Manthropology
Page 11
Are the reproductive consequences of male violence as positive in Homo sapiens? The terrifying Mongols, once more, give us devastating proof that they are. It was their Khan, Genghis, after all, who said, “Man’s greatest joy is to slay his enemy, plunder his riches, ride his steeds, see the tears of his loved ones, and embrace his women.” The evidence, too, is that Genghis was not backward in embracing his embracing opportunities: a 2003 genetic research project on men living in the lands of the former Mongol empire found 8 percent of them carry identical Y-chromosomes—since Y-chromosomes are passed from father to son unchanged, this means sixteen million Eurasian men are direct descendants of Genghis and his close male relatives! On a smaller scale, many a Greek and Roman soldier emulated these feats in the inevitable rape orgies that followed conquest of an enemy city (Agamemnon, in the Iliad, tells his Greek troops, “let there be no scramble to get home, then, till every man of you has slept with a Trojan wife”). The reproductive pay-off of male violence is also explicit among the headhunting cultures of pre-colonial Borneo, in which a man was not allowed to marry until he had taken a head (and might then present it as his bridal gift).
A frequent criticism of the sexually driven theory of male violence has, however, been that no evidence exists of specific genes for aggression. In fact, though, this is no longer true. In the early 1990s scientists discovered that male mice carrying mutations in a gene sequence called MAOA displayed excessive circulating neurotransmitters, such as serotonin, in their brains, resulting in extreme aggression. The same mutation was soon also identified in humans—first in the males of one particular Dutch family who all displayed similarly high levels of impulsive aggression.52 A later back-up study on antisocial children found that the gene variant was, in fact, reasonably widespread, and could be used to predict whether abused children would go on to develop aggressive, antisocial personality disorders.53 Interestingly, a 2000 research project then found high levels of this genetic complex in Macaque monkeys, too: the most widespread genus of primates worldwide after humans.54 It seems a remarkable coincidence, as the authors pointed out, that the two primates with the highest levels of this aggressive “warrior gene” have been the most successful of all ape and monkey colonizers.
This doesn’t, of course, prove that all male aggression is controlled by this particular gene. It does, however, show a mechanism by which aggression can be, and probably is, regulated by natural selection.
That being the case, what is the evolutionary significance of the decline in the fighting ability of modern males, as documented here? Has there been a genetic change to the fighting heart of Homo masculinus modernus? So far, I think, probably not. The fact that modern men no longer go toe-to-toe in revenge-driven death matches has more to do with the fact that we have surrendered our right to take bloody revenge to the state, which now punishes our enemies for us (or indeed, us for them, depending on the degree to which we give in to our instinctual aggression). This cultural change has, however, upended the selective landscape. As in all matters BRAWN and BRAVADO, our BATTLE instincts are more likely to eliminate us from the gene pool these days than to have us sweep its reproductive stakes. Does that mean we have doomed Homo masculinus modernus to an ever-feebler future? Will hotheaded young duelists, instead of firing at ten paces, start bitch-slapping one another over matters of mortal honor—retiring to the nearest hospital at the first sign of a broken nail? A long-term experiment in breeding silver foxes at Novosibirsk in Siberia seems to indicate yes: researchers there were able to breed heritable aggression completely out of their foxes within forty years.55
Yet several things may save modern males from this fate. Our increasing ability to tailor drug treatments to specific genetic conditions, for example, will probably allow those human males who bear the MAOA mutation to regulate their brain serotonin levels, thereby saving them (and their genes) from the potentially fatal consequences of their impulsive aggression. Then there is the awkward yet incontrovertible fact—so distressing to those fathers whose teenage daughters fall head-over-heels for sociopathic, wife-beater-in-waiting young punks—that women are somewhat sexually attracted to aggression in men. A 1987 study of female university students, for example, found that almost all rated dominant males (who employed aggression as a strategy in achieving their dominance) as significantly more attractive than non-dominant men (even though the women also expressed strong distaste for the aggression itself).56 But we don’t need to just take the word of these obscure eggheads and their love-struck human lab rats for it. No less an authority than Tony Soprano, the TV mafioso, confirmed it by reproaching his wife, Carmela, for her hypocrisy in claiming she didn’t care that he had just lost a fight to underling Bobby, reminding her of their young days:
You were there, in the crowd in the parking lot that night at Pizza World when I took Dominic Tedesco. I didn’t even know your name, but I remember our eyes met. And you were blown away.57
With female mate preferences like these in operation it is unlikely that male aggression will disappear from the gene pool any time soon. Then there are the surprising ways in which pathological aggression can be turned to both the individual’s and society’s advantage in the modern world. Several studies have found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that criminal bombers exhibit physiological characteristics in common with psychopaths, among them pathologically low heart rates (indicating very high thresholds for response to stress). More surprising is that so, too, do the most successful bomb-disposal experts.58 No studies of the relative reproductive rates of criminal bombers and bomb-disposal experts have, as far as I know, been done, but this does at least add one more piece of evidence that male aggression in the modern world—and the qualities associated with it (in this case, an extraordinarily pathologically steady hand) need not be a one-way ticket to genetic oblivion.
Another way, of course, that we modern men can turn what aggression we still have into chick-pulling, gene-propagating success is through sports. Many sociologists, in fact, claim the reason we males have become so docile is that all our violence now goes into that form of ritualized combat. Some even insist the rise of sport explains the civilizing process of the past two hundred years. It’s an intriguing theory, but considering the degree of violence and aggression we’ve witnessed in our forebears, it would seem to require modern male sport to be better, faster, stronger, and harder than sports in history ever were. Is there any evidence that they are?
Hmm. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
Balls
On February 16, 2004, those spectators crammed into Vancouver’s hockey stadium, “The Garage,” witnessed one of the most violent incidents to ever blight the sport of ice hockey when power forward Todd Bertuzzi stunned opponent Steve Moore with a roundhouse sucker-punch then drove him headfirst into the ice. When Moore left that ice ten minutes later, it was on a stretcher and for the last time: his three fractured vertebrae terminated his career as brutally as Moore himself had concussed Bertuzzi’s captain, Markus Näslund, weeks earlier with a shoulder-charge. The incident focused attention, yet again, on violence in the Canadian and U.S. National Hockey League, or NHL—the only professional sporting league to have rules permitting fighting (combatants are not ejected, but simply required to drop sticks and gloves and slug it out bare-knuckled). Loud calls from school boards and medical bodies to ban brawling in the league followed, to no avail. Just three years later, Philadelphia Flyers “enforcer” (a semi-official team position whose duties include physically attacking opponents) Todd Fedoruk was laid flat by his New York Rangers counterpart, Colton Orr. Fedoruk, whose skull had already been reconstructed that season with titanium plates, was likewise stretchered off (though unlike Moore he was later able to return). Nothing had changed, nor has it since.
There is a simple reason for the NHL’s foot-dragging on the issue of violence, though: the fans. As the league well knows, many spectators attend hockey games specifically for the fights. A 2003 study published in the American Journ
al of Economics and Sociology proved this by demonstrating that the number of fights per NHL game is the best predictor of ticket sales—far outstripping even the number of goals or wins. While the connection is notable in Canada, it is particularly marked for games played in the United States.1
Another thrilling spectacle of American sporting violence is the National Football League, or NFL. Here, though, the violence arises not from on-field fights but from the brutal nature of the sport itself. Game stats tell the story—by the third-to-last week in the 2008 season, 1 in 15 NHL players had been forced out through injury. In any given year these injuries might include: fractured skulls and other bones, concussions, snapped collarbones, torn rotator cuffs, shoulder dislocations, fused vertebrae, and shredded tendons and ligaments. Most of these injuries come from high-energy collisions with other players: one physicist calculated that a pair of 245-pound NFL linemen crashing into each other at 18 miles per hour would generate enough force to shift a 30-ton mass by an inch.2 Tests on one Detroit linebacker, similarly, showed he was frequently hit by blows measuring 5,780 Gs (astronauts, by contrast, experience about 10 Gs during blast-off). The long-term effects of this abuse are why three-quarters of former NFL players report permanent disabilities from their playing careers.3 Some don’t even make it to old age—118 American university football players died playing the game in the 21 years from 1977 to 1998.4 The cause of these heavy hits and their resulting injuries isn’t hard to find: it’s the increasing size of the players. One anthropologist, for example, calculated that the average height and weight of university football players increased by 2.6 inches and 35 pounds between 1899 and 1970. Since then the trend has gone stratospheric—the average player weight increased by another 24 pounds between 1985 and 2008, and the league now includes more than 500 linemen who top out at over 300 pounds.
It is gladiatorial contests such as hockey and football that give modern sport its reputation for rising violence. At a superficial level, this seems to confirm the idea that brutal athletic contests are both the reservoir of modern-male aggression and the reason it is disappearing from other areas of masculine life. Yet is it really true that sport wasn’t as aggressive in the ancient past? As it happens, a direct comparison is possible, since football and hockey happen to be two of the oldest sports played on Earth. Some form of these two games (sometimes both) has been played almost everywhere for thousands of years (John Davis, the first English explorer to search for the Northwest Passage through the Arctic ice, was amazed on his 1586 expedition to be challenged to a game of football by the Inuit tribesmen he encountered). If modern sport really does act to civilize by soaking up excess male aggression, it should follow that football and hockey in ancient times were less violent and strenuous than their modern counterparts.
The bad news, though (for proponents of the theory, at any rate), is that ancient and prehistoric footballers and puckmen actually played their games long, hard, and incredibly brutally.
Hockey in Europe, for example, seems to have been a violent game from its very inception. One of the earliest types of hockey played there was Irish hurling, a stick-and-ball sport still played today. The very first recorded hurling match, between the Fir Bolg and Tuatha Dé Danann tribes in 1272 BCE, saw stick-blows rained upon the losing Tuatha Dé Danann “till their bones were broken and bruised and they fell outstretched on the turf.”5 To consummate their victory, the Fir Bolg players promptly slew the Tuatha Dé Danann team. Observations by the English man of letters John Dunton in seventeenth-century Dublin show that Irish hurling hadn’t grown much gentler in the intervening three thousand years—he reported that players rarely left the field without “the broken heads or shins in which they glory so much.”6 Other forms of stick games, such as the Icelandic game of knattleikr, seem to have been even more murderous. One Viking saga records a knattleikr game in which “before dusk, six of the Strand players lay dead, though none on the Botn side.” Egil’s Saga, similarly, describes the young Egil’s axe-killing of an opponent on the knattleikr pitch in revenge for rough treatment during play—seven others died in the subsequent pitch invasion.7 Incredibly, given this level of aggression, some knattleikr games reportedly lasted fourteen days.
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Sods and clods
Quite apart from the deadly Old Icelandic game of knattleikr, Viking sport, it seems, was not for the faint-hearted. Horses, for example, provided excellent recreation for ancient Scandinavian sportsmen—but not in races, in fights. In the popular sport of horse fighting, Viking men goaded their stallions into attacking an opponent’s steed, usually as a prelude to the humans’ direct exchange of blows. In one famous horse fight, a Viking named Odd had his ribs broken by the deliberately misaimed prodding of the staff of his enemy, Grettir. Brawling seems to have also accompanied the uniquely Viking sport of “turf throwing.” This was something like a snowball fight, only with clods of earth thrown so hard that they often knocked their targets off their feet, unconscious. In one case, recorded in Eyrbyggja’s Saga, the downing of one man with a well-placed clod resulted in a gang brawl between his teammates and the men of Eyrr, most of whom ended up joining him, injured, on the ground. Turf throwing probably holds the title of the most brutal catching sport in all history, at least until the invention of high-school dodgeball.
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Ancient hockey-like games in the New World were, apparently, no less violent. One Choctaw/Creek Indian lacrosse game witnessed by American settlers in the early 1790s, for instance, resulted in over five hundred deaths, mostly in the post-match fighting.8 These casualty figures might seem unbelievably high, were it not for the fact that Native American lacrosse games often (according to colonial-era American painter George Catlin) involved five hundred players a side and were played on a field almost two miles in length. Baron de Lahontan, the seventeenth-century French commander of Fort St. Joseph in the Huron tribe’s country, similarly remarked that lacrosse there was “so violent that they [the Hurons] tear their skins and break their legs very often.”9 Other sources state that blows from lacrosse sticks and hard stone or wooden balls left large blood clots and hematomas that had to be lanced by medicine men using a special deer-horn sucking cup. Such injuries seem only too understandable, given that almost every foul in modern hockey and lacrosse—tackling, wrestling, tripping, charging, and striking—was permitted in Native American lacrosse. Some tribes, for instance, specialized in tackling by the hair. The Cayuga, similarly, liked to lift opponents off the ground with their sticks and dump them (a move that partly explains the frequency of shattered collarbones noted by early European observers). Cherokee players favored straight-out choking of their opponents, though this brutal strategy was, admittedly, often pursued simply to make opponents disgorge balls they had hidden in their mouths (a legitimate move in Native American lacrosse). Fighting, as in modern ice hockey, was explicitly encouraged by rules such as the one allowing strikes with the stick, providing it was held two-handed. Native American lacrosse was still a violent sport as late as 1845, when a game involving the Choctaw Tallulah Indians resulted in three deaths (caused by deliberately stampeding horses onto the field) and injuries so severe some players were unable to leave the ground until they had recovered nine days later.
Returning to Europe, football in the medieval West may well have been played by much smaller players than today’s NFL players, but its violence would clearly have sent our hulking linebackers scurrying for the safety of the injury list. Called various names across Europe—la soule in France, Shrovetide football in Middle England, camping in Norfolk and East Anglia, and cnappan in Wales—the game resembled modern football in that it was commonly played with an inflatable ball (though often, in this case, an inflatable pig’s bladder sewn into a bull’s scrotum; it was also sometimes sheathed in tin to stop losing teams knifing it). That, though, is where the resemblance ends. Medieval football involved teams of several hundred, since it called for one village’s menfolk to drive the ball through an opposing
village’s territory into the town square or church, which served as goal. Play was a riotous affair, with fists, cudgels, and even horses employed freely. Chronicles of the time testify to the violence of the sport. One sixteenth-century scholar, Sir Thomas Elyot, described “foote balle” as a game “wherin is nothinge but beastly furie and exstreme violence; wherof procedeth hurte, and consequently rancour and malice do remaine with them that be wounded.”10 An anonymous sixteenth-century tract in Old Scots, similarly, claimed that bruises, broken bones, blows, and crippling in old age were among “the bewties of fute ball.”11 Such injuries seem, once more, eminently understandable given the only rules in medieval football were apparently those prohibiting murder and the use of weapons.
Not, it seems, that they succeeded in eliminating either.
In 1280 ce, and again in 1312 ce, for instance, two players died in collisions with opponents wearing sheathed knives (one of the killers being a football-playing priest). But medieval soccer could be lethal even without such weaponry. A Middlesex coroner’s inquest in 1581 ce, to illustrate, recorded the case of Nicholas Martyn and Richard Turvey, who both simultaneously “struck Roger Ludford…under the breast, giving him a mortal blow and concussion of which he died within a quarter of an hour.”12 In 1303 CE an Oxford University student, similarly, found his brother dead after a football game played in the High Street with some Irish students; this time the cause of death was not reported. This lethal violence was not confined to the distant past, either: author William Dutt reports that a match held on Diss Common between Norfolk and Suffolk in the mid-eighteenth century resulted in nine deaths. Perhaps the ultimate proof of the rambunctious but popular violence of medieval football, though, was how often English monarchs and government officials sought, unsuccessfully, to ban it: thirty times between 1314 CE and 1667 CE.