Biomechanical tests have confirmed that the remarkable endurance of human runners stems from both our bipedalism and our superior heat-loss mechanism (sweating). Running upright means we can vary the rhythm of our breathing, whereas quadrupeds such as horses have to breathe according to a pattern dictated by the compression of their lungs from their front legs. Sweating heavily also allows us to escape the constraint that stops fast animals such as cheetahs running more than a half-mile at a time: lethal overheating. I had first-hand confirmation of this from an Australian Aboriginal friend in the remote Pilbara region. Brendan Bobby, an initiated man of the Kurrama mob, once told me, laughing, how he and his mates hunt kangaroos in the scorching desert heat—by running them down in a six-cylinder pickup truck: “That ’roo, if you scare him up on a hot day when he’s lying in the shade, he’ll run out a few hundred yards, then stop and hop right back to the shade! Too hot for him; if he goes too far he’ll die.” Unfortunately for the ’roo, his days are numbered anyway, with Brendan and his mates dishing out death by roadkill.
Colonial-era accounts confirm that Brendan’s ancestors have been taking advantage of this behavior for millennia, though using their own legs rather than Ford utility vehicles. Australian Aboriginal men in Western Australia practiced endurance hunting—running their prey down until it collapsed through exhaustion and, often, died without the need of a blow or spear. The bushmen of South Africa did (and still do) the same with antelopes, chasing them for up to twenty-five miles until they crumple. This is clearly fantastic training for athletic running, since another group of antelope chasers, the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico, are on record as some of the best athletes in the modern world. The phenomenal endurance of the Tarahumara, though often remarked on by conquistadors and early anthropologists, was only brought to the modern world’s attention in 1963. In that year a party of American endurance athletes had to be rescued by local Tarahumaran men after failing, through exhaustion, to complete their “river run” through the forbidding Barranca del Cobre canyon. One grateful but awed survivor described his Tarahumaran rescuers thus:
Each one of us [the Americans] carried a canteen, but nothing else. For five miles we climbed that trail, which seemed designed only for goats. At one point, as we toiled upwards, the Indians passed us, each carrying a 60-pound pack of our gear. Suddenly, I realized it was their third trip of the day.
How did the Tarahumara develop these phenomenal athletic abilities? One study estimates their athletes can perform over 17,000 calories of work effort in 24 hours, whereas the average Tour de France competitor expends just 8,000 to 10,000 (a calorie is not just a unit of energy that we take in through food, but also a unit of energy we can expend through work. Cycling uses about 1,000 calories per hour, and so does the Tarahumara’s running. The difference is that the Tarahumara often run right through the day and night.) Partly it’s geography. The Tarahumara live in hamlets so widely separated that communication between them requires running vast distances. But they also seem simply to enjoy running. Several early anthropologists describe the Tarahumaran sport of “kick-ball” racing, where teams of men run up to 190 miles through wild, craggy terrain in 24 to 48 hours (running by torchlight at night), all the while kicking a crude wooden ball before them.24 This sounds impressive, but not necessarily superior to the performance of modern ultramarathoners. The current world distance record for a 24-hour run, for example, is 188.6 miles, set by Yiannis Kouros, the “Running God,” in 1997. Yet this record was achieved on a flat, rubberized track, whereas Tarahumaran runs take place in rough country. There are also, what’s more, records of other Indian athletes exceeding this speed and distance. John Bourke, the nineteenth-century American soldier and ethnologist, was told of a Mojave runner who ran from Fort Mojave to the Mojave reservation and back—a distance of 200 miles—in less than 24 hours, again through harsh country.25 American historian William H. Prescott, similarly, wrote of Aztec titlantil (“courier runners”) who also covered 200 miles a day, through mountainous country, to bring messages to the emperor in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. Even further back in history, the mighty Sumerian king Shulgi is reputed to have run 218 miles from Nippur to Ur and back again in 24 hours (though this time in two 12-hour stints) circa 2075 BCE.26
Endurance-wise, it seems, ancient and tribal runners may well have left our modern athletes gasping in their wake.
Jumping, too, was an athletic activity in which prehistoric and tribal men probably raised the bar to heights we modern men are unable to reach. In BRAWN we discovered that our near cousin, the bonobo chimpanzee, can jump three times the height an average human male can. Archaeological evidence of early human leaping ability, though, is practically nonexistent. There are, admittedly, some Greek records of phenomenal long-jump performances (like that of Phayllos, who cleared the jumping pit and broke his leg with a leap of 55 feet in the fifth century BCE; the modern record is 29.36 feet), but confusion about measurements (it isn’t clear if this was a single, or multiple, jump event) makes these impossible to confirm. Some medieval knights, similarly, could vault as high as 5'3" to mount their steeds while wearing 88 pounds of armor, but this, too, is difficult to translate into a useful comparison. In fact, the earliest incontrovertible evidence of tribal men’s superior jumping abilities comes from colonial era photographs of the Tutsi peoples of Rwanda. The German anthropologist Adolf Friedrich, Duke of Mecklenburg, was astonished to discover, in the course of his 1907 anthropological survey of Rwanda, that the majority of the tribal men he met there were able to jump heights over 6'4" and frequently did so. This was due to Tutsi tradition of gusimbuka-urukiramende, an initiation ritual in which young men had to jump their own height to progress to manhood. Many, however, did far better than that, apparently jumping heights up to 8'3". As proof, Friedrich sent back to Europe a series of photographs showing Tutsi men jumping over him and a companion. There they provoked general astonishment and despairing questions from at least one prominent German physician, who asked, “What then will be left of our records?”
His concerns, it turns out, were well founded. Even today, the world highjump record remains at the relatively feeble 8' set by Cuban high jumper Javier Sotomayor in 1993. Even worse, Sotomayor’s jump was made using the modern Fosbury flop—a technique invented by athlete Dick Fosbury in which the jumper launches himself back-first over the bar—which adds approximately 10 percent to the jump’s height. If Mecklenburg’s Tutsi jumpers had used that, they may well have jumped an unreachable (by modern standards) 9'1".27
Spear throwing, too, appears to be a sport in which tribal men, predictably, exceled, though again reliable measurements are hard to verify. The current world record for javelin is the 107.7 yards thrown by Jan Železný of the Czech Republic in 1996. Anthropologist J. Edge-Partington, on the other hand, reported that Australian Aboriginal men of the Dalleburra tribe in the early nineteenth century could throw their hardwood spears, without the aid of a spear-thrower (which increases range through leverage), 120 yards or more. The British author, Lieutenant Colonel F. A. M. Webster—himself a national-championship-winning javelin thrower—similarly reported in the early 1900s that Turkana men of East Africa regularly out-threw him by yards in competitions using their traditional spears (though he always triumphed with a regulation javelin). The evidence from the ancient Olympics, though, is once again uncertain. Depending on the translation, we have records of Greek javelin throws measuring either 110 to 164 yards. While even the lower measurement beats today’s record, there are two complications. First, Greek javelins were probably lighter than modern Olympic javelins, and thus easier to throw. Second, Greek athletes used a special leather thong, the amentum, which increased range by 10 to 25 percent by imparting spin and giving extra leverage. Sadly, we can’t therefore say for sure just how good the ancient Greek Olympian javelin throwers were. The situation is exactly the same with ancient Olympian discus throwers, where the varying weights of Greek stone and brass diskoi (some weighed four times as
much as modern discuses) make performances impossible to compare.
One projectile contest about which we can be certain, however, is archery. Modern Olympic archers use high-tech, carbon-fiber recurve bows with sights and stabilizing weights, yet their shots are still shorter, slower, and less accurate than those of ancient archers. To take the gold in the individual men’s archery event at the 2008 Olympics, Ukrainian Viktor Ruban shot 12 arrows at the rate of one every 40 seconds at a target 77 yards away, landing just 5 in the 2-inch bullseye (7 others landed in the 4-inch outer bullseye). Ancient Mongol archers, however, despite their “primitive” wood-and-horn bows, often bettered this from greater distances, at faster speeds and on horseback to boot. Even leaving aside the ability of Genghis Khan’s nephew, Yesüngge, to hit a target from 586 yards away, a Mongol historical text, The Blue Sutra, records that several of Genghis Khan’s warriors hit a tiny red flag at 164 yards in a competition before an enemy khan. One, in fact, set himself a real challenge and brought down a flying duck with a single arrow through its neck. Mongol archers could loose 12 aimed arrows a minute (one every 5 seconds, compared to the modern standard of one every 40 seconds) and usually did so from horseback, timing their shots to fire between steps, when their horses’ hooves were off the ground. The official history of another nomadic Asian people, the Khitan, similarly states that Khitan soldiers held competitions to cut a 1-inch thick willow branch with a single arrow at full gallop. Other ancient archers also outstripped modern Olympic archers’ performances. Henry VIII, for example, in a contest with the French king at the “Field of Cloth of Gold” tournament in 1520 ce, sent several arrows into his target’s bullseye from 240 yards away. A Spanish chronicler in 1606 likewise testified that Carib Indian archers of the Antilles Islands could consistently hit an English half-crown coin at 100 paces.
It isn’t just in the Western world that modern archers fall short, either. In 1987 a fifth-degree black belt in the art of kyd (Japanese archery), Ashikawa Yuichi, was humiliated in his attempt to recreate the traditional Japanese bow sport of tshiya, “clearing arrows.” This sport, which began in medieval Japan in 1606, required competitors to shoot arrows down the 130-yard corridor of Kyoto’s Rengeō-in Temple, hitting the far wall without touching the side walls, floor, or roof on the way. Successful efforts were called “clearing arrows,” and archers competed to see how many each could score out of 100 or 1,000 attempts. Yuichi, despite his high level of skill and months of additional training, managed just 9 tshiya from 100 attempts.28 Though probably the best any modern Japanese archer could do, this was ridiculous in light of the record set by fifteen-year-old Kokura Gishichi in 1830: 94 tshiya in the 100-arrow event and 978 in the 1,000 arrow. To add insult to injury, Yuichi’s slow and careful shooting would have been scorned by early tshiya competitors. In 1686 CE Wasa Daihachiro, for example, shot 8,133 clearing arrows out of a total 13,053 over the course of 24 hours—a rate of 1 arrow every 6 seconds.29
Other sporting contests in which ancient competitors shame their modern counterparts are those involving animals. The U.S. Professional Bull Riders tour, for instance, where top riders fight to stay atop ferocious, bucking bulls for eight seconds, proudly calls itself “the toughest sport on earth.” Yet a study by the Canadian Professional Rodeo Sport Medicine Team found that serious injuries, in Canadian professional bull-riding events at least, were rare—occurring in just 1.5 percent of rides.30 Now consider an equivalent ancient sport: the “bull-leaping” ritual of the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete from 2700 to 1450 BCE. Frescoes unearthed there depict aristocratic youths grasping charging bulls by the horns and somersaulting over their backs (some paintings, alternatively, show them diving over the bull’s horns to perform handstands on its back). We don’t have to rely on imagination for a picture of how dangerous this was: some frescoes also show unsuccessful leapers entangled, possibly fatally, in the beast’s horns. We have no figures, of course, but it seems a safe bet the injury rate exceeded 1.5 percent. Polo, similarly, is often considered a particularly tough modern equestrian sport. Yet compared to its ancient Afghan counterpart, Buzkashi (“goat grabbing”), it seems positively sissy. Buzkashi matches, which are still played today, involve hundreds of mounted competitors (each carrying a whip for attacking opponents) battling one another for possession of a calf’s carcass—which usually disintegrates during play. The action is brutal, with players charging, whipping, and unseating one another in their attempt to drag the carcass clear. Games rage for days and range for miles. Injuries include fractured skulls, concussions, broken limbs, cracked ribs, punctured lungs, and severe bruising—and even the occasional fatality. It’s a safe bet action like that would send most modern polo players scurrying back to their clubhouse for a restorative pink gin or three.
* * *
Medieval cheerleaders?
Medieval fairs may have lacked many of the accompaniments of modern sports events: mascots, stadium seating, and jumbo-vision screens. They did, however, have cheerleaders—in a manner of speaking. Fair organizers often injected sex appeal into proceedings with a half-time prostitute race. Between the archery contests, jousting, and gander pulling (a horrific sport in which a greased goose’s head was ripped from its body), organizers often scheduled a race of the town’s “fallen” women, either among themselves or against their supposedly more virtuous sisters. History doesn’t record what drew these athletic jezebels to enter such competitions, but the motivation of the mostly male spectators seems clear: one ogling onlooker records appreciatively that the women ran “with skirt tuckt very high.”31
* * *
It seems puzzling, given this apparent feebleness in the contest compared to our ancient brethren, that any modern competitor should be tagged “super.” Yet the trend toward record medal hauls, such as Michael Phelps’s eight gold at the 2008 Olympics, has led some commentators to label ours the “age of the superathlete.” These, supposedly, are those superior competitors who win multiple events in the one Olympics, such as Jesse Owens in 1936, Mark Spitz in 1972, and Carl Lewis in 1984. Yet even here modern competitors fall short of ancestral male sportsmen. Not one modern superathlete, for example, has repeated his feat consistently over successive Olympics (though Lewis, to be fair, came close with fewer wins in 1988 and 1992). None of them, what’s more, has won all their events on the one day (even Michael Phelps’s maximum was two events on the one day). Yet ancient Greek Olympians did this so frequently that authorities kept a special list of triastes (“those who won three events on the one day”). Leonidas of Rhodes won this title at four successive Olympics in the twelve years between 164 and 152 BCE, taking out the stadion (“220-yard sprint”), the diaulos (“440-yard sprint”) and the hoplitodromos (“440-yard race run in heavy armour, helmet, and shield”) at each one. Carl Lewis, by comparison, was only able to win one event, the long jump, in every one of his four Olympic appearances. Hermogenes of Xanthos nearly equaled Leonidas’s feat, winning eight victories in the stadion, diaulos, and hoplitodromos in three Olympic appearances, and Astylos of Syracuse was just behind him, with seven. The stamina needed to win these three demanding races on one day must have been incredible. The ability to then back up and perform the same feat in Olympics after Olympics was nothing short of superhuman.
Some Greek Olympians, moreover, had even longer careers than Leonidas—and ones far longer than those of their modern counterparts. The champion Spartan wrestler Hipposthenes, for example, scored victories in six consecutive Olympic wrestling competitions in the twenty-four years between 632 and 608 BCE. The hulking Milo of Kroton (he was reputed to eat more than twenty-two pounds of meat and twenty-two pounds of bread at every meal) did the same one hundred years later. (Only one modern wrestler, Adolf Lindfors in 1920, has ever won gold at an Olympics when over the age of forty, and even Lindfors only won at a single Olympics.) What makes this longevity even more incredible is that Greek wrestling was a brutal sport only marginally less lethal than boxing and the Pankration . Gre
ek athletes also sometimes competed at much higher intensity than modern athletes—running, throwing, or fighting two or three times a week. Their modern counterparts typically compete in just a handful of events per year. The champion boxer Theogenes of Thasos, to quote one example, fought fourteen-hundred bouts over twenty-two years. Muhammad Ali, by comparison, fought just sixty-one in his twenty-one-year career. (Theogenes, what’s more, apparently never lost a bout; “The Greatest,” by contrast, dropped five.) Crowning laurels for stamina, however, must go to the fifth century CE chariot racer Porphyrius. Not only was Porphyrius known to occasionally race fifty times in one day, he continued racing for forty years until his retirement in his sixties. Porphyrius, similarly, won almost every race he entered—he even frequently performed the diversium: winning a race, then swapping chariots with his defeated rival and winning again. Again, what makes Porphyrius’s career so remarkable is the danger he faced: chariot races were notorious for their naufragium (“shipwreck”) crashes. The Greek poet Pindar, for example, describes one race in which forty-one chariots started but just one finished.
Performance-wise, it seems, our superathletes no more deserve the title than they do (some argue) the multimillion-dollar endorsements that follow. Yet others insist that it is precisely these rewards that make a male superathlete—the money, the lifestyle, the women, and the fanatical worship from millions of fans. Surely no ancient athlete could compete in this cult of the super sportsman? Call it schadenfreude, but the good news for all envious couch potatoes is that modern superathletes don’t, in fact, compare favorably. Whether financially, sexually, or in terms of public adoration, ancient sportsmen often make their modern counterparts look like impoverished minor league wannabes hustling change for a big date.
Manthropology Page 13