Like any decent scientist, David Carrier didn't set out to star in his own research.

He certainly didn't plan to be an Indiana Jones type character in a New York Times best seller.

Back in the early 1980s, when he first pondered the notion that men — and women — are the finest, most efficient runners in evolutionary history, his immediate goal was to get his doctorate in biology from the University of Utah.

To that end, he published a paper in 1984 in the scientific magazine Current Anthropology with the academic-sounding title "The Energetic Paradox of Human Running and Hominid Evolution."

What the article suggested, at its essence, was that if you placed every species on Earth at the Olympic starting line and fired the starter's pistol, the winner of the footrace, eventually, would be us.

The cheetah would take an early commanding lead, followed by antelopes, lions, leopards, tigers, rabbits, deer and so forth. Later, others would surge to the front, maybe the horse, the wildebeest, the wolf, the bear.

But let that race go long enough and we homo sapiens would ultimately prevail — the best endurance runners ever created.

"It's one of the reasons we top the food chain. Before supermarkets and food processors, before rifles and four-wheel-drives, we used to outrun our food. "Persistence hunting," Carrier called it.

Back in '84, Carrier's postulates ran into an enormous wall of indifference.

"Anthropologists basically ignored the paper," says Carrier, a longtime professor of biology at the U. "They just said, 'Humans are not good runners. Look at us.' That was that."

But Carrier persisted. A fit runner himself, he took his brother, Scott, to the Wyoming plains to chase down antelope, attempting to prove his thesis firsthand (Their chase was unsuccessful, it turned out, but that's another story).

He also attracted the attention of Dennis Bramble, one of his biology professors at the U., who took the idea of Running Man and ran with it.

It was Bramble who made the ah-ha! discovery that humans are the only animals who shed heat by sweating and are not limited to one breath per stride while running, two factors that give us a huge leg up even if the competition has four legs.

Bramble collaborated with an evolutionary anthropologist at Harvard, Dan Lieberman, and they co-wrote a paper titled "Endurance running and the evolution of Homo" that was published in Nature. That was in 2004. After 20 years, Carrier's crusade was gaining steam.