And afterwards decide whether to ride it, paint a picture of it, worship it, or eat it

In my blog post Recognizing objects in difficult situations means generalizing , I quoted Nate Silver in The Noise and the Signal.

Human beings do not have very many natural defenses. We are not all that fast, and we are not all that strong. We do not have claws or fangs or body armor. We cannot spit venom. We cannot camouflage ourselves. And we cannot fly. Instead, we have to survive by means of our wits. Our minds are quick. We are wired to detect patterns and respond to opportunities and threats without much hesitation.

Peter Farb in Humankind has a more generous assessment of our physical capabilities. He starts by observing that

Perhaps a total of 100 billion humans have walked the planet since the appearance of the earliest hominids. Of these, about six percent have been agriculturalists, fewer than four percent have lived in industrialized societies, and all the rest - approximately ninety per cent - have lived as hunters and gatherers.

He then elaborates what this heritage has meant for us.

Humans have evolved physically as organisms adapted to hunting wild game and gathering wild plants - an existence that demands versatility, endurance, and strength. Of all living things, only a human is capable of swimming a mile, then walking twenty miles more - scampering over boulders along the way - and finally climbing a tree. Humans about equal chimpanzees in the capacity to pull loads, and pound for pound they are superior to the donkey in toting heavy weights on their backs (as witness the Sherpas of the Himalayas). Many mammals can run faster than humans, but they lack the humans' great endurance. Probably no other mammal can equal the stamina and the sustained speed of the marathon runner, who averages about twelve miles per hour over a course of 26 miles. Nor does any other species equal the human ability to adapt physiologically to the stresses of diverse environments: very high and very low altitudes, extremely hot and extremely cold climates, the virtually sunless floor of tropical forests and the sun-baked desert. Each of these environments yields strikingly different plant and animal foods, yet the human digestive system has no difficulty in coping with any or all of them. And added to this remarkable physical flexibility is a quickness to learn, a superior memory, and the gift for creative thought. A human is thus the only animal that can run down a horse or an antelope simply by tiring it over a period of days - and afterwards decide whether to ride it, paint a picture of it, worship it, or eat it.