I guess it's not really an apt analogy. It's more like if a the challenge was to get from city A to city B in the fastest time by any means necessary. People would run it until the horse was domesticated, and then people would ride them until the motorcycle or car was invented, and so on.

That's not to say that you can't still do a foot race between A and B. It's just now you have to constrain it, it has become something different.