>>...taking down prey by running them to exhaustion has led to humans’ own abilities to run long distances — by increasing humans’ ability to sweat, ...
Also better matching mitochondrial and nuclear genomes from selection pressure for better aerobic performance - which might explain human longevity (longer than would be predicted by body mass and metabolic rate - similar to animals that can fly e.g. pigeons/bats live about 10x as long as mice/rats).
Lucy is evidence that bipedalism came long before increased cranial capacity so there's certainly a long enough period for evolution to have had an effect if that bipedalism had to do with chasing down prey. Mitochondrial 'Eve' lived about 200K years ago, long after Lucy (3ish million years ago) so mitochondrial DNA was certainly in flux.
I've gotten interested in mitochondria of late so I have a tendency to see a lot of evolution through that lens (if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail). And I've noticed that a lot of evolutionary biologists seem to not be accounting for the interplay between the two genomes each eucariotic cell has...