Power Animals, Caveman, Bear Feet and Bare Foot Running

It all went rather wrong after I had done some sports visualization called Self Hypnosis and Cognitive Sports Psychology that I had read about in a running mag where you focus on being like a specific animal. I thought. "Well a horse runs rather well - I will focus on that". If you imagine the Leonardo drawing as a human leg then you can see where I was coming from.

Basically what I’m getting at is the horse runs on a finger, with the metatarsal stretched out as a limb and the Talus acts as a joint. Horses don’t get shinsplints and plantar fasciitis and they don’t wear cushioned trainers. With this in mind I started to run more on my toes, and then, as I started to strain my calf muscles, and got a stabbing pain in my left buttock I realized that perhaps humans aren't like horses at all.

As I limped about and tried to stretch my hamstrings on the kitchen table I thought to myself that If I couldn’t run like a horse, and I certainly couldn’t run like a cat (with those Puma Mobiums runnng shoes which are modeled on a cat’s paw) then what animal could I empathize with in such a manner? The first animal one might say is a Chimpanzee which is our closest animal cousin, and this is where it gets interesting.  
  

With which animal does the human foot share the most similarities?  

It isn’t a Chimpanzee. They have feet which have a big toe much like a thumb which enables them to manipulate objects with their feet and climb trees.

The surprising answer is a bear. I don’t think this was lost on Leonardo who did more than one study of a bear’s leg much in the fashion that he had studied human anatomy.

And this is where it gets interesting. In one of the earliest caves in which pictorial art survives, called Chauvet Cave (France), about thirty thousand years old, we find a great gallery of prehistoric art of various animals, but also there is a bear skull placed upon a fallen stalactite, and believed to have been the centre of some form of veneration. Furthermore, not only did bears at one time live in that cave, the first marks upon that clay covered wall was by a bear. The implication is that the bear and the bear claw marks inspired prehistoric man to paint at this site. At Chauvet Cave at least, the Bear and Man is somehow linked in the Prehistoric Mind.

We can further this thought by looking at the petraglyphs of the Native Americans from New Mexico, who also seem to venerate - amongst other animals - the bear. In these following photos you will see first of all carvings of the human foot followed by a carving of a bear foot.

They do not make a direct comparison of course, yet one can imagine the significance of the human foot print just as we can imagine the significance of the hand. The fact that the Native Americans also venerated the bear, just as the prehistoric hunter/gatherers who painted the cave at Chauvet did, makes me wonder whether the traditions of the Native Americans extend further back into history than we may realize, just as the Australian Aborigines do. The culture of the Australian Aborigines are thought to reach back some 50,000 yrs ago...if we apply the same time span to the Native Americans we would place them - not in their ancestral home of America - but living across the entire Eurasian continent (somewhat restricted of course by the glaciers of the ice age). With this in mind perhaps it is not strange that there is a sort of harmony between the rock of art of prehistoric Europe and that of the America.

I of course digress - but not I believe too much. Feet, foot prints and the bear foot print, and the very human act of bipedal running is all somehow linked. Horse riding after all is a relatively new invention, perhaps a few thousand years old in Europe and only a few hundred years in America. Before we rode horses we found other ways of locomotion, and our feet were our only means of travel.