Manthropology

by Peter McAllister

  Obviously, modern hockey and football would have struck these ancient players as being about as risky as hopscotch. This is clearly difficult enough for “sport as civilizing reservoir of aggression” believers, but the theory’s problems are, I’m afraid, just beginning. A more extensive look at ancient sports, both historic and prehistoric, reveals most were so explicitly violent they’d have made even a modern illegal-dog-fight organizer blush.

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  Man bites dog

  Modern sports like horse and greyhound racing are often labeled freak shows of exploitative violence toward animals, but they couldn’t hold a candle to medieval and Victorian-era English pit sports. These basically involved anything violent that could be done to any creature in an earthen pit dug into some tavern basement or village green. Sometimes, indeed, the pit could even be dispensed with, as when the village folk of Stamford beat a bull to death in a field for sport in 1836. More normally, however, a badger might be thrown into the pit to be torn apart by fighting dogs; bears with their paws cut off might be treated the same. Fighting cocks fitted with metal spurs might eviscerate each other for the enjoyment of the crowd, while dogs specially bred for viciousness and tenacity (the original pit bulls) would similarly maul each other to death.

  An even more popular pit sport involving dogs was “ratting,” in which a terrier was thrown into a pit filled with rats and had to kill as many as he could within a given time. A record was set in 1848 by Tiny—a terrier himself so close to a rat in size that he wore a woman’s bracelet for a collar—who dispatched three hundred rodents in just fifty-four minutes.

  Such canine blood sports continued merrily until 1866, when an outcry erupted over a fight between a bulldog called Physic and a human dwarf named Brummy, held in the town of Hanley. Though Brummy won, the cruelty of the encounter was the last straw for outraged public opinion, as this report from the Daily Telegraph of the time shows:

  By the time Round 10 was concluded the bulldog’s head was swelled much beyond its accustomed size; it had lost two teeth and one of its eyes was entirely shut up; while as for the dwarf, his fists, as well as his arms, were reeking [with blood]…in Round 11 the bulldog came on fresh and foaming…but…the dwarf dealt him a tremendous blow under the chin, and with such effect that the dog was dashed against the wall, where, despite all its master could do to revive it, it continued to lie.13

  Hanley miners, incidentally, were reportedly so furious at the extinction of their favorite sport that they were still threatening the paper’s reporter, James Greenwood, with physical violence thirty years later.

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  Many ancient athletic events were, for one thing, intimately connected to war. Some, indeed, were war—such as the tournaments of the later European Middle Ages. The name conjures images of gallant knights splintering softwood lances harmlessly against one another’s armor in chivalrous charges (though the death of Henry II, King of France, in 1559 CE from a splintered lance in the eye shows jousting could be lethal). Yet jousting was actually a later, pale imitation of the real twelfth and thirteenth-century tourneys, which were brutal, bruising affairs of masses of armored men hammering each other, sometimes to death. In these melees, tourney entrants formed opposing teams, charged each other using war lances, flinging themselves on unhorsed knights with daggers, and hacked at opponents with broadswords, axes, and maces. Given the numbers involved, melees were often hard to distinguish from real war. Baldwin of Hainault, for example, took three thousand foot soldiers to one tournament for protection from his enemy, the Duke of Brabant.14 Casualties similarly confused the issue—when sixty knights died in the melee at a 1240 CE tournament in the German town of Neuss, spectators could have been forgiven for wondering how the event differed from real combat.15

  Even those ancient sports that weren’t actual war often served as training for it. Many Greeks, for example, believed that their athletic culture was the reason they had triumphed over the vast armies of the Persian kings Darius and Xerxes. As ever, of course, the most extreme examples come from the Spartan Greeks. The two main sporting events of the Spartan state were strange, violent rituals aimed at toughening their boys for life as citizen-soldiers. The first, the agon karterias (“endurance contest”), was a public whipping match in which graduating boys competed to see who could withstand a brutal (and sometimes fatal) flogging at the altar of the goddess Artemis Orthia—the winner earned the title of bomonikes (“altar winner”). The second, the Platanistas competition, was a vicious gang fight in which two opposing mobs of boys were isolated on an artificial island in a plane-tree grove and made to brawl until one team was forced off. The Greek writer and geographer Pausanias wrote that participants “fight with their hands and by jumping up to kick. They bite and gouge out eyes. They fight man to man this way, but they also attack as a group violently and push one another into the water.”16 Since Spartan soldiers did things like this even to their own countrymen, it is no surprise other peoples considered them dangerous madmen best avoided.

  Some ancient sports, such as dueling, by contrast, had their origins in one-on-one violence. The medieval Vikings, in this case, provide the most egregious examples. One was the Swedish “sport” of bältesspänning (knife-wrestling). This event, which only died out in rural Sweden in the eighteenth century, featured two contestants, tied to each other by a single large belt, writhing and stabbing at one another with daggers. Combatants’ wives also apparently attended, usually clutching large sheets with which to bind their husband’s bleeding wounds. The only safety measure seems to have been the competitors’ occasional agreement to wrap their blades with strips of cloth to shorten their tip-length.17 Bältesspänning’s dueling origins are self-evident, and so, too, are those of glima (belt-wrestling), which is now the national sport of modern Iceland. Glima also uses belts, though in this case each opponent wears one around his stomach and two around his thighs, which his opponent grips and uses to throw him. While modern glima doesn’t use knives, its ancient version used something just as lethal: a waist-high, tapered rock onto which wrestlers tried to throw their opponent so as to break their back.18 Apparently such matches were used to resolve (obviously permanently) personal disputes.

  Other ancient sports, in contrast, owed their violent nature to their origin in religious ritual. One clear example is the rubber-ball game of ancient Central American civilizations such as the Olmecs, Aztecs, and Maya. This game, which bears a passing similarity to modern basketball, is worth describing in detail not just because it shows how intertwined prehistoric sport and religion were; it also illustrates, when compared to its modern counterpart, just how feeble present-day sports really have become.

  The rubber-ball game that Cortés and his conquistadors saw in sixteenth-century Central America was played from as far south as Honduras to as far north as Arizona. Matches were held on stone courts roughly the same area as modern basketball courts, and even featured stone hoops through which players could shoot game-winning goals. Since these hoops were only fractionally bigger than the ball, however, only one in every two hundred or so shots probably scored. The Meso-American ball game was not only more difficult than basketball, however; it was also far more dangerous. Native Americans played the game with solid rubber balls that could weigh up to twenty pounds (fifteen times the weight of a modern regulation basketball) and generated enormous speed and force on the stone court. So hard did these balls strike that they could only be safely hit using a player’s thigh, hip, or buttocks. A strike anywhere else often killed the player, as noted by the Spanish monk and historian Diego Durán:

  Some of these men were taken out dead…[because] the ball on the rebound hit them in the mouth or the stomach or the intestines, so that they fell to the floor instantly. Some died of that blow on the spot.19

  Even when players hit the ball correctly (which they did with an accuracy and dexterity that amazed the Spaniards) the resulting injuries were often horrific:

  With this bouncing…they
suffered terrible injuries on their knees and thighs so that the haunches of those who made use of these tricks were frequently so bruised…[they] had to be opened with a small blade, whereupon the blood which had clotted there because of the blows of the ball squeezed out.

  Aztec, Mayan, and Olmec ball-game players did, admittedly, wear some protective gear, but this simply proves how phenomenally athletic they were in comparison to modern basketballers. The leather hip-guards, and even the heavy “handstone” gloves they sometimes wore, are uncontroversial, but the ancient sixty-pound stone girdles that are occasionally unearthed at ball-court sites have been dismissed as too heavy for any human to wear. Yet this is probably unjust. Cortés himself, after all, was so impressed by the muscularity of the Central American ball-players that he took a team of them back to Spain in 1528 to play before the court of Charles V. A painting of the event by Christoph Weiditz confirms Cortés’s impression: the painter shows the stout bodies of the native ball players rippling with muscle. I personally think they’d have noticed the weight of those stone girdles about as much as they would sweatbands.

  Perhaps most terrifying, however, was the prospect players faced of being sacrificed. All Central American civilizations regarded their ball games as more than just sport; each match was a reenactment of the mythical battle between the gods and the underworld. Archaeological evidence shows that these reenactments often ended in the sacrifice of one or more players. One stone mural adorning a ball court at El Tajin shows a player having his heart ripped out by priests. A stone column at one Mexican archaeological site, Aparicio, shows another being decapitated. The famous ball court at Chichen Itza, the largest in the world at 540 by 220 feet, not only has murals depicting balls containing human skulls, it also features a massive skull rack—a somewhat grisly wall of fame. Incredibly, it is not clear whether those sacrificed in these games were the winners or the losers (offering one’s body in sacrifice was considered an honor in Mayan society).

  The civilization theory of sport thus seems about as dead as any unfortunate Huron lacrosse player, Welsh medieval cnappan footballer, or Aztec sacrificial ball-gamer. Modern sport is less violent, intense, and aggressive than in days of old (and very old), not more. But why? It’s tempting—in fact, inescapable—to put it down to increasing wussiness among modern sportsmen, despite their boasts and our willingness to believe them. But something else is going on here, too. What stands out about ancient sports is how entwined with other ends they were, be those ends military, religious, or conflict-resolution related. The famous sociologist of sport Norbert Elias claims, in fact, that this distance from original aims is what defines modern, “real” sport.20 Present-day athleticism elevates that which used to be a minor part of sport—the contest—to its whole raison d’être. Hunting, for example, used to be about the pleasure of personally killing (and, usually, eating) an animal, while modern fox hunting (in those places of the world where it is still legal) is about simply chasing one—the killing being delegated to the hunters’ hounds. Aztec ball games used to be about scoring goals to obtain the favor of the gods; modern basketball is just about how many you can score. This being the case, we’re entitled to ask how well we compete compared with ancient sportsmen.

  How well, in other words, do we perform in the contest?

  Early twentieth-century anthropologists would have thought it ridiculous to even ask. They figured the question had already been answered: at the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis, Missouri. By happy coincidence, those Olympics coincided with the St. Louis World Fair, which featured a massive anthropological exhibit of real, live “savages” from all across the world—Japanese Ainu, Philippine Igorots, Eskimos, South American “Giant Patagonian” tribesmen, African Pygmies, and many, many others—who had been specially shipped to the city for the event. The man in charge of this breathtaking folly, disgraced former Smithsonian Institute anthropologist Dr. W. J. McGee, hit upon an incredible idea: why not combine the two and determine once and for all the true sporting capabilities of “primitive” athletes? Thus was born “Anthropology Days,” two days of athletic events testing the tribesmen’s sporting prowess in Olympic events such as high jump, 100-yard dash, shot put, and javelin. The results, as the official history of the World Fair records, were dismal:

  The world had heard of the marvelous qualities of the Indian as a runner…[the] remarkable athletic feats of the Filipinos, and of the great agility and muscular strength of the giant Patagonians. All these traditions were dashed…the representatives of the savage and uncivilized tribes proved themselves inferior athletes, and greatly overrated…An African Pygmy [in the 100-yard dash] made a record that can be beaten by a 12-year-old American school boy. The giant Patagonians’…best [shot put] performance was so ridiculously poor that it astonished all who witnessed it.21

  These poor performances, though, clearly had more to do with unfamiliarity, lack of practice, and often a simple refusal to take the events seriously (the Pygmies made great sport in the dash by climbing all over the man with the starting gun). Unbiased observers thought the non-Western athletes had been unfairly judged. One such was Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the French founder of the modern Olympic movement. To his eternal credit, de Coubertin was appalled by the St. Louis spectacle, calling it “an outrageous charade.” He thought the athleticism of uncivilized peoples was, in reality, every bit the equal of civilized peoples, predicting that “black men, red men, and yellow men [would one day] learn to run, jump, and throw, and leave the white men behind them.”22

  This statement, though both brave and insightful, didn’t go far enough. For, as the evidence of archaeology and colonial historians once more shows, the athletic abilities of prehistoric and tribal sportsmen often far outstripped that of their modern, “civilized” brethren.

  Those fossilized footsteps proving prehistoric Australian Aboriginal men could probably outrun modern Olympian sprinters, for example, have already been noted. Unequivocal fossil evidence like this, though, is very rare. In its absence our only real alternative lies in historical records, yet these, too, can be problematic. The ancient Greeks, whose Olympian obsession with athletics has left us records of 794 winners from their 1,221 years of games (786 BCE to 435 CE) might be expected to help, but they had neither the time-keeping technology nor the interest to record sprinting speeds (Greek sprinters seem to have cared only about whom they beat on the day, not their speed compared to a record). Measurable reports really only began in the colonial era, when literate Europeans came into contact with tribal peoples. One famous account from the nineteenth-century Western Australian frontier, for instance, describes an Australian Aboriginal man who outran a pursuing police horse at Forty Mile Beach. Since an average horse gallops at 25 to 30 miles per hour, this report is both impressive and plausible, given the Willandra Lakes footprint evidence . What’s more, several other reports describe ancient and tribal men performing similar feats. Spanish conquistadors in the seventeenth century, for instance, complained of fugitive Native Americans who left their mounted pursuers in their dust.23 Later, Mexican ranchers took to hiring local Indian runners to run down escaped horses.

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  The one-legged man is king

  The ability of prehistoric Australian Aboriginal men to shame modern Olympic sprinters has already been noted . Those same fossilized footprints also show, though, that disabled Aboriginal athletes would have humiliated modern Paralympians, too.

  Archaeologist Stephen Webb reports that when his team found the fossilized trackways they were puzzled by those of the individual labelled “T4,” which featured 22 right footprints but no left prints. They also included several circular impressions that looked like the imprints of the end of a blunt stick. The footprints were spaced so far apart that it was thought they couldn’t possibly belong to a hopping man, who would have had to have been traveling at over 13 miles per hour to make them. The group settled on the explanation that T4’s other foot had been in a canoe he had been pushing
through the shallow lake with his stick—until they spoke to several traditional Pintubi people from outback Australia. Not only are the Pintubi accomplished trackers, it so happened that they themselves had grown up with a famed one-legged hunter. They were thus able to show Webb how T4 had achieved his phenomenal hopping speed: by building up momentum with the aid of his stick, then casting it off and hopping unassisted. Admittedly, modern Paralympians achieve much higher speeds than T4 did, but only with the high-tech assistance of spring blades and other aids. They also don’t hop. A better indication of T4’s feat is to compare his speed to the modern Guinness Book of Records’ 1-mile hop record-holder’s speed of 1.3 miles per hour.

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  One possible objection to the superiority of prehistoric athletes is that Jesse Owens, the modern (1930s) track star, did exactly the same thing, racing and beating horses over one hundred yards several times. Owens later admitted, however, that he won by choosing skittish horses that were startled by the gun, giving him a crucial head start. A more serious objection is the mighty performance of marathon runner Huw Lobb, who in 2004 definitely did outrun a horse in the annual “Man vs. Horse” race in Llanwrtyd Wells, in Wales, for the first time in the event’s twenty-five-year history. That race, though, was over twenty-two miles—and therein lies the rub. For it is a peculiar fact that we humans, so feeble in almost every other respect compared to our animal cousins, are stellar endurance athletes. Not only did ancient athletes often run down horses over longer distances (such as the Olympic champion Lasthenes, who did so in a twenty-two-mile race from Coroneia to Thebes in the fifth century BCE), prehistoric hunters frequently performed similar feats simply as part of their daily lives.