Humans have the highest capacity for endurance and for a very long time we hunted not by being smarter but by literally following animals until they got tired and gave up before we did.
Peak animal capacity right there. Imagine being so totally and entirely beyond the abilities of our contemporaries that this is considered an apex predator.
To follow an animal often required tracking it when it ran out of sight. Our sense of smell stinks, so we looked for clues on where it went. That's smart
Yeah, you're right. I should have said that our sense of smell isn't specialized for smelling other animals at a distance for tracking like many other animals can.
The thing with a lot of animals is also that they're pretty dumb.
They could potentially out walk us, it's the most energy efficient way of moving, but what they actually do is run off when they see a human, then when they no longer see the human, they take a break. At which point the human catches up. At which point they run off again. Repeat multiple times.
The human simply has to keep walking, while the animal keeps running off. If the animal instead walked, the human would never or take far longer to catch up, because the animal would tire itself far less.
If they're fit, not too tired. Humans are some of the best distance runners in the animal kingdom, and we can walk virtually forever. And we can regulate our own body temperature by sweating. And we can carry some extra food and water with us. And we are capable of being excellent trackers as well. The joke in the op is about how humans used to hunt - by chasing an animal until it collapses of exhaustion. Some tribes still do this today
A handful of millennia ago any human hunter-gatherer could run 10 marathons back to back easily, and still beat the modern world record on each to outrun a deer. The deer would collapse of exhaustion after a few minutes at 30mph. Most primitive humans ran around 28mph max. Even then, if the human resorts to stalking and stays close, the deer will be exhausted still when the human has recovered (due to our ability to sweat).
Depends on what you mean exercise. Sprinting will tire you out, but you will quickly be ready again. Walking you can do almost forever. If you have a decent amount of fat on your body, you are basically a perpetuum mobile (sleep excluded, of course). Your footwear will go before you tire.
Being upright and the ability to sweat through our skin. Most quadrupeds can only exhaust heat through panting, and their diaphragms compress when running so they can’t pant as effectively.