons rapidly build up, the fatigue poisons will rapidly build up, the blood will become acidic (or basic, I forget which,) and the chemical barriers of the lungs will no longer function properly. The horse will rapidly start to bleed into it’s lungs, producing the noticeable effect known as “blowing foam” or “blowing blood.” If the horse is stopped at this point it has a reasonable chance of survival.
As the horse continues, no oxygen at all will be able to be absorbed by the lungs, the oxygen debt will become total and the horse will black out (probably at about 30 mph) as its brain is starved from oxygen. Essentially it drowns.
Depending on the shape the horse is in, it may alternately have a heart attack at any point in this process.
This still happens occasionally at race tracks, and with irresponsible or unknowledgeable riders who push a horse too hard.
Horses have a lot of heart, and will run themselves to death for you.
Horses and men are different animals and have adapted to fit different lifstyles. Horse’s ancestors evolved to move around and eat grass in a herd, moving, in duration, fast enough to outrun the rate at which they graze so they don’t starve. Then, occasionally, when a predator appears they have to run fast to outrun it until the predator gives up and goes for an easier meal.
People evolved to move fast enough to stalk prey and then kill it suddenly. That stalking, then the subsequent chase when the person, say, jumps out of a bush, required the person to keep up a reasonable pace long enough to wear the animal out so it would slow so the man could move in for the kill (projectiles changed that). Like a pack of wolves, kind of. Definitely not like a cheeta.
So, it is obvious when you look at life histories that the horse would win a dash but the man would win the long marathon.
P.S.: today’s human may not be able to beat a horse (except with a whip). Husbandry has made it so we don’t need to chase down our own meals. Society has made so we don’t need to kill anything to eat: its called the market.
It’s highly debatable whether humans are well adapted to be predators. When we hunted successfully, we hunted cooperatively (before guns that is), and still an awful lot of our diet was gathered. I would imagine that a lot of cooperative hunting tactics exist specifically to avoid the kind of lengthy chase you describe. I seriously doubt that hunting by chasing the animal down so that it tires out is a successful or efficient tactic. Think about it this way: the longer the time interval between the prey detecting you and you actually killing it, the fewer successful hunts there are per time period (not even bringing in the time it takes you to detect the prey), and the greater chance for each individual prey to escape.
It may occur every once in a while, or for special rituals (like with the indians someone mentioned), but as a regular tactic?
I’d think that successful predators are those that ambush and/or corner their prey.
Hmm… that id seem like I was trying to say that people did this for food to stay alive…
Think of it like this (my untested hypothesis):
guy can pass ritual = chicks dig him = more childrren = more of subsequent generation can run steadily fast for long distances = more of that generation passes ritual … =eventually most people can pass ritual
then people no longer need ritual, but people keep the ability to run reasonably quickly over long distanes
Boom! Now most fit humans can outrun a horse! Even though there is no reason why you need to.
Having both run a marathon, and ridden a horse a very long distance, I’m not sure that man necessarily wins the marathon over his equine brother.
Horses can routinely cover such distances in what would be to a man, world record times.
If you think differently please support it.
That ritual Wood Thrush refers to doesn’t seem feasible. I doubt every group throughout the world had that ritual, which is what it would take for us all to evolve the trait. Man was a runner long before his society advance enough to have elaborate rituals.
Scylla: Did I mention that the endurance contest between a man and a horse was on bicycles? How negligent of me to forget that. To make things even, the horse is allowed to ride one too…
OK, so I was off by a bit in saying that a human could “easily double” the distance a horse could run without deterioration. Perhaps I should have said a man could match the distance and perhaps even exceed it by a little bit. Could a human run 36 miles/day indefinitely without deterioration? Probably yes, although he would have to eat like a, er, horse…
Man also has the uncanny ability to disappate a lot of heat, so when noontime comes around most animals are hot and tired. Perfect time to hunt, or chase horses, sheep, whatever you need is.
Over a 24 hour period it is easily possible to ride 350 miles on a bicycle ,I’ve managed 440 miles, but for several weeks afterward short distance high speed ability tends to be compromised. Oddly enough the long distance middle-speed ability is much less affected.
If I ride a 24 hour or 12 hour race then my 10, 25, and 50 mile times suffer for weeks but I can still turn in a decent 100 miler.
I was just joking about the cycling against a horse. Of course, with the mechanical advantage of a bicycle, humans can easily outdo a horse several times over.
Indians did capture horses by chasing them until the horse was too tired and hungry to run anymore. They did this in the way that has been suggested, harassing it so it didn’t get enough to eat and drink. You don’t have to run faster than the horse to do this, just start jogging towards the horse. It spooks and runs off a couple hundred yards, you keep jogging towards it. It’ll stop and graze until you spook it again. Continue until it no longer has the energy to run away. Because horses have to eat so much, this is pretty certain to work, although it will take quite a bit of time.
But this was only used to capture horses, not to hunt them. While humans in general have more endurance than other mammals, it was not very productive to chase them down to eat. After all, that takes a lot of energy to do, so there has to be enough meat on the animal to make up for that. So our ancestors made use of another of our advantages over other animals (our brain) and devised better, more efficient ways to hunt. And eventually, of course, they domesticated some of the animals, eliminating the need to hunt them at all.
OK, about whether a human can outrun a horse in a race, probably not if it’s for a specific distance. And letting the horse feed during the race negates the main advantage of humans. Maybe we should have a race to see who can run farthest without eating.
The ritual would have needed to be much older and much more widespread than the native americans for this to have occurred. Stamina is enough of an advantageous characteristic on its own merits that you don’t need to turn to stalking horses or to sexual selection to explain why humans have it. As far as why horses wouldn’t have as much as we do, how about this: since horses can run pretty fast to escape predators in a short distance, they usually don’t have to outlast the predators in an endurance contest as well.
IF the contest is to cover the most ground before you drop, the nod goes to the human. As I’ve said, the horse can’t keep itself hydrated, the human can. In a hot environment, the contest won’t even be close.
In terms of a one time contest over most distances the horse will most likely be the clear winner. They have greater speed over the short term, and a horse is capable of tremendous exertion for a one shot kind of deal. In 100 mile endurance races it is not uncommon for horses to lose 100-150 pounds worth of water weight. Like camels, they will pull water from their body fat to sustain them.
I’d like to be careful, when I say that man has greater endurance. This is really just at the extremes, and is more a function of hydration, and body heat bleed-off.
The average plug of a horse is gonna run all but the most supremely conditioned athlete into the ground every time, over almost any distance.
I remember reading about a man (I think an American Indian) who traveled around the American West in the ‘cowboy era’ racing against horses and winning. He supported himself by going from town to town and soliciting bets on the race.
However, there was a trick to his success. The race always involved a turn around a tree, post, etc. - dash down to the turn, turn, and dash back to the starting line. The horse always lost so much ground on the turn that it couldn’t quite catch the man on the return dash.
I also seem to remember that the American Quarter Horse Association used to sponser an annual ‘match race’ between a Quarter Horse and a Cadillac. The car company backed out after being defeated year after year - a Cadillac simply can’t match the speed of acceleration of a Quarter Horse!