Persistence hunting likely wasn't a major driver of those evolutionary changes.

The hypothesis is really only supported by the fact that we have adaptations that make it theoretically possible, but the times and places those adaptations came about doesn't really match up with the times and places it would have been effective (i.e. woodland where the ground would be too hard for effective tracking [0]).

There are some other things that point away from it, too; it's worth doing some googling.

It's certainly possible that persistence hunting happened to some degree, and it's a fun idea so it really caught on in popular consciousness, but the actual evidence is limited.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

Consider this:

Persistence hunting isn't just running 25km to catch 1 deer.

It may also involve multiple scout runs (perhaps 50km or longer) to find where the deer are after the current local deer supply is exhausted. It may also involve moving the entire tribe unit to a location 100-200km away from the current one, which would involve people less fit than tribe hunters.

> It's certainly possible that persistence hunting happened to some degree, and it's a fun idea so it really caught on in popular consciousness, but the actual evidence is limited.

Well, the problem is that evidence for just about everything related to our existence from before the glacial period ended is very limited due to a population bottleneck.

But there's no reason to assume that our ancestors did not use every tool available at their disposal to survive, one of the tools being persistence hunting, which we are still very good at, despite there not being evolutionary pressure to be selected for for the last 7-8 thousand years.