The story of The Tortoise and the Hare has been interpreted in a few different ways. There is the standard "slow and steady wins the race", the moralistic "'many people have good natural abilities which are ruined by idleness; on the other hand, sobriety, zeal and perseverance can prevail over indolence" (Source:wiki) and others. But I think there may have been a more practical lesson which was lost through time. Aesop lived around 600 B.C., and at least some of the fables he told are speculated to be a collection of even older, oral tradition stories. So the story likely originated in a culture in which hunting was the primary source of food. Which leads me to this hypothesis: the story was actually about how a human can hunt game which runs much faster than a man, a practice called "persistence hunting" (Source:wiki). Unlike many animals, humans have the ability to sweat, and our relative hairlessness makes us effective at thermoregulation. Using this technique, a human can even hunt down a cheetah, slowly and steadily (like the tortoise) stalking an animal which much periodically stop to rest (like the hare) or it will overheat. This seems to me to be a much more valuable lesson to early people, a lesson which would be worthy to pass on through fable. My conclusion: this is not a story teaching moral fortitude, or how to win a foot race, but one which teaches a survival skill. Thoughts? I am not a historian, so I may be way off on this one, but the idea seems sound.
