The Ball (4 page)

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:

R
AMBO
: “What are the rules?”

M
UJAHIDEEN
: “Well, you have to take the sheep, go once around, and then throw it in the circle.”

R
AMBO
: “Why?”

M
UJAHIDEEN
: “Because there is a circle there.”

R
AMBO
: “That's it?”

M
UJAHIDEEN
: “That's it. Very simple.”

R
AMBO
: “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.

W
hat 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.

H
ypothesis 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.”

Inscriptions and scenes from Egyptian tombs from 2000
BC
on show that sports were an important part of daily life along the Nile. Competitions, including wrestling, boxing, swimming, jousting, archery, and foot races, were enjoyed by members of the aristocracy and commoners alike. The pharaohs, like so many rulers throughout history, depicted themselves regularly as invincible warriors, hunters, and athletes—physically strong and capable of defeating enemies in sport as well as war. At the annual festival of the Sed, the pharaoh would run around the city to publicly display his stamina and power. And while ball games were mostly played by girls and children for fun, other more ritualistic games were played by the pharaoh himself.

Tuthmosis III playing ball, Temple of Hatshepsut, Deir el-Bahri, Egypt.

The actual balls used in these games have turned up with some frequency in Egyptian tombs, preserved alongside mummified cats and other personal treasures meant to accompany the deceased into the afterlife. Stitched leather balls, bearing an uncanny resemblance to modern-day hacky sacks, were stuffed with straw, reeds, hair, or yarn. Balls made of papyrus, palm leaves, and linen wound around a pottery core have turned up as well. In one case, excavations of a child's grave uncovered the first evidence of bowling, complete with stone balls and pins, still waiting to be knocked down.

Anyone who believes that the first time a bat connected with a ball was in a Cooperstown, New York, cow pasture in 1839 should see a sculpture from around 1500
BC
showing King Tuthmosis III with a bent stick of olive wood batting balls away while two priests pitch and fetch. Tuthmosis was one of the greatest military leaders of ancient Egypt, reputed to have captured 350 cities in military campaigns that expanded the Egyptian empire. The hieroglyphs that accompany the image read, “Catching [of the balls] by the servants of god after he [the king] has struck them away.” You can almost imagine a crowd of worshippers chanting “Tut! Tut! Tut!” as he steps to the plate to play this game, known as
seker-hemat
.