by John Fox
Where I saw the rudimentary foundations of sport, Stan sees the development and maintenance of flexible problem-solving skills that dolphins depend on in the wild. His observations of Ivan, Largo, and other captive dolphins lead him to believe that they use play to continuously test and challenge themselves, constantly tweaking the “rules” to sharpen their cognitive skills. He uses Piaget’s concept of “moderately discrepant events” to describe this phenomenon. Dolphins, like Piaget’s child subjects, learn about their world and expand their physical and cognitive abilities by slightly modifying the rules of their play to make them incrementally more stimulating. This is how both dolphins and humans play and learn.
The evolving poolside ball game was serving as what Marc Bekoff calls “brain food” for Ivan, Largo, and their friends. The dolphins, responding to my cues and initiating variations in play themselves, were flexing their cognitive muscles, perfecting motor skills, and manipulating their watery environment in ways that could eventually be put to the test in the wild.
It’s hardly a coincidence that the object at the center of all the pool action was a ball. According to Stan, balls are the hands-down favorite toy of dolphins, as they so often are for people. In a controlled study of the play behaviors of 16 captive dolphins conducted over a five-year period, he found that they were far more likely to initiate spontaneous play with balls than with other objects, with bubbles, or even with each other. Why balls?
Well, if play is brain food, then ball play is like a high-protein, calorie-packed energy bar. The ball may be one of the most animate of inanimate objects in our material world. As I watched Largo and Ivan laugh and splash and leap after their colorful ball while the other dolphins dragged mats and ropes around the pool, I coined my own term to describe balls as objects: kinetically interesting. Balls can bounce, roll, be struck, thrown and caught fairly easily at a wide range of speeds. They are highly aerodynamic and yet unpredictable in their trajectory, capable in the hands of a deft knuckleball pitcher of appearing to defy the laws of physics.
Balls are also by nature social tools. They draw animals and humans together, inviting either cooperation or competition or, as in most sports, some dynamic combination of the two. “I throw or kick to you, you throw or kick it back” is very different than “you grab the ball and try to keep it from me.” But both involve tacit agreement around the rules of fair play. Vanessa Woods, a researcher with the Hominoid Psychology Research Group, spent time playing with bonobo chimpanzees in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and experienced both responses.
“We were looking at the social dimensions of bonobo tool use,” she told me. “We had this bright pink ball that the chimps just loved. The question we asked was, were they just going to steal it and run away? Or would they get the idea that this is a shared experience and now we’re going to play together. So the big test was if we threw the ball to them, would they throw it back?”
Some of the bonobos just ran off with the prized possession and didn’t get the social part of it at all. “For them, it was the equivalent of throwing a Wii to a group of kids,” Vanessa said. “They’d fight over it and whoever got it first would run off with it.” I paused to contemplate such a scene with Aidan and his friends and instantly got the distinction.
Two of the bonobos in the research group took to the game right away. One chimp threw the ball back with his hands, then with his feet, and then experimented with other throws. He’d then clap his hands and wait for it to be thrown back.
“When the experiment was done,” Vanessa said, “he’d throw a tantrum like a kid would do: he’d tug at your arm, make all kinds of noise, and would try slapping the ball out of your hands even.”
Animals that depend on learning for survival all play. It’s how knowledge and experience are passed from parent to child, enabling a safe space where limits can be tested and new ideas and innovations can get a dry run. “In a dangerous world,” wrote Diane Ackerman, “where dramas change daily, survival belongs to the agile, not the idle.”
At the pool, the head trainer reluctantly interrupted our game. Vixen, Largo, and friends had a performance coming up and needed a break from the action. We gathered up all the toys and assembled them back on the rack. The dolphins got agitated, slapping the water with their fins, as though disappointed at the fun ending—“continuation desire” at work. Vixen rested her head sullenly on the side of the pool and looked instantly bored as we headed out front to find seats in the rapidly filling stadium. Ten minutes later, throbbing rock music signaled the start of the show. The dolphins swam in and were soon jumping through hoops, doing synchronized tail slaps, leaping and landing in unison, sending huge waves of water into the front row and soaking delighted audience members. Their eyes were then covered to show off their ability to use echolocation to find and retrieve several tossed rings. After each trick, the trainers shoveled a handful of herring into the dolphins’ mouths. They seemed to be enjoying themselves as they hungrily devoured the fish and showed off their skills to the cheering audience. It was a great show, and exhilarating to watch. Yes, it was regimented, rehearsed, rewarded, and therefore entirely different than our backstage games. The equivalent, you might say, of a Little League championship versus a pickup game with friends.
As they did their tricks and earned their dinner, their secret was safe with me: herring or no, they’d be playing just as hard.
So when did we put it all together? Who first spoke those magical words “Play ball”? In what language were they uttered? Or were balls kicked and rolled and thrown for fun and competition long before there were even words to describe the rules or capture the play-by-play?
Since the drive to play and even to invent rudimentary games is undeniably pre-human, it is almost certain that our earliest hominid ancestors were capable of it on some level. It is also likely that it was in part through play, through testing our limits and innovating solutions, that we adapted to changing environments and evolved into our modern form. For this reason, Huizinga believed that Homo ludens, Man the Player, deserves his due alongside Homo sapiens, Man the Thinker. We play, therefore we are.
Until recently, however, the common wisdom was that play was purely an act of leisure (leisure being the opposite of work) and therefore an invention of civilization. The lives of our earliest ancestors and, by extension, of contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes were seen as an all-out grind from sunrise to sunset. Every ounce of expendable energy went into bagging the next deer, or gathering wild vegetables, or defending against predators, leaving no reserves for anything as frivolous as the playing of games (or, for that matter, arts, science, etc.). This is a compelling story that makes our great march toward civilization feel satisfyingly linear, virtuous, and inevitable. As we evolved, we not only got smarter but also had more fun. But it turns out not to be true.
In the 1960s, anthropologist Richard Lee spent time among the !Kung bushmen of Africa’s Kalahari Desert and found that their hunter-gatherer lifestyle wasn’t the “precarious and arduous struggle for existence” we all imagined it to be. !Kung women, who—big shocker—worked harder than the men, could gather enough food in one day to feed their families for three, spending the rest of their time resting, visiting neighbors, entertaining—enjoying some measure of leisure, in other words. Their husbands, meanwhile, had it even better. It turns out that hunters, as the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins famously put it, “keep bankers’ hours.”
The Australian Aborigines present the perfect example of a leisure-rich hunter-gatherer culture that historically played a wide variety of sports, including ball games. A diverse collection of groups that once spoke as many as 300 distinct languages, the Aborigines have traditionally been hunter-gatherers who traveled in small bands, had no agriculture, and employed simple stone tool technology that remained largely unchanged over their 40,000-year history. But they played ball.
The Aborigines of western Victoria played a football-like game called marn grook that involved upwar
d of 50 men playing across a large open stretch of land. Accounts from the 1920s and earlier describe a contest between clans or totem groups (the “white cockatoos” versus the “black cockatoos,” for example) that involved punting and catching a stuffed ball made from grass and beeswax, opossum pelt, or, in some cases, the scrotum of a kangaroo.
The rules of the game were not well understood by those white men who recorded it, but this account gives an idea:
A ball, similar to the one used in cricket but made of grass tied up tightly with string and then covered with beeswax, is used for the game, where men of different moieties took sides as in football, and the game was started by kicking the ball into the air. Once kicked off, however, the hands could not touch the ball again, only the feet were used for this purpose, and the side who kept it in the air and away from the others were looked upon as the winners.
The winner, in some cases, earned the honor of burying the ball in the ground until it was unearthed for the next game.
On the other side of the world, the Copper Inuit are a hunting society in the Canadian Arctic that subsist on seal, fish, and, in the spring, caribou. When the ice melts in the spring and summer months they are also known to play their own variation of football, called akraurak. As described by the anthropologist Kendall Blanchard, the game is played with a seal-hide ball stuffed with hair, feathers, moss, or whalebone. Goals are set up on the snow and teams must kick the ball up and down the field and drive it across the opponent’s goal line. This game is so important within the culture that the Inuit refer to the northern lights, or aurora borealis, as arsarnerit, meaning “the football players.”
Where in most cultures—ancient and modern—balls have been fashioned from animal skins, in some the animal itself is the ball (or, you could say, the game is the game). In buzkashi (“goat grabbing”), a team sport still played on horseback among the herding people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and neighboring parts of Central Asia, players attempt to grab the headless, disemboweled, sand-filled carcass of a goat from the ground and throw it toward a goal. This ancient game may hint at the early roots of ball games and is made all the more challenging by opponents who use all manner of force, including fists and whips, to keep a rider from successfully scoring a goal. Buzkashi achieved brief fame (or embarrassment) in the 1988 film Rambo III. In one scene, a mullet-wearing Sylvester Stallone is helping the mujahideen rebels battle their evil Soviet invaders. He is invited to join a game and prove his manhood. A profound dialogue ensues:
RAMBO: “What are the rules?”
MUJAHIDEEN: “Well, you have to take the sheep, go once around, and then throw it in the circle.”
RAMBO: “Why?”
MUJAHIDEEN: “Because there is a circle there.”
RAMBO: “That’s it?”
MUJAHIDEEN: “That’s it. Very simple.”
RAMBO: “Like football.”
Rambo, of course, gets the goat.
That competitive sports and ball games should be as common among hunter-gatherer and so-called primitive societies as they are in agricultural ones makes a great deal of sense. The physical dexterity, cognitive, and visual-spatial skills that ball games help develop are more elemental and essential for a hunter-gatherer than they are for a farmer or, say, a briefcase-carrying corporate attorney. Hunting was the original game, where the stakes were life or death and the competition for scarce resources fierce and relentless. For our early protein-hungry ancestors, the object was simple: chase down and kill your prey (“game”) before it could run off or get nabbed by a smarter or faster competitor. If you think about it, the Paleolithic hunter’s toolkit contained in its most primitive form all the basic types of equipment—stones, spears, clubs, nets—that you’d need to open a basic sporting goods store.
What if we owe our present status as walking, talking, large-brained alpha primates in part to our unique ability to throw a scorching fastball? That’s what evolutionary biologist William Calvin of the University of Washington proposed in an essay from his book The Throwing Madonna. Calvin argues that our premodern ancestors may have accomplished more with their one-armed rock throws than simply braining small animals. The motion itself may have promoted the first lateralization of a function to the left brain, a spark that set in motion the development of language, tool use, and much more. Lateralization means that certain neural functions occur more in one side of the brain than the other. So how might this have worked? Here’s how Calvin arrives at his theory.
Most animals can’t throw to save their lives, especially since so few are capable of standing on two feet for more than a minute or so. Chimpanzees, our nearest relatives, are among the best, but even they don’t have a good enough arm to make my son’s old T-ball team. Sure, they can heave a large rock to crack open a dead monkey’s skull and extract the brains. But if the monkey were alive, the chimp’s only recourse would be to chase it down, which consumes a lot of energy and is pointless if the monkey’s faster. Once we got bipedal, however, humans figured out that rather than go on a wild monkey chase they could pick up a small rock, throw it hard and far with one hand, and have a better chance of hitting pay dirt while conserving energy in the process. Also, if the prey was the kind that might fight back, throwing rocks offered the safety of distance. This unique ability would have conferred a tangible advantage to our ancestors, the kind that evolution might have rewarded and selected to continue and propagate.
So what? Now you’ve got a not-so-smart, mostly upright, well-fed primate with a killer fastball and reproductive advantage. Add a lump of chaw and you’ve got your average major-league baseball pitcher! (Only kidding!) But this is where Calvin’s theory gets interesting. Throwing requires some pretty sophisticated rapid muscle sequencing, a function that in humans takes place in the left brain. That’s why, as Calvin recounts, patients with left-hemisphere strokes have a hard time completing the sequence of activities needed to, for example, unlock and open a door. The other function that’s been lateralized to our left brain is language, which is itself dependent on muscle sequencing.
Is it really possible that language, that most human of human traits, might partially owe its existence to our ability to nail a rabbit from 50 feet? Calvin thinks so. Unlike other proposed causes, such as tool use or the discovery of fire, for example, throwing offers immediate return on investment. You kill that rabbit quicker, easier, and with less energy and exposure to risk than your competitors, and you and your offspring’s odds of survival start looking really good. Not in a few years or generations, but immediately.
Now, anything that might improve the speed and precision of that throw would be beneficial to survival. Such as a larger brain. With just a handful of neurons, our caveman-pitcher might find himself throwing everywhere but the strike zone. But more neurons can boost precision exponentially. Meaning a bigger brain would have drastically improved our ancestors’ ERA. That larger brain would have come in handy for inventing tools, refining stone technology, and developing fire. Fire allowed food to be cooked, which meant we could extract more calories and energy from fibrous fruits and raw meat, which fed our growing brain even more—a virtuous cycle if ever there was one.
Whether rock throwing had an influence on human evolution is certainly up for debate. No one will ever fully know the answer. But it’s easy to see from the picture Calvin paints how an action as seemingly trivial and mundane as playing catch with a ball might trace its evolutionary path back to something much more fundamental to our existence.
Hypothesis and speculation on the beginnings of sports don’t give way to historical fact until the third millennium BC, when the first written descriptions and depictions of ball games appear in the Near East and Egypt. The Upper Paleolithic cave paintings of Europe and Africa say little about the day-to-day lives of the artists who drew them, focusing instead on their animal prey. Archaeology of this period yields little more than stone, bone, and soil.
The game of ephedrismos as depicted on a Classical Greek vase.
When the ball finally enters history, it arrives as a bizarre and homoerotic form of polo played from the backs not of horses, but of humans. The account of this strange sport is found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the first works of literature ever written. It was carved into cuneiform tablets around 2600 BC, while the Mesopotamian hero-king Gilgamesh was the ruler of Uruk, an ancient city in what is now southern Iraq. Regarded as two-thirds god and one-third man, Gilgamesh goes to impressive lengths to oppress Uruk’s citizens. He exhausts, for instance, the city’s young men with games of polo so he can exhaust their wives without distraction.
[His] comrades are roused up with his ball(game), the young men of Uruk are continually disturbed in their bedrooms (with a summons to play).
Gilgamesh then takes the men out to humiliate them in the public square:
He [Gilgamesh] who had very much wanted a ball was playing with the ball in the public square. . . . He was mounted on the hips of a group of widow’s sons.
“Alas, my neck! Alas my hips!” they lament.
Though it might be reassuring to think of this game of people polo as just an anomalous perversion of sport—like, say, trampoline basketball or zorbing—the game actually seems to have had a serious fan base in the ancient world. A similar game crops up a few hundred years later in Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, this time played girl-on-girl. In one rock-cut tomb in the cemetery of Beni Hasan, a painted scene of daily Egyptian life shows two pairs of girls, one girl astride the other, throwing balls back and forth. The ancient Greeks played it as well and gave it a name, ephedrismos (from the Greek verb “to sit upon”). Scenes of both women and men playing the game appear on painted jars, terra-cotta figurines, and life-size statues of the Classical period. On a vase in the collections of the Ashmolean Museum, a bearded man with a cane prepares to throw the ball to three pairs of mounted young men. The graffiti-like inscription that appears next to the thrower might as well be a speech bubble. It reads, simply, “Give the word.”