Humans are natural runners—and this ancient gene mutation might have helped. Your muscles are ready to run, whether you like it or not.

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This woman looks too happy to be in so much pain!
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▼ Your cells are ready to run a marathon, even if you’re not. Every cell in the human body is carrying a mutation that might help optimize our muscles for running long distances, according to some recent research.
One of the oldest known genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees may have helped ancient hominids—and now modern humans—excel at running long distances. To understand how the mutation works, scientists examined the muscles of mice that were genetically engineered to have the mutation. In the rodents, having the mutation boosted oxygen levels to working muscles, increasing endurance and reducing overall muscle fatigue. The researchers surmise the mutation could be working similarly in humans. The results were published this week in Proceedings of the Royal Academy B.
Many physiological adaptations help make humans adept at long-distance running—the evolution of long legs, the ability to sweat, and our loss of fur all helped increase our endurance. With this new finding, researchers believe they’ve “found the first molecular basis for this unusual change in humans,” says Ajit Varki, a physician researcher in cellular and molecular medicine at University of California San Diego (UCSD) and lead author of the study.
The CMP-Neu5Ac Hydroxylase(CMAH, for short) gene mutated in our ancestors about two or three million years ago, when hominids were starting to leave the forest to forage and hunt across the expansive savannah. It’s one of the earliest genetic differences we know about between modern humans and chimpanzees, says Varki. Over the last 20 years, Varki and his research team have used mice to connect the mutation to other impacts on the human body as well, including more severe symptoms of muscular dystrophyand inflammation that can increase cancer risk from eating red meat.
“There have been a lot of genes identified relevant to running,” says Daniel Lieberman, a paleoanthropologist at Harvard who was not involved in the study and has extensively researched human evolution and running. “But this is the first gene that I know of that pinpoints a derived feature, a novel feature, that appears about the time we have fossil evidence for running.” (▪ ▪ ▪)

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