It is time to bury the nonsense of the ‘incomplete animal.’ As Julian Huxley, the eminent British biologist, once observed concerning human toughness, man is the only creature that can walk twenty miles, run two miles, swim a river, and then climb a tree. Physiologically, he has one of the toughest bodies known; no other species could survive weeks of exposure on the open sea, or in deserts, or the Arctic. Man’s superior exploits are not evidence of cultural inventions: clothing on a giraffe will not allow it to survive in Antarctica, and neither shade nor shoes will help a salamander in the Sahara. I am not speaking of living in those places permanently, but simply as a measure of the durability of men under stress.

— Paul Shepard, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, 1973