Racing is probably as old as man himself.
As an activity, a easy physical activity, it is hard to imagine a time when man didn’t run against another – man, woman, or beast.
Indeed, many evolutionary biologists and anthropologists now hold that running – or racing, more or less (the distinction is present in many but not all cases) – is a big section of the reason behind how we became human to start with.
These thinkers and researchers believe it was the potential to run, run after prey and therefore in a sense to race against them, that granted us to get the meat which lead to the growth of the human brain.
It is believed that the urge to run is an innate one.
Along with our capability to sweat, racing after prey allowed the otherwise physically unremarkable speices that we are to procure enough protein to evolve ever larger cranial capacities.
Just look at kids, and how they will naturally run after one another.
As scientists have long identified, playtime behavior has evolutionary roots.
Among humans, the most notable aspect of many of our simplest physical pastimes involves running, giving chase.
We are nowhere near to the fastest animals on the planet, to be sure, but there appears to be none that can match our stamina and capacity to keep running.
Certainly, there is no evolutionary reason for the ability to sweat other than to run long distances.
Before the development of projectile weapons such as slingshots, boomerangs, and bows and arrows, human beings hunted by merely running down their prey, running them to exhaustion, literally running them to death.
For not being able to sweat meant that they had to stop in order to cool down, providing, in time, the perfect opportunity for human beings to close in for the kill.