Persistence hunters amaze my roommates and I. We are very curious as to how, after running and tracking for HOURS, they get the giant animal back to the community.
David Attenborough narrating the hunt.
Our assumption is butchering the game on the spot and carrying the different parts back. Regardless, humans never fail to amaze me!
We, or at least I did when I first heard about this style of hunting, tend to assume persistence hunts are completely linear. Human and prey start out at point A, human follows prey who is traveling to point B, human then kills prey when the poor, tasty animal overheats.
A couple of studies used GPS devices to track persistence hunts and found there is no long-term uni-directional travel that would make carrying the game back to camp impossible. Though human and prey may travel up to 35 km, and the hunt could take over 6 hrs, the kill point is usually surprisingly close to where the hunt started (Liebenberg 2006).
Why does this happen? The animal frequently loops back on their old tracks. The GPS tracks for a persistence hunt look more like a picture a 3 year old might draw instead of a hiking trail with a determined destination. In the 2001 kudu bull hunt featured in the paper I cited above, the kill site is slightly over 1 km from where the hunt began. The hunters can easily carry their choice portions back to camp, or call in reinforcements to help with the butchering.