Bravado
One clear, sunny morning in 2005, rail commuters in Hanau, a small town near Frankfurt, witnessed an amazing spectacle. As their InterCity Express (ICE) bullet train left the station, a black-clad, bandannaed figure leaped ninja-style onto its rear windscreen and attached a vacuum-grip handhold. For the next 20 minutes the man, a twenty-something train surfer known as “the Trainrider,” held on for grim, buffeting death as the ICE cranked up to its cruising speed of 155 miles per hour. Convinced he’d be killed, passengers shot hurried emergency calls through to the Federal Border Guards, who arrived just as the ICE reached its last stop. Incredibly, however, the Trainrider was uninjured—he even escaped a possible 10-year prison sentence by the simple precaution of having bought a valid ticket.
The Trainrider was lucky; an investigation by Humboldt University’s Institute of Legal Medicine reported that in the six years between 1989 and 1995, forty adolescent males were seriously injured, eighteen fatally, while train “surfing” on Berlin’s S-Bahn and Underground lines.1 Surfing trains has become a worldwide phenomenon among daredevil young men, but techniques seem to vary: in Europe and the United Kingdom the aim is to mount the roof and ride freestanding without falling off; while South African thrill seekers sling themselves under slower-moving trains and perform the “gravel” maneuver—paddling their legs through the gravel fast enough to prevent them being torn off. The thing they share is an extreme disregard for danger. The Humboldt University report found that falling off, though gruesome enough and usually fatal, was not even the major cause of death for train surfers; most died from massive trauma after high-speed collisions with power poles, signal masts, and even other trains.
What makes young men so needlessly risk their lives? The Humboldt authors dismissed the simple urge to show off, instead wheeling out familiar suspects such as alienation, the search for recognition, and lack of facilities and positive role models, among others. Yet, curiously, they failed to note that most of these in fact confirm the thesis that young males universally experience strong instinctual urges toward reckless displays of courage. Why, for example, would anyone search for recognition through such foolhardy acts unless others found them impressive? In fact, what young male daredevils like the Trainrider demonstrate is what an evolutionary psychologist might call “conspicuous bravery”—bravery specifically aimed at communicating one’s evolutionary fitness and courage to one’s peers. Another word for it is the much maligned term bravado.
Getting your kicks, Sioux style
Adolescence is a time for young males to show their courage. Portuguese teens go on rampages through their neighborhood backyards, while American boys indulge in extreme sports such as wave jumping, snowboarding, and “vert” skating. None of these, however, is anywhere near as extreme as the games nineteenth-century Sioux boys played. Brule Sioux chief Iron Shell, for example, described for one chronicler his tribe’s “swing-kicking game,” in which:
…two rows of boys faced each other, each holding a robe over his left arm…after the…stock question, “Shall we grab them by the hair and knee them in the face until they bleed?”…using their robes as a shield, they all kicked at their opponents…[who] once down…[were] grabbed at the temples with both hands and kneed in the face…until [they] could fight no longer.
Even supposedly gentler Sioux games took considerable nerve to play. In the “buffalo-hunt” game, one boy was required to hold up a cactus leaf, representing a buffalo’s heart, while the others shot arrows at it. In the “mud-throwing” game, similarly, boys threw balls of mud at each other using springy sticks—each ball containing a buried live ember.2 
At first sight, bravado presents a puzzle to an evolutionary anthropologist. Recklessly putting yourself at risk of injury or death, for no reason, hardly satisfies the cardinal rule of natural selection: that an organism’s attributes and behaviors should tend to propagate its genes. It seems, in other words, to be maladaptive. Rational bravery, on the other hand—where individuals expose themselves to danger in pursuit of a goal—suffers no such ambiguity. Be the goal either hunting a dangerous animal for food, or swimming a crocodile-infested river to mate with an attractive female, the effect is the same: the courageous act brings reproductive rewards that outweigh its risk. Even apparently unrewarding acts of bravery can still be rational, particularly if they display altruism. Brave behavior performed for another’s benefit can, just like the big muscles mentioned in the previous chapter, function as an honest and unfakeable sexual signal to a potential mate—look how capable and fearless I am, and how willing to use that strength to help others! A recent University of Maine study into the mating preferences of American university women confirmed that altruistic, or heroic, bravery is seriously sexy: roughly three-quarters of the women expressed strong preferences for heroic risk-takers as boyfriends.3 Bravado, however, was right out—almost as many women stated they wouldn’t even date, let alone marry, a man who indulged in risks that weren’t altruistic.
To add to the mystery, young men don’t seem to have the foggiest notion that their bravado so signally fails to impress women. Another phase of that same University of Maine study, this time aimed at university men, revealed that they grossly overestimated how attractive their non-heroic risk-taking was to females (though they accurately predicted how attractive their heroic risk-taking was). Similarly ignorant was Lebohang Motsamai, a famed South African train surfer who told the BBC that he performs the “gravul” and other tricks because “when I do this they [the girls] are going to love me. They are going to say, eish, this boy is clever.”4
Why do young males maintain this mistaken belief in the sexual appeal of their reckless displays? A subsidiary survey in the University of Maine study gives a clue. That survey found that although swaggering bravado was unattractive to women in either a mate or a same-sex friend, it was highly desirable in a same-sex friend for males. This suggests that the real target of male bravado is other men. By advertising their willingness to take risks when nothing is at stake, men are simultaneously underscoring their worth as a formidable coalition partner for other males when something is. This is important because male-male bonds (the “band of brothers” phenomenon) are a central organizing principle of most human societies that have been studied ethnographically.5 Indeed, from the evidence of chimps and bonobos, it seems to have been inbuilt since at least the time of our last common ancestor, around 4.5 million years ago.6
A final piece is still missing from the puzzle, however. Male bravado might well be aimed at other males, but the logic of natural selection still demands it have some positive reproductive consequence in order to persist. Is there any evidence it does? In fact, there is. Frans de Waal’s primatological survey at Burgers’ Zoo in Holland recorded some intriguing details about the reproductive effects of male-male coalitions in chimpanzees.7 De Waal noted that Yeroen, an older chimp who had been overthrown as alpha male by younger rivals, still managed to get the lion’s share of mating opportunities by judiciously forming coalitions that pitted his rivals against each other. Even when these arrangements collapsed and Yeroen became subservient to a single dominant male, Nikkie, he still received a share of mating opportunities as the price of his support. This seems to tally with anecdotal evidence that modern human males who associate with attractive, high-prestige men greatly increase their own reproductive opportunities—as in the case of those roadies described by SPIN magazine who scored sex from “ramp-rat” groupies by hanging around with rock stars.8 Swaggering young men like Lebohang aren’t, it seems, so deluded after all. Their braggadocio does get them girls, just not in the way they think. (This, incidentally, neatly illustrates the distinction between proximate and ultimate causes in evolutionary theory: the proximate cause of young men’s bravado, besides instinct, is their mistaken belief that it appeals to women; but the real, ultimate, cause is probably its role in establishing male-male coalitions.)
If we modern men are, then, dancing to an ancient tune in our love of braggadocio, the question remains: how well are we dancing? How brave are we? We obviously think enormously so: both in heroic bravery, if the upsurge in post-9/11 films extolling patriotic bravery is any guide,9 and in non-heroic bravado, if the rash of reported adolescent copycat fatalities following TV shows like Jackass is to be believed.10 But how, I wondered, would we fare in the harrowing ordeals of courage and masculinity that ancient male members of our species had to undergo: the initiation rituals, tortures, terrifying medical treatments, and dangerous wild-animal hunts? Luckily, each has a modern equivalent, so the answer seemed to lie in a simple comparison.
Initiation rituals, for example, are still a feature of male in-groups such as military units, school cohorts, and criminal gangs. In 1997 a furor erupted in the United States when film footage surfaced showing Marines being stabbed with badges as part of a graduation hazing ritual at the Corps’ training school for airborne warfare. The graduates writhed in pain, shirts bloodied, as instructors jabbed their golden graduation wings (backed by two half-inch spikes) repeatedly into their chests. This, it turned out, was a traditional Marine induction ritual called “Blood Pinning” (also known as “Blood Wings” in the Army airborne training school), which reportedly dates back to World War II. The then Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, called the practice “disgusting” and demanded the Corps eliminate it, but history was apparently against him—hazing seems to have long been, and to be still, an inevitable feature of male (and sometimes female) in-groups. A similar scandal, for example, shook the U.S. Naval Academy as long ago as 1905.11 The modern Russian army, similarly, has several brutal equivalents as part of its Dedovshchina (“rule of the grandfathers”), system, including the “dried crocodile,” during which conscripts are forced to hang upside down from a top bunk while the Deds, or “grandfather” soldiers, beat them savagely. One medical study, as well, reported that over two hundred and sixty thousand American university athletes surveyed had suffered from hazing incidents, and that for sixty-five thousand of them the hazing had included violent and illegal activities such as beating or kidnapping.12 Far from being isolated incidents, brutal initiations are, it seems, part and parcel of the universal male experience.
Nor are they the regrettable invention of bored modern grunts and students. Acts of bastardry such as Blood Pinning are simply imitations (and generally pale ones) of rituals that are tens, and possibly hundreds, of thousands of years old. Romanian religious philosopher Mircea Eliade described the heart of these ancient rituals as “the ordeal”—a brutal experience that the uninitiated underwent to qualify for graduation into the group. The purpose of the ordeal seems to have been threefold. First, it provided a test of the would-be member’s strength and courage. Second, the violence of the initiation rituals seems to have symbolized the death of the uninitiated male’s earlier self, and his rebirth into the world of the group’s men. Third, the cruel abuse seems, paradoxically, to have strengthened in-group bonds by heightening the uninitiated male’s need to belong to the group. The ordeals themselves always featured one or more of the following elements: extreme pain, bodily mutilation, or the performance of extraordinary physical feats. How, then, do our modern initiation rituals compare on these three scores?
Blood Pinning, for example, is clearly painful, but probably mild compared to the rituals of urban American gangs, to which entry is often gained by being “jumped in”—beaten by existing members in a mass attack. (Gang researcher Mike Carlie Ph.D. described a ritual called “Freein’ Hoover,” in which would-be members had to pick six pennies off the ground while suffering multiple bashings by initiated gang bangers.) Even these, however, are a shadow of the torments endured by ancestral Homo sapiens males during initiation. One of the most painful was (and is) the initiation ritual of the indigenous Maués people of Brazil. Young Maués males don a palm-fiber mitt into which hundreds of stinging bullet ants—so-called because their sting hurts worse than being shot—have been woven, stingers facing inward. Bullet ants have the most painful venom of any insect alive, yet the fourteen-year-old Maués boys must wear the glove for ten full minutes, resulting in blinding pain, paralysis, and days of uncontrollable shaking.13 Luiseño boys of prehistoric California possibly had it even worse, being made to wallow in a pit filled with stinging ants during the heminuwe puberty ceremony, and whipped afterward with stinging nettles.14 An even more astonishing use of dangerous insects was in the “wasp fights” of the Brazilian Kayapo, in which adult Kayapo males ascended ladders to assault—with their bare hands—huge nests of highly aggressive wasps until the enraged hornets stung them into semi-consciousness. An adult Kayapo man might engage in a dozen of these fights throughout his life. Hornets were also used (and probably still are) in the initiation ceremonies of the Keyo, a Kalenjin-speaking people of Kenya. Here, though, the real pain was inflicted with plants: during the hornet ordeal young Keyo men were also forced to crawl through tunnels woven from stinging nettles, and to have the same plant rubbed into their genitals.15 Even more sadistic ritual use of plants was (and still is) recorded among the Sambian men of New Guinea: not only do uninitiated boys there have stiletto-sharp blades of pitpit cane thrust repeatedly up their nostrils to cause profuse bleeding, they also have three-feet-long loops of vine forced down their throat to induce vomiting, then their glans penis slit with bamboo blades.16
This genital surgery leads us neatly into the second element of Eliade’s ordeal—mutilation. The main function of bodily mutilation appears to be not just extreme pain, but also permanent advertisement of the initiate’s endurance and membership in the initiated group. One of many modern examples is the hot-iron branding used by some African American college fraternity males to advertise their solidarity.17 A more extreme one is the severing of finger segments, used as both a punishment and initiation ritual, among the Japanese boryokudan, known to Westerners as the yakuza.
Another ritual of the boryokudan, incidentally, confirms a curious fact, alluded to by the Sambian initiations: that male mutilatory rituals frequently center on the penis. Twenty percent of incarcerated Japanese boryokudan examined in a survey by the Kumamoto University Department of Legal Medicine, for example, were found to carry a peculiar genital modification: penile balls. This mutilatory ritual, called pearling, sounds excruciating—the subject, or a fellow prisoner, penetrates the foreskin with a sharpened toothpick or paperclip, gouges out a tunnel, then pushes a “pearl” of glass or melted plastic deep into the wound, leaving it there to heal in situ. Yet even this gruesome procedure is a cakewalk compared to the savage penile modifications endured by men in prehistoric times.
Modern circumcision, for example, is often denounced as a barbaric and primitive practice, even generating its own protest group: the International Organisation Against Circumcision Trauma (INTACT). Modern medical circumcisions of adult males, however, are performed under anaesthetic—usually a dorsal penile nerve block—in a ten-minute, low-invasive surgical procedure. Tribal circumcisions, however, often were, and are, excruciatingly long operations performed with no pain relief—this was, in fact, their point. The Keyo circumcision ritual, for example, was not only the culmination of the abusive ceremonies already described, it also required the initiates to stand stock-still while boiyot-ab-tuum (the “old-man-of-the-rite”) skinned their penis from halfway down its shaft using the kibos (“bald-headed knife”), then sliced off any remaining skin and connective tissue with a razor blade;18 finally, the remnant penile skin was yanked forward, a transverse cut made, and the bloodied shaft forced through to make it sit up permanently in semi-erect mode. Incredibly, very few young Keyo males failed this ordeal, though apparently death from blood loss and gangrene were common. Even Keyo circumcision, however, pales beside the sub-incision rite practiced by Australian Aboriginal men throughout the continent’s desert regions. In this rite, still practiced, the underside of the young man’s penis is slit deeply from tip to scrotum (depending on how much pain the initiate can bear) using either an extremely sharp, traditional quartz knife or (these days) a razor blade. The penis then heals open, urethra exposed, leaving it looking something like a pitcher plant flower. How clearly this is a means of permanently advertising status can be seen in the custom of some South Australian tribal men who, on meeting the men of a strange tribe, would press their penises into the palm of each stranger to demonstrate their initiated status.19
A medal, or a chest to pin it on?
The large number of military medals handed out these days seems to give comfort that modern male bravery is alive and well. Only, however, if we assume one not-quite-indisputable fact: that every soldier who gets a medal deserves it.
Some critics point out that, in the United States at least, military decorations show unmistakeable signs of inflation—the tendency to grow until just about everyone gets one. In some cases this is literally true: every U.S. soldier who fought in the first Gulf War got a medal just for showing up, and more medals were handed out for the invasion of Grenada than troops who actually participated.20 It is also now the case that every U.S. soldier who completes boot camp gets a medal for doing so. Even the most revered decorations have not proven uninflatable—one U.S. paratrooper in the 1989 invasion of Panama received a Purple Heart for getting heat stroke.
Interestingly, medals awarded for ultra-heroic bravery—like the Victoria Cross and the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor—have bucked the trend, going down rather than up. The United Kingdom, for example, has awarded just 14 Victoria Crosses since World War II, compared to 1,340 in the 90 years before that. The United States, similarly, has given out just 7 Congressional Medals of Honor (the highest military bravery award) since the Vietnam War, compared to 245 in that conflict. Similarly, 20,000 soldiers in the Vietnam War won Silver Stars (the third-highest award), while just 400 have in the years since.21 The pattern is so striking that the economists who authored the paper revealing it asked, quite justifiably, “Where have all the heroes gone?”
To be fair, heroism is definitely harder for the modern soldier than his World War II comrade. Charge an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) in Iraq, yelling like a banshee, and chances are you’ll wind up dead before onlookers even have a chance to download the Medal of Honor application form. It’s also true that military brass have become deliberately miserly with these awards, partly as a reaction against the free-for-all with lesser medals. Yet the paper’s authors point out that the main cause is a far less noble one. Rising incomes and affluence have vastly increased the “opportunity cost” of dying through heroism. Put simply, modern soldiers have much more to live for than soldiers of their fathers’ generation, and so take the rational, sensible, and completely cowardly decision to make sure they stick around to enjoy it.
Though also a simple cosmetic option for both men and women these days, tattooing remains another body-altering ordeal often used to assert masculine identity. A survey of American military men with tattoos, for example, showed that they considered theirs to both promote in-group solidarity (“all Marines have tattoos”) and advertise the wearer’s ability to suffer the ordeal of getting them (“they !@#$% hurt!”).22 Ancient tattooees, however, would have laughed at such pretensions. New Zealand Maori full-face moko tattoos, for example, were hammered into the tattooee’s skin using bone and stone chisels (which also featured special spatulas to wipe away the copious blood flow) leaving deep, permanent furrows. The process was so painful that several attendants were required to hold the recipient down, and it often left the tattooee so injured that he had to be hand-fed through a funnel for weeks. Traditional Samoan tataus were even more brutal, utilizing inking combs of sharpened human bone that were bashed into the skin with a heavy coconut-palm mallet. Since their main purpose was to demonstrate the bravery of their wearers, they often featured plain areas of solid color from navel to knee as part of their intricate designs, leading early explorers to report that Samoan men wore strange, tight silk breeches. Given that these breeches involved weeks of painful pounding and piercing of the anus, scrotum, penis, and perineum, and the very real threat of death through infection, we can readily acknowledge their wearers were extremely brave. Even the boryokudan—whose association with traditional irezumi tattoos is so marked that many Japanese swimming pools expressly forbid tattooed swimmers so as to keep gangsters out—are wusses in comparison to their painted predecessors. Modern-day yakuza get their full-body irezumi done in Western-style parlors using high-speed inking machines and Western inks. Traditional irezumi, however, were hand-pricked into the boryokudan gangster’s body with iron needles over a period of years by a horishi (tattoo master). The cadmium-based inks used by the horishi apparently caused such extreme pain that even the most stoic of early yakuza could only bear an inch or two of coloring in one session.
Eliade’s third element of initiatory ordeals, the performance of physical feats, is often still part of modern male rituals, too. Mike Carlie describes the “blood-in, blood-out” rule by which prospective American gang members must commit a murder, or other act of violence, to gain entry to the gang (they also, as the name implies, must commit one to get out). This sounds ferocious, yet in the age of firearms such feats are often tame, drive-by affairs posing little risk to the shooter (Carlie reports that even just shooting up an enemy gangbanger’s house-front was often acceptable). Some Papuan tribesmen of the New Guinea highlands in the colonial era, by contrast, could not even marry until they had committed their first murder—by hand, with a ceremonial bone dagger—after which they wore a special homicidal insignia that marked them as initiated killers for the rest of their lives.23 Numerous other tribes and societies historically had even more dangerous initiation tests in which young males had to single-handedly kill savage beasts. Alexander the Great, to quote a famous example, was not allowed a spot on the couch at the Macedonian royal court’s regular drinking symposium until he had speared a wild boar (Sus scrofa, specimens of which reach 550 pounds and can disembowel a man with their ten-inch tusks) without the help of a net. East African Maasai boys initiated into the murran warrior class faced even greater perils. During the olamayio ritual (in fact not solely an initiation rite) they often killed, by hand, full-grown lions. Remarkably, these ritual hunts still take place, and still using spears, though the Maasai have presumably had access to guns for decades now.
If modern male initiation rituals are a shadow of the tortures endured by ancestral males, what about actual torture? How well would modern men withstand the terrifying, grievous mistreatment that males historically endured, either from tribal enemies or cruel overlords? Most of us seem to believe that the new millennium has ushered in a depraved, brave new world of fiendishly refined torture, along with ever more scientifically advanced methods of resisting it. In 2005–06, for example, a scandal erupted in the United States when it emerged that psychologists from the military’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) program, which trains U.S. soldiers to resist torture in the event of capture, had played a role in the creation of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used on detainees at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. According to critics, the sleep deprivation, hypothermia-inducing cold, waterboarding, and stress positions constituted a barbaric new development in the sordid history of torture, though an intriguing rock engraving on the walls of the Addaura Cave in Sicily, dated to approximately 10,000 BCE., clearly shows two men who may be captured warriors bound in a classic stress position, with legs and neck tied together to forcibly arch their backs.24 The SERE-program schools (there are six, distributed between the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force) also boast that graduates of their grueling program of confinement, deprivation, and abuse are better prepared than any other soldiers in history to withstand ill-treatment at the hands of an enemy. Yet, without taking anything away from the suffering of modern POWs, how tough are SERE graduates really?
How, for example, might they fare in comparison to Native American men in pre-contact North America? Native American warriors had a reputation for showing extreme bravery in the face of torture; they had to, since they were also some of the premier torturers of the hunter-gatherer world. (This is sometimes disputed: scalping, for instance, is frequently described as a European import rather than an indigenous Native American practice. A 1980 investigation by William Sturtevant, curator of ethnology at the Smithsonian Institute, however, pointed out that the evidence of a Native American origin of scalping is overwhelming—many pre-contact Native American skulls bear scalping cut marks, and the word itself was not even a verb in English until white settlers saw the practice in America.25) Scalping was not simply a painless procedure inflicted solely on dead enemies. Records show that it was also a torture technique. Jesuit missionaries in the Great Lakes area during the seventeenth century reported that villagers there tortured war captives by scalping them and then heaping hot coals onto their scalped heads. But this was just part of several extensive torture “complexes” that anthropologist Nathaniel Knowles described among eastern Native Americans (torture was not as common on the plains and in the west), differentiated by how the victim was secured for abuse—on a frame, a platform, a pole, or a stake.26 Methods were fiendishly inventive and included: hanging red-hot metal hatchets around the neck; tearing out beards; slitting ears, noses, eyes, and tongues; pulling sinews out of arms; skinning alive; outright burning; burning cords bound around the body; and pincushioning with burning pine splinters. Knowles reported that one Seneca chief had been tortured by the Cherokee by having the soles of his feet burned, hard corn pushed into the blisters, and then being forced to run a gauntlet of warriors attempting to club him to death. Other captives had multiple cuts sliced into their bodies and embers pushed inside the wounds, or were slowly dismembered and disemboweled.
Given such bloodcurdling treatment, defeated Native American warriors might have been forgiven for blubbering all the way to their gory ends. The evidence is, however, that they met them defiantly. The European explorer, trader, and historian James Adair, to give one example, described the firebrand torture of an Iroquois man that he witnessed, saying that the man:
…having unconcernedly suffered much sharp torture…told them with scorn they did not know how to punish a noted enemy, therefore he was willing to teach them…Accordingly he requested of them a pipe and some tobacco, which was given him: as soon as he lighted it, he sat down, naked as he was, on the women’s burning torches that were within his circle and continued smoking his pipe without the least discomposure.27
Similarly, in cases of Iroquois platform torture, which often lasted for days, missionaries reported that victims were expected to, and did, sing and dance the entire time. These “death songs” might be simple, lyrical farewells to the world the victim was shortly to leave, such as the haunting Choctaw song recorded by the poet Jim Barnes (himself part-Choctaw): “When I pass, this prairie will hold my tracks as long as the wind sleeps.”28 More commonly, however, they combined boastful accounts of the war deeds of the victim himself, scornful assertions of his lack of fear, and threats to his torturing enemies of the vengeance his tribe was shortly to wreak. This last—the intense sense of corporate, tribal identity—is probably the key to the incredible endurance of these tortured Native American warriors. Modern SERE instructors, too, emphasize in-group bonds and a sense of shared ordeal as essential for their graduates to withstand enemy abuse.
Whether those same graduates could endure the attentions of an Iroquois platform torturer is, fortunately, a question rarely asked.
Strong corporate identity also helped another group of victims withstand extreme torture—the Roman Christian martyrs (though here religious consolation probably played an even greater role). These were those early adherents of Jesus who, in the four centuries after his death, faced harsh persecution from the Roman Empire. The empire’s torture methods were uniquely brutal. Roman scourging, for example, used bone-and metal-fretted whips like the horribile flagellum (“horrible whip”), which tore off so much flesh its victims often died of blood loss. Criminals and unrepentant Christians might also be sentenced to wear the tunica molesta (“annoying shirt”)—a serious misnomer given the tunica was a naphtha-soaked garment that was set aflame once donned. Similarly, most people are aware of damnatio ad bestias—the practice of throwing Christians to the beasts—but not of what it actually entailed. In addition to being fed to lions, victims of damnatio ad bestias might also be tied to wild boars and gored, staked out in front of an enraged bear, or netted and thrown to a leopard. Women were treated particularly cruelly: as well as being gored by wild bulls they were, according to one writer, also sometimes smeared with the vaginal fluid of cows so as to be raped by them.29 If written accounts are to be believed, however, the early Christians frequently refused to buckle under such torture. The Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, the scrupulously reliable fourth-century church historian, lists examples such as that of the youth Apphianus, who was racked for twenty-four hours, scourged so hard the bones of his ribs and spine showed, and then had his feet soaked in oil and burned to stumps; he still refused to renounce his faith and was drowned in the sea. Another man, Sanctus, had the book of Roman tortures thrown at him, being subjected to such heavy scourging, racking, damnatio ad bestias, and burning from hot brass plates fastened to his body (and particularly, his genitals) that he became “one continued wound, mangled and shrivelled, that had entirely lost the form of a man to the external eye” he, too, held firm, being finally roasted to death on an iron chair.
Raging bulls
Screen boxer Rocky Balboa beat all his opponents with his heart, not his muscle, according to his wife, Adrian. But ancient Tahitian boxers needed the hearts of lions just to get in the ring, so deadly was their version of the sport. The reports of missionary and author William Ellis leave no doubt about how brutal the Tahitian ring could be:
…no time was spent in sparring or parrying the blows…[which] were generally straightforward, severe, and heavy; usually aimed at the head. They fought with the naked fist, and the whole skin of the forehead has been at times torn or driven off at a blow…
Predictably, the injury and death toll from such savage pugilism was substantial. Ellis recorded that Tahitian boxing champions “were proud to boast of the number of men they had maimed and killed.”30
Very few modern males, of course, will ever be subjected to waterboarding at Guantánamo Bay, let alone damnatio ad bestias. But there is one form of torture almost every modern man undergoes: medical treatments. Several studies confirm that the clinical arena is another prime one for displays of masculine bravado. The 2004 General Household Survey of the United Kingdom’s Office of National Statistics, to quote one, reported that English women were twice as likely as men to see a doctor in response to pain.31 Of those men who did go, most expressed supreme confidence in their own stoicism. Amusingly, another survey—this time by the American Journal of Pain in 2001—found that the typical man not only considered himself better able to withstand painful medical procedures than the typical woman, but also than the typical man. This bravado frequently leads men to disdain the use of anesthetics when undergoing medical procedures, as when the International Journal of Men’s Health found that most Australian men undergoing a TRUS-Bx—or trans-rectal ultrasound prostate biopsy (during which needles are punched through the rectal wall to obtain tissue samples)—refused painkillers, even though the pain grew so intense that some almost passed out.32 This sounds impressive, but how does it compare to the medical treatments ancient men suffered, presumably in silence?
You guessed it: terribly. Next to ancestral male patients, we’re about as brave as Scooby-Doo visiting the doggie dentist.
Ancient painkillers, for example, were not only completely ineffective, they were also themselves an ordeal. Woodcarvings from the Necropolis of Saggara, dated to 2500 BCE, show that Egyptian surgery patients had the nerves and arteries near their incision tightly compressed to provide a local-anaesthetic effect. This painful technique provides some relief, but not much: attempts by British surgeon James Moore to revive it through his invention of a femoral-nerve clamp for leg operations in 1784 had to be abandoned when the clamp turned out to cause more pain than the operation.33 The Assyrians used the same technique as a general anaesthetic, compressing the patient’s carotid arteries (in the neck) so as to starve the brain of oxygen, resulting in unconsciousness (the word carotid is Greek for “arteries of sleep”). Though drastic, this was perhaps mild compared to seventeenth-century ships’ surgeons in the British Navy who placed their patient’s head in a wooden bowl and thumped it mightily with a carpenter’s mallet before operating (although this was more to stop the patient’s screams than for anesthetic purposes).
Ancient surgeons did, at some times and in some places, have a few painkilling drugs available. Pedanius Dioscorides, a Greek surgeon in Nero’s army, for instance, wrote of using mandrake root, which contains the anesthetic atropine, when operating on soldiers’ wounds.34 Roman surgeons also had some knowledge of stinking nightshade (a natural sedative) and opium as anesthetics. Medieval Arab physicians used a sponge infused with cannabis resin, which was placed over the nose so patients would inhale the fumes. The problem with all of these, however, as noted by the famous Greek physician Galen, was one of dosage: too little was ineffective, too much could kill (stinking nightshade, for instance, is also known by its Anglo-Saxon name henbane, which means “chicken killer”). The fact that ancient surgical manuals invariably include instructions to bind and forcibly hold the patient down shows that most ancient operations effectively took place without any pain relief whatsoever.
This didn’t stop ancient surgeons from undertaking incredibly brutal procedures, though. Roman surgeons, as well as medieval Arab ones, commonly removed cataracts by piercing the patient’s cornea with a hollow needle to break up the cataract and suck it out, without pain relief. Both also performed limb amputations and the removal of tumors without effective anesthetic. Amputations were such a terrifying procedure that Roman surgeons commonly gave patients a final chance, on the table, to back out; if they signaled they still wished to proceed they were seized by several assistants, held down, and had their limb forcibly amputated no matter what they then screamed. The real essential ingredient in Roman surgical pain management was, apparently, courage—raw, simple courage on the part of the patient. The legendary Roman consul Marius, to quote one famous example, actually underwent surgery to cut the varicose veins out of one leg without anesthetic and also without the customary restraints and bindings. The Roman historian, Pliny the Elder, wrote that Marius maintained an unflinching silence throughout this grisly operation, but declined the surgeon’s offer to devein his other leg, saying he thought the results not quite worth the pain.35
If such fortitude amazes us, imagine the astonishment of the early nineteenth-century European archaeologists who began unearthing skulls dating from the Neolithic (10,000–4000 BCE.) that showed definite signs of trepanation: having holes surgically cut into them and bone removed so as to expose the brain—for magical purposes or to cure headaches, epilepsy, and other ailments. Their amazement was not because trepanation was unknown to them—it was a technique that had been abandoned in pre-antiseptic European medicine due to its almost 100 percent mortality rate. What surprised them was that many of the trepanned Neolithic skulls showed signs of bone healing, indicating, incredibly, that their patients had survived. Some, indeed, had multiple trepanation holes in various stages of healing, implying they lived for years after some operations. Survival rates of this primitive skull surgery are hard to calculate, but current estimates range from 50 to 90 percent. This does not mean the procedure was a mild one, however. The evidence of trepanned skulls shows four basic methods: scraping, where the scalp and skull were gradually scraped away with a sharp-edged stone; grooving or sawing, where a circle or square was repeatedly sawn in with a pointed stone or arrowhead; drilling, where a circle of closely spaced holes was drilled with a bone or stone awl; and chiseling, where a square of intersecting incisions was hammered into the bone (in Polynesia this was done with a shark’s tooth and wooden mallet).36 These excruciating operations generally lasted about an hour, though in some tribes, like the Algerian Kabyles, they took almost twenty days. Incredibly, these brutal procedures seem to have been not at all uncommon. Not only have prehistoric trepanned skulls been found in Africa, Australia, ancient China, the Americas, and the Pacific islands, the operation was also apparently performed on many individuals in each group. On the Polynesian island of Uvea, for example, 100 percent of the adult males were trepanned. On other Polynesian islands children are known to have been almost as frequently trepanned, simply as a preventative health tonic. In almost all cases the operation seems to have been done without anesthetic—the exception being prehistoric Peru, where surgeons dribbled a mixture of saliva and chewed coca leaves onto the patient’s scalp prior to operating.
In all likelihood, trepanation was not the only surgical operation that prehistoric males endured without pain relief. Archaeological evidence of such surgery is rare (it usually involves soft tissues, which are not preserved), so our knowledge is limited to recent hunter–gatherer societies. Even here, though, it is clear that patients often endured excruciating procedures without anesthetic. Those Polynesian trepanners, for example, also employed their shark-tooth chisels as scalpels in cutting tuberculous glands out of sufferers’ necks and castrating scrotums swollen from elephantiasis (a grotesque thickening of the skin caused by parasitic worms). Then there was the sophisticated but brutal surgery endured by Maasai patients. Being an extremely violent warrior culture, the Maasai developed such skill in wound repair that their society came to include a specialized caste of surgeons. Among the procedures performed without painkillers by these skilled medicos were: eyeball removal, bone resections, tendon lengthening, excision of lymph glands, and deep intestinal operations such as hernia correction and removal of abscesses on the liver and spleen. Perhaps less impressive in terms of surgical skill, though more so in patient bravery, were the amputations performed by Australian Aboriginals on their wounded warriors. The Assistant Colonial Surgeon of Western Australia, Reverend H. Wollaston, for instance, described in the late nineteenth century an Aboriginal amputee he met whose leg:
…had been severed just below the knee and charred by fire, while about [two inches] of calcined bone protruded through the flesh…On inquiry the native told him that in a tribal fight a spear had struck his leg and penetrated the bone…he and his companions made a fire and dug a hole in the earth sufficiently large to admit his leg…The limb was then surrounded with live coals or charcoal, and kept replenished until the leg was literally burnt off.37
Incredibly, Wollaston also reports that this man was up and walking two days later, and had traveled, with the aid of a stick, some sixty miles to see him. Admittedly, this method of amputation sounds barbaric, but just one hundred years earlier it had also been European practice to cauterize amputated limb stumps in boiling oil. Similarly, the death rate from European lower-limb amputations frequently exceeded 75 percent—a level even such brutal tribal amputations might find hard to match.38
But if the ordeals that ancient and tribal men endured at the hands of their fellow men make modern ones look about as tough as a Indian rug burn, what about ordeals involving wild animals? Hunting has been the traditional avenue for displays of bravado since Stone Age hunters in Turkey circa 7000 BCE depicted themselves slaying aurochs (an ancient species of aggressive wild cattle) six times the size of any that ever lived before or since.39 Xenophon, the fourth-century BCE Greek soldier-historian, for example, described hunting as an essential test of courage and preparation for the manly art of war. U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt, himself a famed hunter in the Dakota Badlands, agreed, urging American males in his 1902 work Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches to prove their masculinity against the wild beasts of nature. U.S. Census Bureau statistics show they obeyed: by 1980 over 16 million Americans held valid hunting licenses. Among certain subsets of men, such as Michigan autoworkers, hunting numbers were even higher, sometimes reaching 30 percent of all males aged twenty-five to forty-four. These modern American huntsmen commonly list the thrill of danger and the challenge of overcoming a worthy animal adversary among their motivations. Yet how dangerous is modern hunting really?
How often, to put it another way, does the animal win?
Not very, is the short answer. If we define winning as escaping, apparently very few animals manage that: The Fund for Animals reports that hunters kill over 100 million animals annually in North America—with doves, squirrels, pheasants, and deer being the most bagged trophies. If we define winning as inflicting injury or death on the hunter, animals come off even worse: injuries to hunters by animals in the United States are apparently so rare that statistics on them aren’t directly collected (they have to be extrapolated from general animal-attack statistics). About the only animals capable of seriously injuring hunters are bears, of which American shooters kill an average twenty-four thousand annually; yet according to the Alaska Science Center, just nine hunters died from bear attacks in Alaska over the twenty-odd years from 1980 to 2002. The main source of danger to American hunters, in fact, has traditionally been other hunters, but even this threat is now greatly diminished—while thirty-five hunters were shot by other huntsmen in Michigan in 1940, this number had dropped to just three by 2005. Pretty mild stuff, clearly, but how does it stack up against the hunting exploits of our prehistoric and tribal ancestors?
By this stage I was almost afraid to ask.
The ferocious hunting habits of the Neandertals, for example, have already been noted. Recent studies have revealed just why they hunted huge animals such as mammoths, woolly rhinos, bison, and wild horses—Neandertals were top-level predators with an awesome appetite for meat. In 2005 paleoanthropologist Steve Churchill calculated the probable caloric requirement of Neandertal males: they came in at 4,500–5,000 calories (21,000 kilojoules) per day, or almost three times that of modern Western men (due to the Neandertals’ strenuous lifestyle and large physiques).40 This translates to about 4.5 pounds of meat per male per day, or 1 whole caribou each per month. With those appetites Neandertal males clearly needed something bigger than the occasional hamster to snack on.
Giant animals, however, also fought hard, which accounts for that high level of head and neck fractures among Neandertal males. The fact that these injuries must have come from close-quarters confrontations with thrashing horses, mammoths, and woolly rhinos, though, begs the question: why didn’t Neandertal hunters throw their spears from afar (like their modern hunting brethren), rather than attack the animals by hand? The answer seems to be that their hyper-robust bodies may have inhibited their throwing ability. A 1990 University of New Mexico study, for example, found that the sturdy Neandertal scapula, or shoulder blade, probably restricted the rotation of their arms.41 My personal feeling is that the shortened limbs of Neandertals probably played a part, too. In this case leverage would have operated against them, since their shorter arms reduced both their mechanical advantage and throwing velocity. Evidence for this can be seen in a 1999 study of modern cricket fast bowlers, which found that the fastest were invariably those with the longest arms. Every extra four inches at the wrist, in fact, gave a 3.6 yards-per-second increase in ball speed.42 This, incidentally, was also the reason for the blitzkrieg of West Indian super-quick bowlers who terrorized world cricket in the 1970s and 1980s: not only did greats like Courtney Walsh, Joel Garner, and Colin Croft average 63 in height, their African ancestry also gave them disproportionately longer arms. It’s the flipside of Allen’s law: organisms living in hot (tropical) environments tend to have longer limbs to aid heat loss.
Ironically, the fact that we Homo sapiens are descended from tropical Africans is probably the reason our hunters have become such wimps. The first Homo sapiens in Europe, around forty thousand years ago, had those same long African arms (though they shortened somewhat over time as they adapted to the cold conditions of Ice Age Europe) and were thus possibly better adapted for throwing spears than Neandertals, and better able to avoid their rampaging prey. With the invention of the spear-thrower (which, by increasing leverage, almost doubles a spear’s velocity) around 15,000 BCE, Homo sapiens were able to keep even further away. This then began a technological stampede toward progressively longer-range projectile weapons: bows and arrows, blowpipes, muskets, and, finally, modern high-powered firearms. The crowning dishonor in our rush to distance ourselves from any possible danger from our prey, however, has to be the Internet. In 2007–08, thirty-five U.S. states were forced to ban hunters from accessing new Web sites through which, for a fee, a live trophy animal was lured to a feeding station in front of a gun that the hunter could aim and fire remotely via the World Wide Web. Groups opposing this new “sport” (many of which, to be fair, were pro-hunting bodies) argued that Web hunting, from hundreds or thousands of miles away, “violated the ethics of a fair chase.”
You don’t say?
In direct contrast to our standoffish hunting ways, however, there are still places in the world where men hunt very dangerous animals from close quarters indeed. Pygmy peoples of the Central African rainforests, for example, still hunt aggressive forest elephants by hand with a short, stabbing spear. Author Kevin Duffy, in his 1984 book Children of the Forest, described how a modern Mbuti Pygmy tuma, “great elephant hunter,” tracks and kills his giant prey. First he plasters his face with black paste, believing this will lead the elephant, if it sees him, to think him a chimpanzee and ignore him. Then he tracks the elephant through the forest at a furious pace, sometimes for days. When he finally locates it, the tuma creeps up by utmost stealth (elephants have incredibly acute hearing and sense of smell) to stand under its belly—the only place where his spear can plunge in deeply, unimpeded by bone. After a quick thrust, the hunter has just split seconds to leap clear of the giant’s lethal trunk (blows from elephant trunks killed several zookeepers around the world in 2007 and 2008). Then he tracks the animal anew, sometimes again for days, until it either dies or weakens enough to be attacked once more.
Got the guts
According to anthropologist Patrick Putnam, after a Pygmy tuma elephant hunt even Pygmy boys far too young to hunt were required to prove their bravery, albeit in more unorthodox ways. Putnam pointed out that by the time the tuma reached his kill’s corpse, it was often bloated with decomposition gases. These were employed to surprising effect, he said, when:
…a man other than the elephant hunter cuts a square of skin off the elephant’s side…until he comes down to a point where the body wall is very thin…then a small male child, squalling and screaming, is thrust on the elephant’s side; he is told to bite, which he does, and the balloon bursts…the ceremony is…especially repugnant to the child, who does not enjoy having the whole rotten insides of the elephant burst in his face.43
Sadly, the story may be apocryphal, since Putnam, although a dedicated and preeminent anthropologist, was also a noted eccentric given to occasional eruptions of hot vaporings himself.
An even more incredible feat of close-quarters hunting is the lion killing of the Maasai tribe referred to earlier. According to nineteenth-century British colonial engineer Frederic Shelford, the bravest of the Maasai olamayio hunters actually grabbed the lion by its tail and drove his spear through its body from haunches to chest. This is particularly impressive considering that lions are supremely strong: feline muscle is, pound-for-pound, the strongest in the animal world.
The verdict, it seems, is in—from enduring torture and terrifying treatments to facing initiation and hunting ordeals, we moderns are shadows of the men we never were. Of course, the fact that we don’t bravely face such ordeals doesn’t prove we can’t. For most of us, everyday opportunities to face real peril have almost evaporated (which is partly why teenage males manufacture such foolish ones). The prime reason for this seems to be our affluence. The basic drive behind bravado has always been the male’s quest to better himself—in worldly goods, prestige, or the reproductive stakes. In tribal societies, the avenues open to striving males were few, and invariably fraught with enemies and dangers that simply couldn’t be avoided. Today, in our rich and diversified economies, opportunities for advancement and escape routes have multiplied dramatically. Tribal New Guinean “trash men”—low-status warriors who lacked wealth, prestige, and family connections—were known to fight with suicidal courage in clan wars, simply because it was their only chance of acquiring social standing. Modern males, if thwarted in their climb up the career ladder, simply move to another job, or even another occupation.
Another cultural contributor to our waning bravery is probably male–male segregation. As that University of Maine study showed, bravado displays are primarily a form of communication among males. Increasingly, though, those males are now isolated from one another—by the nuclear family, workplace specialization, and (paradoxically) improved communication technologies such as video-conferencing. The band of brothers has been dissolved, and our bravado instinct, thus deprived of its audience, is atrophying. It is no coincidence, for example, that modern displays of reckless courage are generally performed by adolescent and postadolescent males. True, this is partly a physical phenomenon attributable to the fifty-times increase in testosterone levels that pubescent males experience, combined with the lag in development of their prefrontal cortices (responsible for planning and goal setting). But it’s also probably a product of audience availability. The school, university, or entry-level work environments they inhabit are almost the last places in the modern world where men gather in appreciable numbers. The decline in young males’ risk-taking behavior from age twenty-five onward may not, in fact, be just due to falling testosterone, but also to reduced opportunities to form the male–male bonds that bravado is all about.
Yet for all that our cowardice may be culturally governed, doesn’t mean it won’t eventually write itself into our genes. Experiments in animal breeding, for example, have found that behavior can become genetically encoded in as few as two or three generations, and firmly fixed after ten to twenty. All that would be needed would be a selective mechanism by which bravery genes were dropped from the gene pool and cowardly ones retained. Is there any such selective mechanism? The answer is yes…and no. It is unlikely that sexually selective pressures for altruistic bravery will ease, since women demand it so consistently of their mates. (It’s also hard to see them changing in this—how could it benefit a female to breed with males who won’t protect their brood?) The selective landscape for non-heroic bravery—bravado—however, has been transformed. Not only is its raison d’être disappearing through the isolation of males from one another, it is also becoming lethal. Barred from our ancestral channels for displaying bravado (like facing down wild animals and undergoing ordeals), young men now do so through such frequently fatal means as train surfing and drunk driving. World Health Organization figures from 2007 show that car accidents are now the leading cause of death for men aged fifteen to nineteen worldwide. The fact that far fewer young females die in such crashes shows they are not just accidents—young male bravado is clearly a major cause. This being the case, it will take some pretty stunning advances in road-safety technology to stop bravado being literally smashed out of Homo masculinus modernus in a very short time indeed.
“But wait a minute,” I hear several outraged readers belatedly protest. “If we modern men are so cowardly, what accounts for the inexorably rising tide of male violence on TV and in newspapers? It takes courage to fight, so wouldn’t that prove we are just as brave, or foolhardy, as those males who have gone before us?”
Well, yes it would—if it were true. But is it?
Admittedly, in some ways it certainly seems to be. Consider combat sports, for example. Where once the gentlemanly sport of boxing brought fighting violence into our living rooms, now the supposedly deadly, barbaric sport of ultimate fighting does. This fighting style is considered so extreme that even Senator John McCain, no mean boxer himself, once called it “human cockfighting.” Yet how extreme is Ultimate Fighting, really? How would the code’s fighters fare if we introduced some real hard men into their cage: ancient and tribal brawlers like the original Greek Olympian boxers, say, or South America’s Yanomami Indian axe-fighters? And heck, since we’re making a night of it, why not throw in a solid undercard, too? Let’s rope in the ultimate fighting soldier as well, the U.S. Special Forces warrior, to go mano-a-mano with the original “black ops” experts: the medieval Japanese shinobi, or ninjas. Throw in, too, for good measure, a rumble between the would-be baddest terrorist on the planet, Osama bin Laden, and a horde of genuine, bloodcurdling horrors from the wastelands of the Asian steppe, Genghis Khan and his Mongols, and this is starting to look like a fight.
Be warned though, all those queuing for a front-row seat. Don’t wear white. Because by the time this is done we can guarantee you won’t be.