Bully for Brontosaurus (4 page)

Cavalli-Sforza’s consensus tree, based on overall genetic distances among 120 alleles for 42 populations—probably the best we can do for now, based on the maximal amount of secure and consistent information—divides modern humans into seven major groups, as shown in the accompanying chart. Only branching order counts in assessing relative similarity, not the happenstance of alignment along the bottom of the chart. Africans are not closer to Caucasians than to Australians just because the two groups are adjacent; rather, Africans are equally far from all other peoples by virtue of their common branching point with the ancestor of all six additional groups. (Consider the diagram as a mobile, free to rotate about each vertical “string.” We could turn around the entire array of Groups II to VII, placing Australians next to Africans and Caucasians at the far right, without altering the branching order.)

These seven basic groups, established solely on genetic distances, make excellent sense when we consider the geographic distribution of
Homo sapiens
. Humans presumably evolved in Africa, and the first great split separates Africans from all other groups—representing the initial migration of some
Homo sapiens
out of the mother continent. The next split separates the coherent region of the Pacific and Southeast Asia from the rest of the world. One group reached Australia and New Guinea, perhaps 40,000 years ago, forming the aboriginal populations of this region. A later division separated the Pacific island peoples (Group VI, including Polynesians, Micronesians, and Melanesians) from the southeastern Asiatics (Group V, including southern Chinese, Thai, Malayan, and Filipino).

Cavalli-Sforza’s consensus tree for the evolutionary relationships of human groups based on overall genetic distances. Postulated relationships among language families match this pattern remarkably well. See text for details.
IROMIE WEERAMANTRY, COURTESY OF
NATURAL HISTORY
.

Meanwhile, the second great branch divided to split the northern Oriental stocks from the Caucasians (Group II, including Europeans, Semitic peoples of southwest Asia, Iranians, and Indians). A second division separated the Native American peoples (Group IV) from the northeast Asian family (Group III, including the Uralic peoples who left Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian as their non-Indo-European calling cards from invasions into Caucasian territories, and the Altaic peoples of Mongolia, Korea, and Japan).

This good and sensible order indicates that genetic data are not betraying our efforts to reconstruct the human family tree. But Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues go further toward the great promise of extending this correlation between genes and geography to the other great sources of independent information—the geological and linguistic records.

I find the linguistic correlations more exciting than anything else in the work of Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues. Language is so volatile. Conquerors can impose their language as well as their will. Tongues interpenetrate and merge with an explosive ease not granted to genes or morphology. Look at English; look at any of us. I, for example, live in America, the indigenous home of very different people. I speak English, and consider the cathedral of Chârtres the world’s most beautiful building. But my grandparents spoke Hungarian, a non-Indo-European language. And, along with Disraeli, my more distant ancestors were priests in the Temple of Solomon when the physical forebears of the original English people still lived as “brutal savages in an unknown island.” One might have anticipated very little correlation between language and the tree of human ancestry.

Yet the mapping of linguistic upon genetic tree is remarkable in its degree of overlap. Exceptions exist, of course, and for the reasons mentioned above. Ethiopians speak an Afro-Asiatic language (in the phylum of Hebrew and Arabic), but belong to the maximally distant African group by genes. The Tibetan language links with Chinese in Group V, although the Tibetan people belong with northeast Asians in Group III. But Tibetans migrated from the steppes north of China, and Ethiopians have maintained primary contact and admixture with Semitic speakers for millennia. The correlations, however, are striking. Each genetic group also defines either a single linguistic phylum or a few closely related phyla. The Pacific island languages, with their mellifluous vowels and nearly nonexistent consonants, define Group VI almost as well as the genetic distances. The Indo-European languages set the borders of Caucasian affinity, while the other major tongues of Caucasian peoples (Afro-Asiatic of the Semitic group) belong to a related linguistic phylum.

I am especially intrigued that the heterodox hypotheses for linkages among linguistic phyla, and for potential reconstructions of human languages even closer to the original tongue, follow the genetic connections so faithfully. Nostratic would link Groups II and III. The even more heterodox connection of Nostratic with Amerindian tongues would include Group IV as well. Note that Groups II to IV form a coherent limb of the human family tree. The Tower of Babel may emerge as a strikingly accurate metaphor. We probably did once speak the same language, and we did diversify into incomprehension as we spread over the face of the earth. But this original tongue was not an optimal construction given by a miracle to all people. Our original linguistic unity is only historical happenstance, not crafted perfection. We were once a small group of Africans, and the mother tongue is whatever these folks said to each other, not the Holy Grail.

This research has great importance for the obvious and most joyously legitimate parochial reason—our intense fascination with ourselves and the details of our history. We really do care that our species arose closer to 250,000 than to 2 million years ago, that Basque is the odd man out of European languages, and that the peopling of the Americas is not mysterious for its supposed “delay,” but part of a regular process of expansion from an African center, and basically “on time” after all.

But I also sense a deeper importance in this remarkable correlation among all major criteria for reconstructing our family tree. This high correspondence can only mean that a great deal of human diversity, far more than we ever dared hope, achieves a remarkably simple explanation in history itself. If you know when a group split off and where it spread, you have the basic outline (in most cases) of its relationships with others. The primary signature of time and history is not effaced, or even strongly overlain in most cases, by immediate adaptation to prevailing circumstances or by recent episodes of conquest and amalgamation. We remain the children of our past—and we might even be able to pool our differences and to extract from inferred pathways of change a blurred portrait of our ultimate parents.

The path is tortuous and hard to trace, as the sister of the seven ravens learned when she went from the sun to the moon to the glass mountain in search of her brothers. History is also a hard taskmaster, for she covers her paths by erasing so much evidence from her records—as Hansel and Great discovered when birds ate their Ariadne’s thread of bread crumbs. Yet the potential rewards are great, for we may recover the original state so hidden by our later changes—the prince behind the frog or the king that became the bear companion of Snow White and Rose Red. And the criteria that may lead to success are many and varied—not only the obvious data of genes and fossils but also the clues of language. For we must never doubt the power of names, as Rumpelstiltskin learned to his sorrow.

YOU MAY EITHER LOOK
upon the bright side and say that hope springs eternal or, taking the cynic’s part, you may mark P.T. Barnum as an astute psychologist for his proclamation that suckers are born every minute. The end result is the same: You can, Honest Abe notwithstanding, fool most of the people all of the time. How else to explain the long and continuing compendium of hoaxes—from the medieval shroud of Turin to Edwardian Piltdown Man to an ultramodern array of flying saucers and astral powers—eagerly embraced for their consonance with our hopes or their resonance with our fears.

Some hoaxes make a sufficient mark upon history that their products acquire the very status initially claimed by fakery—legitimacy (although as an object of human or folkloric, rather than natural, history; I once held the bones of Piltdown Man and felt that I was handling an important item of Western culture).

The Cardiff Giant, the best American entry for the title of paleontological hoax turned into cultural history, now lies on display in a shed behind a barn at the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown, New York. This gypsum man, more than ten feet tall, was “discovered” by workmen digging a well on a farm near Cardiff, New York, in October 1869. Eagerly embraced by a gullible public, and ardently displayed by its creators at fifty cents a pop, the Cardiff Giant caused quite a brouhaha around Syracuse, and then nationally, for the few months of its active life between exhumation and exposure.

A broadsheet from 1869 giving vital statistics of the Cardiff Giant.
NEW YORK STATE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION, COOPERSTOWN, NY
.

The Cardiff Giant as now on display in the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown, New York.
NEW YORK STATE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION, COOPERSTOWN, NY.

The Cardiff Giant was the brainchild of George Hull, a cigar manufacturer (and general rogue) from Binghamton, New York. He quarried a large block of gypsum from Fort Dodge, Iowa, and shipped it to Chicago, where two marble cutters fashioned the rough likeness of a naked man. Hull made some crude and minimal attempts to give his statue an aged appearance. He chipped off the carved hair and beard because experts told him that such items would not petrify. He drove darning needles into a wooden block and hammered the statue, hoping to simulate skin pores. Finally, he dumped a gallon of sulfuric acid all over his creation to simulate extended erosion. Hull then shipped his giant in a large box back to Cardiff.

Hull, as an accomplished rogue, sensed that his story could not hold for long and, in that venerable and alliterative motto, got out while the getting was good. He sold a three-quarter interest in the Cardiff Giant to a consortium of highly respectable businessmen, including two former mayors of Syracuse. These men raised the statue from its original pit on November 5 and carted it off to Syracuse for display.

The hoax held on for a few more weeks, and Cardiff Giant fever swept the land. Debate raged in newspapers and broadsheets between those who viewed the giant as a petrified fossil and those who regarded it as a statue wrought by an unknown and wondrous prehistoric race. But Hull had left too many tracks—at the gypsum quarries in Fort Dodge, at the carver’s studio in Chicago, along the roadways to Cardiff (several people remembered seeing an awfully large box passing by on a cart). By December, Hull was ready to recant, but held his tongue a while longer. Three months later, the two Chicago sculptors came forward, and the Cardiff Giant’s brief rendezvous with fame and fortune ended.

The common analogy of the Cardiff Giant with Piltdown Man works only to a point (both were frauds passed off as human fossils) and fails in one crucial respect. Piltdown was cleverly wrought and fooled professionals for forty years, while the Cardiff Giant was preposterous from the start. How could a man turn to solid gypsum, while preserving all his soft anatomy, from cheeks to toes to penis? Geologists and paleontologists never accepted Hull’s statue. O. C. Marsh, later to achieve great fame as a discoverer of dinosaurs, echoed a professional consensus in his unambiguous pronouncement: “It is of very recent origin and a decided humbug.”

Why, then, was the Cardiff Giant so popular, inspiring a wave of interest and discussion as high as any tide in the affairs of men during its short time in the sun? If the fraud had been well executed, we might attribute this great concern to the dexterity of the hoaxers (just as we grant grudging attention to a few of the most accomplished art fakers for their skills as copyists). But since the Cardiff Giant was so crudely done, we can only attribute its fame to the deep issue, the raw nerve, touched by the subject of its fakery—human origins. Link an absurd concoction to a noble and mysterious subject and you may prevail, at least for a while. My opening reference to P.T. Barnum was not meant sarcastically; he was one of the great practical psychologists of the nineteenth century—and his motto applies with special force to the Cardiff Giant: “No humbug is great without truth at bottom.” (Barnum made a copy of the Cardiff Giant and exhibited it in New York City. His mastery of hype and publicity assured that his model far outdrew the “real” fake when the original went on display at a rival establishment in the same city.)

For some reason (to be explored, but not resolved, in this essay), we are powerfully drawn to the subject of beginnings. We yearn to know about origins, and we readily construct myths when we do not have data (or we suppress data in favor of legend when a truth strikes us as too commonplace). The hankering after an origin myth has always been especially strong for the closest subject of all—the human race. But we extend the same psychic need to our accomplishments and institutions—and we have origin myths and stories for the beginning of hunting, of language, of art, of kindness, of war, of boxing, bow ties, and brassieres. Most of us know that the Great Seal of the United States pictures an eagle holding a ribbon reading
e pluribus unum
. Fewer would recognize the motto on the other side (check it out on the back of a dollar bill):
annuit coeptis—
“he smiles on our beginnings.”

Cooperstown may house the Cardiff Giant, but the fame of this small village in central New York does not rest upon its celebrated namesake, author James Fenimore, or its lovely Lake Otsego or the Farmer’s Museum. Cooperstown is “on the map” by virtue of a different origin myth—one more parochial but no less powerful for many Americans than the tales of human beginnings that gave life to the Cardiff Giant. Cooperstown is the sacred founding place in the official myth about the origin of baseball.

Origin myths, since they are so powerful, can engender enormous practical problems. Abner Doubleday, as we shall soon see, most emphatically did not invent baseball at Cooperstown in 1839 as the official tale proclaims; in fact, no one invented baseball at any moment or in any spot. Nonetheless, this creation myth made Cooperstown the official home of baseball, and the Hall of Fame, with its associated museum and library, set its roots in this small village, inconveniently located near nothing in the way of airports or accommodations. We all revel in bucolic imagery on the field of dreams, but what a hassle when tens of thousands line the roads, restaurants, and Port-a-potties during the annual Hall of Fame weekend, when new members are enshrined and two major league teams arrive to play an exhibition game at Abner Doubleday Field, a sweet little 10,000-seater in the middle of town. Put your compass point at Cooperstown, make your radius at Albany—and you’d better reserve a year in advance if you want any accommodation within the enormous resulting circle.

After a lifetime of curiosity, I finally got the opportunity to witness this annual version of forty students in a telephone booth or twenty circus clowns in a Volkswagen. Since Yaz (former Boston star Carl Yastrzemski to the uninitiated) was slated to receive baseball’s Nobel in 1989, and his old team was playing in the Hall of Fame game, and since I’m a transplanted Bostonian (although still a New Yorker and not-so-secret Yankee fan at heart), Tom Heitz, chief of the wonderful baseball library at the Hall of Fame, kindly invited me to join the sardines in this most lovely of all cans.

A.G. Spalding, promoter of the Doubleday creation myth.
NATIONAL BASEBALL LIBRARY, COOPERSTOWN, NY
.

The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly
ad infinitum
. (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don’t know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway.) When people ask me how baseball imitates life, I can only respond with what the more genteel newspapers used to call a “barnyard epithet,” but now, with growing bravery, usually render as “bullbleep.” Nonetheless, baseball is a major item of our culture, and the sport does have a long and interesting history. Any item or institution with these two properties must generate a set of myths and stories (perhaps even some truths) about beginnings. And the subject of beginnings is the bread and butter of these essays on evolution in the broadest sense. I shall make no woolly analogies between baseball and life; this is an essay on the origins of baseball, with some musings on why beginnings of all sorts hold such fascination for us. (I thank Tom Heitz not only for the invitation to Cooperstown at its yearly acme but also for drawing the contrast between creation and evolution stories of baseball, and for supplying much useful information from his unparalleled storehouse.)

Stories about beginnings come in only two basic modes. An entity either has an explicit point of origin, a specific time and place of creation, or else it evolves and has no definable moment of entry into the world. Baseball provides an interesting example of this contrast because we know the answer and can judge received wisdom by the two chief criteria, often opposed, of external fact and internal hope. Baseball evolved from a plethora of previous stick-and-ball games. It has no true Cooperstown and no Doubleday. Yet we seem to prefer the alternative model of origin by a moment of creation—for then we can have heroes and sacred places. By contrasting the myth of Cooperstown with the fact of evolution, we can learn something about our cultural practices and their frequent disrespect for truth.

The official story about the beginning of baseball is a creation myth, and a review of the reasons and circumstances of its fabrication may give us insight into the cultural appeal of stories in this mode. A. G. Spalding, baseball’s first great pitcher during his early career, later founded the sporting goods company that still bears his name and became one of the great commercial moguls of America’s gilded age. As publisher of the annual
Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide
, he held maximal power in shaping both public and institutional opinion on all facets of baseball and its history. As the sport grew in popularity, and the pattern of two stable major leagues coalesced early in our century, Spalding and others felt the need for clarification (or merely for codification) of opinion on the hitherto unrecorded origin of an activity that truly merited its common designation as America’s “national pastime.”