Play Ball
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
Heraclitus, fifth century BC
Play is a funny thing to get serious about. When you think about it, asking why we play ball or any other game violates the most basic rule of all—what could be called the rule of Nike: just do it. When a child is invited by a friend to pretend she’s a penguin or under attack by aliens from outer space, she doesn’t ask why. She happily begins to waddle and flap her wings or dives in a panic behind the couch to avoid enemy phaser guns. We even have a term for the kid or adult who breaks the rules of play and ruins it for everyone else: spoilsport, which the psychologist William James famously traces back to the shah of Persia visiting England and stuffily declining an invitation to the Epsom Derby, reasoning, “It is already known to me that one horse can run faster than another.”
Though they exist on different ends of the play spectrum, both the shah-spoilsport and the girl-penguin under alien attack would probably agree on one thing: play is silly. Or in the academic phrasing of evolutionary psychologist Gordon Burghardt, play is “of limited immediate function.” Over the years, scholars of play (yes, there are such people) have tried to outdo each other in articulating the pointlessness of this essential human activity. Carl Diem described it as “purposeless activity, for its own sake.” The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga characterized play as being “not serious” and an activity “connected with no material interest.” But the hands-down winner was Roger Caillois, a French intellectual who defined it as “an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money,” before proceeding to waste another 200 pages writing about it.
Anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and ethologists have all taken a turn at defining play. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, even Tom took a pass at it. After managing to trade the pleasure of whitewashing his Aunt Polly’s 30-yard-long front fence for an apple, a kite, a dead rat on a string, a tin soldier, and a dozen other treasures—all by making fence painting look like the most fun a boy could ever have on a summer’s afternoon—he mused that “work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”
The psychiatrist Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute of Play, admits that defining play is as bad as explaining a joke, but dissects the punch line nevertheless. In his schema, play tends to be characterized by seven properties—none of which will shock the nonscientific community:
1. It’s voluntary (something you’re “not obliged to do”).
2. It’s got what he calls “inherent attraction.” In other words, it’s “fun.” (Try defining that!)
3. It gives us “freedom from time.” When we play, we’re in a state of flow and time flies.
4. We experience “diminished consciousness of self.” That is, we lose ourselves in the moment.
5. It’s all about improvisation, make-believe, invention.
6. It sparks a “continuation desire” in us. As every parent knows, we never want to stop playing.
7. It’s “apparently purposeless.”
Yet we all play. People in every culture and through all recorded time have played. It’s at the core of creativity and innovation and the source of some of our greatest joy and pleasure. It’s an essential part of what makes us human. But as anyone who’s ever watched kittens wrestle a ball of yarn or spent time in a dog park knows well, the innate drive to play—even the attraction to playing with balls—runs deep in the animal kingdom. Animals, as Huizinga pointed out, “have not waited for man to teach them their playing.”
Dogs, like most other mammals, have their own language of play that scientists have only begun to decode. My puppy will approach another dog with a ceremonial bow, crouching on his forelegs and raising his hind end in the air while barking and wagging his tail. According to Marc Bekoff, an ethologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who’s studied dogs and their wild counterparts for 30 years, these are fixed communication signals that dogs use to establish what he calls a “play mood”—their way of saying, “Hey! I’m here to play.” What follows looks an awful lot like fighting, as dogs bite each other, growl, bare teeth, and tussle on the ground in mock combat. But, says Bekoff, dogs use bows and other signals continuously throughout these bouts to reassure their playmates, as if to say, I’m sorry I just bit you hard, but it was all in good fun.
So play is on the one hand frivolous and on the other hand universal. Out in the wild, play also consumes vital energy and puts animals at seemingly pointless risk of predation or injury. Studies of young mammals have shown that they expend up to 15 percent of their calories playing—calories they might otherwise use to further their growth and development. Other research and anecdotes of animal injury and even death in the course of play give biological credence to our mothers’ classic warning that as kids we all rolled our eyes at: “It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.”
One of the most dramatic recorded incidents of “death by play” involved seal pups frolicking off the coast of Peru in 1988. Robert Harcourt, a zoologist at Macquarie University in Australia, observed an attack by southern sea lions on more than 100 seal pups. As Harcourt reported, 22 of the 26 pups killed were caught up in playing in the shallow tidal pools right before the attack and didn’t seem to notice they were under attack until it was too late.
What seems at first blush to be a simple question turns out to be one that has dogged biologists since Darwin. The neuroscientist Melvin Konner has called play “a central paradox of evolutionary biology.” How can humans and other mammals have evolved, over millions of years, a set of shared behaviors that squander valuable energy, make them vulnerable to injury or attack, and yet produce no obvious material benefit? I decided to go straight to the source to find the answer: the human brain . . . by way of Florida.
The main strip in Panama City Beach has seen more than its share of “apparently purposeless behavior” leading to “diminished consciousness of self” over the years. Thankfully, on the September afternoon when I arrived the only traces left of spring break bacchanalia were the half-price beer bongs in the Purple Haze Emporium. Hurricane Fred, the sixth of the season, had just swept through, and a steady rain was foiling the few budget travelers hoping to lounge on the beach.
I found Gulf World Marine Park just past life-size plastic statues of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, next to the Steak ’n Shake. Gulf World, a seaside attraction since 1969, is an old-school marine park that features penguins, sea otters, sharks, and a ragtag cast of performing animals, including Russell the Crow. As the regional hub for the Marine Mammal Stranding Network, the park serves as a long-term rehab center for dolphins and small whales that have been beached by storms or illness. And the marine park is home to the only group of rough-toothed dolphins under human care in North America. Rough-toothed dolphins, or Steno bredanensis, are smaller and have longer beaks than the more common bottlenose dolphins. They are also more playful, which has brought scientist Stan Kuczaj back to Gulf World regularly for the past six years. Stan is a professor of psychology at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he runs the Marine Mammal Behavior and Cognition Laboratory. Specializing in both childhood development and dolphin cognition, he is one of a small but growing group of scientists working to unravel the paradox of play. Through a wide variety of studies across disciplines, from neuroscience to behavioral psychology, these researchers are finding evidence to suggest that play not only has a purpose but may serve a critical role in cognitive development and adaptation in humans and other mammals.
I figured if I was going to answer Aidan’s question about ball play, I needed to start at the source, or as close to the source as I could reasonably get. I needed to understand why play exists in the first place.
I met up with Stan by the pukka necklace display in Gulf World’s gift shop. Thin and tan with wire-rimmed glasses and a nervous smile, the 59-year-old self-described “dolphin nerd” presents the perfect blend of beach bum and lab scientist that you might expect from a guy who studies dolphin cognition for a living. Waving the marine park equivalent of a backstage pass, he whisked me through the employees entrance and around the back of the small stadium, where a dolphin show had just ended. The backstage pool was roiling with energy, water lapping over the sides and washing over our feet.
“I just love these guys,” said Stan, clearly delighted to be back with his fun-loving subjects.
The seven dolphins chased each other full tilt around the pool. A funny way to relax after a performance, I thought. Having experienced the classic dolphin show myself, complete with hoop jumping and synchronized breaching, I had always assumed that they stopped playing the minute the spectators left the stands and the buckets of herring ran empty. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Stan zeroed in on this group of rough-toothed dolphins for his research because they play more often, longer, and with more vigor than other dolphins (and most other mammals for that matter). Kevin Walsh, the owner of Gulf World, refers to them affectionately as “Tursiops on crack” (Tursiops being the Latin name for the bottlenose dolphin). The young trainers who spend the most time with the animals and know each one’s idiosyncrasies intimately shared their own tales of dolphin hijinks. Quite often, when they’ve divided the dolphins into separate pools, the trainers report, they’ll return the next morning to find them all in one pool again, having leapt out and shimmied 30 feet across the pool deck to reunite with their friends.
Then there’s the inexplicable behavior. “I’ve come by at night and seen all seven floating upright and looking up at the sky,” said one trainer. “We don’t know what they’re doing, but we like to say they’re communing with the mother ship.”
Stan has been studying the animals both in the wild and in captivity for nearly 20 years. He began his career studying child language use but got hooked on dolphins while assisting a colleague’s research in Hawaii. He never looked back. Stan’s unique, cross-species experience has allowed him to look at the phenomenon of play from a broad evolutionary perspective. In conversation, he toggles seamlessly between discussions of controlled experiments conducted in dolphin tanks and Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, which addresses the four stages children pass through in acquiring and using knowledge.
Over the years, Stan and his fellow researchers have documented elaborate play behaviors among dolphins. As with humans, dolphin play can be solitary or social. Both in the wild and in captivity, they’ll play with their own or another dolphin’s bubbles. In the ocean they’ll play chasing games together or one will dislodge a sponge and play with it alone for 15 or 20 minutes.
They’ve watched young dolphins taking turns pushing each other along the surface of the water, one on his side and the other nosing him sideways through the water, sometimes at rapid speeds. Then they’ll switch places so one of the pushers gets to be the “pushee,” a move that requires a high degree of social cooperation.
While snorkeling, Stan once watched two adult dolphins and one young dolphin playing together with a plastic six-pack holder. One swam toward the others with the plastic trailing from his pectoral fin. Within minutes, the three were voluntarily passing the plastic back and forth without any attempt to grab or steal it. Then the game changed. One dolphin swam ahead of the others with the plastic on his fin and let it go in the water. The second swam up, caught the plastic, and swam forward before releasing it to the third.
Stan is particularly interested in evidence such as this, which suggests cooperation and communication as well as shared “rules” of engagement, the kind of advanced behavior that dolphins depend upon for foraging and defending against predators. What his research tells him is that play is anything but trivial and purposeless, but may in fact be essential to adaptation and survival.
Research on nonhuman animals suggests that play is not only critical to our health and socialization but also affects the growth and development of our brains. In one study, rats isolated during the period of juvenile development when they play the most were far less socially adept than their nonisolated peers well into adulthood. In another study, researchers allowed 13 rats to play freely together while 14 other rats were kept in isolation. After three and a half days, the brains of the playful rats were found to contain much higher levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a protein that stimulates nerve growth in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, areas associated with emotions and decision making. Animals that play are, in other words, smarter and more socially intelligent than those that don’t.
A recent study conducted by scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that playing also helps humans develop adaptive cognitive skills. They recruited 36 students, male and female, half of whom were varsity athletes across a variety of sports and half of whom were healthy nonathletes. For the experiment, each student was put on a treadmill surrounded by large video screens. Goggles gave the video images real-world dimensions and feel. They found themselves navigating a busy cityscape and were charged with walking, not running, across a busy intersection without getting mowed down by cars passing at 40 to 55 miles per hour. The athletes completed more crossings than the nonathletes by a significant margin, and not because they were quicker or more physically agile. “They didn’t move faster,” said the study leader. “But it looks like they thought faster.” Athletes, the study suggests, have a cognitive advantage when it comes to processing visual and other information quickly enough to respond rapidly. A running back in football trying to make his way through the other team’s defense needs to make lightning-quick decisions while responding in real time to the cues of every other player on the field. That not only takes physical agility; it takes mental agility as well.
Neuroscientist Sergio Pellis of the University of Lethbridge in Canada and his colleagues have found that there’s a direct correlation between brain size and playfulness in mammals. They measured brain size and recorded play behaviors in 15 species of mammals and found that the species with relatively large brains played a lot more than their small-brained counterparts.
The evolutionary lines that eventually led to dolphins and humans diverged in the Mesozoic Age, more than 95 million years ago, at a time when dinosaurs still roamed Earth. Despite being virtually unrelated to humans, dolphins are by every measure among the most playful of animals, second only to humans in this department. And it’s almost certainly no coincidence that they are also second only to humans when it comes to their brain-to-body size, or encephalization quotient. EQ is defined by neuroscientist and behavioral biologist Lori Marino as “a measure of observed brain size relative to the expected brain size derived from a regression of brain weight on body weight for a sample of species.” The EQ value for modern humans is 7.0. Dolphins have EQ levels close to 4.5, while our closest relatives, the great apes, have levels of only 1.5 to 3. Scientists have found some correlation between EQ value and the degree to which animals are inclined to play. Dolphins and humans, Marino says, “share a psychology.” You could say we’re both uniquely hardwired to play hard.
At poolside, Stan made some quick introductions. Vixen, he pointed out, can be identified by the perpetual rash on her neck caused by laying her head on the edge of the pool. Astro’s tail is crooked from scoliosis. Noah has pink freckles on his chest. And so on. Once I’d been told who was who, Stan walked up to a rack filled with a random array of objects—buoys of various shapes and colors, plastic pool fencing, sections of Styrofoam mats, orange traffic cones, plastic rings, and a small blue and white basketball.
“Let’s give them some toys to play with,” he said, grabbing a noodle. “These guys are crazy about their toys.”
We began grabbing objects and throwing them in. The pool erupted with energy. Vixen darted off with the chain of pool fencing wrapped around her fin. Largo started pushing a mat through the water, then jumping on top of it to make a slapping sound, then pushing it to the pool’s bottom. I threw in a blue and white ball that Ivan and Noah instantly began pushing around the pool with their noses, dodging, faking, and reversing direction to keep the ball from their opponent. They then took turns diving to the bottom and then rocketing to the surface to knock the ball high in the air, breaching behind it before slapping back down on the water.
Dolphins are extraordinary athletes. Along with having high EQs and a relentless urge to play, they are built to perform. They can achieve speeds of up to 20 miles per hour. They can dive as deep as 1,000 feet and stay down for 30 minutes at a stretch. They navigate and locate each other, along with predators and prey, through echolocation—producing sound waves that bounce off objects and bring back detailed information on distance, location, and shape. Dolphins, Stan says, can locate and retrieve an object the size of a golf ball at a football field’s distance. With that lethal combination of speed, spatial prowess, and hunger to play, I thought, the Miami Dolphins would not only sail into the Super Bowl but would finally live up to the promise of their name.
After a few minutes of playing with the ball, Ivan managed to flip it out of the pool right where I was standing. I picked it up and threw it back in. Ivan chased it down and then initiated the dolphin equivalent of a game of fetch. He’d push it all the way back to me, I’d reach into the pool, pick it up, and throw it back in. After doing this repeatedly for nearly five minutes, I got distracted by another dolphin and turned away. So this time he not only brought the ball back but then smacked it out of the water with his nose, sending it whizzing past my head. Clearly he meant business.
The game had gone from just chasing, to playing fetch, to knocking the ball out of the water back to the thrower with line drives that became more precise each time. Largo soon abandoned his mat and joined the game, adding a competitive dimension. In just ten minutes, what had begun as a frenzy of free play had evolved into a disciplined and competitive interspecies ball game with an unspoken but mutually understood set of rules.
Where I saw the rudimentary foundations of sport, Stan sees the development and maintenance of flexible problem-solving skills that dolphins depend on in the wild. His observations of Ivan, Largo, and other captive dolphins lead him to believe that they use play to continuously test and challenge themselves, constantly tweaking the “rules” to sharpen their cognitive skills. He uses Piaget’s concept of “moderately discrepant events” to describe this phenomenon. Dolphins, like Piaget’s child subjects, learn about their world and expand their physical and cognitive abilities by slightly modifying the rules of their play to make them incrementally more stimulating. This is how both dolphins and humans play and learn.
The evolving poolside ball game was serving as what Marc Bekoff calls “brain food” for Ivan, Largo, and their friends. The dolphins, responding to my cues and initiating variations in play themselves, were flexing their cognitive muscles, perfecting motor skills, and manipulating their watery environment in ways that could eventually be put to the test in the wild.
It’s hardly a coincidence that the object at the center of all the pool action was a ball. According to Stan, balls are the hands-down favorite toy of dolphins, as they so often are for people. In a controlled study of the play behaviors of 16 captive dolphins conducted over a five-year period, he found that they were far more likely to initiate spontaneous play with balls than with other objects, with bubbles, or even with each other. Why balls?
Well, if play is brain food, then ball play is like a high-protein, calorie-packed energy bar. The ball may be one of the most animate of inanimate objects in our material world. As I watched Largo and Ivan laugh and splash and leap after their colorful ball while the other dolphins dragged mats and ropes around the pool, I coined my own term to describe balls as objects: kinetically interesting. Balls can bounce, roll, be struck, thrown and caught fairly easily at a wide range of speeds. They are highly aerodynamic and yet unpredictable in their trajectory, capable in the hands of a deft knuckleball pitcher of appearing to defy the laws of physics.
Balls are also by nature social tools. They draw animals and humans together, inviting either cooperation or competition or, as in most sports, some dynamic combination of the two. “I throw or kick to you, you throw or kick it back” is very different than “you grab the ball and try to keep it from me.” But both involve tacit agreement around the rules of fair play. Vanessa Woods, a researcher with the Hominoid Psychology Research Group, spent time playing with bonobo chimpanzees in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and experienced both responses.
“We were looking at the social dimensions of bonobo tool use,” she told me. “We had this bright pink ball that the chimps just loved. The question we asked was, were they just going to steal it and run away? Or would they get the idea that this is a shared experience and now we’re going to play together. So the big test was if we threw the ball to them, would they throw it back?”
Some of the bonobos just ran off with the prized possession and didn’t get the social part of it at all. “For them, it was the equivalent of throwing a Wii to a group of kids,” Vanessa said. “They’d fight over it and whoever got it first would run off with it.” I paused to contemplate such a scene with Aidan and his friends and instantly got the distinction.
Two of the bonobos in the research group took to the game right away. One chimp threw the ball back with his hands, then with his feet, and then experimented with other throws. He’d then clap his hands and wait for it to be thrown back.
“When the experiment was done,” Vanessa said, “he’d throw a tantrum like a kid would do: he’d tug at your arm, make all kinds of noise, and would try slapping the ball out of your hands even.”
Animals that depend on learning for survival all play. It’s how knowledge and experience are passed from parent to child, enabling a safe space where limits can be tested and new ideas and innovations can get a dry run. “In a dangerous world,” wrote Diane Ackerman, “where dramas change daily, survival belongs to the agile, not the idle.”
At the pool, the head trainer reluctantly interrupted our game. Vixen, Largo, and friends had a performance coming up and needed a break from the action. We gathered up all the toys and assembled them back on the rack. The dolphins got agitated, slapping the water with their fins, as though disappointed at the fun ending—“continuation desire” at work. Vixen rested her head sullenly on the side of the pool and looked instantly bored as we headed out front to find seats in the rapidly filling stadium. Ten minutes later, throbbing rock music signaled the start of the show. The dolphins swam in and were soon jumping through hoops, doing synchronized tail slaps, leaping and landing in unison, sending huge waves of water into the front row and soaking delighted audience members. Their eyes were then covered to show off their ability to use echolocation to find and retrieve several tossed rings. After each trick, the trainers shoveled a handful of herring into the dolphins’ mouths. They seemed to be enjoying themselves as they hungrily devoured the fish and showed off their skills to the cheering audience. It was a great show, and exhilarating to watch. Yes, it was regimented, rehearsed, rewarded, and therefore entirely different than our backstage games. The equivalent, you might say, of a Little League championship versus a pickup game with friends.
As they did their tricks and earned their dinner, their secret was safe with me: herring or no, they’d be playing just as hard.
So when did we put it all together? Who first spoke those magical words “Play ball”? In what language were they uttered? Or were balls kicked and rolled and thrown for fun and competition long before there were even words to describe the rules or capture the play-by-play?
Since the drive to play and even to invent rudimentary games is undeniably pre-human, it is almost certain that our earliest hominid ancestors were capable of it on some level. It is also likely that it was in part through play, through testing our limits and innovating solutions, that we adapted to changing environments and evolved into our modern form. For this reason, Huizinga believed that Homo ludens, Man the Player, deserves his due alongside Homo sapiens, Man the Thinker. We play, therefore we are.
Until recently, however, the common wisdom was that play was purely an act of leisure (leisure being the opposite of work) and therefore an invention of civilization. The lives of our earliest ancestors and, by extension, of contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes were seen as an all-out grind from sunrise to sunset. Every ounce of expendable energy went into bagging the next deer, or gathering wild vegetables, or defending against predators, leaving no reserves for anything as frivolous as the playing of games (or, for that matter, arts, science, etc.). This is a compelling story that makes our great march toward civilization feel satisfyingly linear, virtuous, and inevitable. As we evolved, we not only got smarter but also had more fun. But it turns out not to be true.
In the 1960s, anthropologist Richard Lee spent time among the !Kung bushmen of Africa’s Kalahari Desert and found that their hunter-gatherer lifestyle wasn’t the “precarious and arduous struggle for existence” we all imagined it to be. !Kung women, who—big shocker—worked harder than the men, could gather enough food in one day to feed their families for three, spending the rest of their time resting, visiting neighbors, entertaining—enjoying some measure of leisure, in other words. Their husbands, meanwhile, had it even better. It turns out that hunters, as the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins famously put it, “keep bankers’ hours.”
The Australian Aborigines present the perfect example of a leisure-rich hunter-gatherer culture that historically played a wide variety of sports, including ball games. A diverse collection of groups that once spoke as many as 300 distinct languages, the Aborigines have traditionally been hunter-gatherers who traveled in small bands, had no agriculture, and employed simple stone tool technology that remained largely unchanged over their 40,000-year history. But they played ball.
The Aborigines of western Victoria played a football-like game called marn grook that involved upward of 50 men playing across a large open stretch of land. Accounts from the 1920s and earlier describe a contest between clans or totem groups (the “white cockatoos” versus the “black cockatoos,” for example) that involved punting and catching a stuffed ball made from grass and beeswax, opossum pelt, or, in some cases, the scrotum of a kangaroo.
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:
RAMBO: “What are the rules?”
MUJAHIDEEN: “Well, you have to take the sheep, go once around, and then throw it in the circle.”
RAMBO: “Why?”
MUJAHIDEEN: “Because there is a circle there.”
RAMBO: “That’s it?”
MUJAHIDEEN: “That’s it. Very simple.”
RAMBO: “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.
What 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.
Hypothesis 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.
This ritual game of the pharaohs, which occurs in tomb art 19 times over a thousand-year stretch, appears to have been no ordinary game. The pharaoh is sometimes depicted playing in the presence of Hathor, a goddess associated with the afterlife. Later texts reveal that when the king ceremonially struck the ball it was believed to damage the eye of Apophis, the serpent enemy of the gods. In one image from the seventh century BC, the king runs and throws four clay balls toward the cardinal directions. Although the evidence is fragmented, the message seems to be that while men played other men in inconsequential earthly contests, the pharaoh battled the forces of darkness on behalf of the gods. And, according to these, his commissioned accounts, he always won.
Organized athletics and sport achieved new levels of cultural importance in ancient Greece, where the male athlete was celebrated in art and literature. The Greeks’ word for athletic contests, agon—aptly, the root of “agony”—reflected their attitude toward the role of athletics in society. Men of worth were expected to be as combative in sport as in war, to struggle with all their strength and will to defeat their opponents. As the sports historian Allen Guttmann points out, the fit and muscular body of the athlete was the aesthetic ideal because it stood ready to defend the city-state in war. Every city had its stadiums, gymnasiums, and palaestras (wrestling academies) where athletes stripped nude and rubbed themselves down with olive oil before workouts or competitions. Athens alone had nine public gymnasia, which served not only as athletic centers but also as cultural, religious, and political centers.
Athletic festivals were held to honor the gods in cities and towns across the Peloponnesian peninsula. The oldest and most celebrated of these was, of course, the Olympic Games, which took place every four years to honor Zeus. Unlike the modern Olympics, however, which now include basketball, tennis, soccer, table tennis, handball, field hockey, and both beach and indoor volleyball, no ball game was ever played at the ancient Olympics. Ball games were still regarded as playful diversion and entertainment, not as agon. Never, for example, do Greek accounts of ball play ever mention the words “victory” or “defeat.”
The Greeks did enjoy ball games, however, and, along with ephedrismos, played a wide variety. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus is shipwrecked on the shore of Phaeacia. Nausicaa, the beautiful daughter of the king, goes with her maids to the seashore to do the laundry and, while waiting for it to dry in the sun, plays a game that sounds a bit like dodge ball: “Nausicaa hurled the ball at one of her maids. She missed the girl and threw it into a deep pool. They all shrieked to high heaven.” The shrieks of the girls at play awoke Odysseus, who was dozing in the bushes nearby. He went off to the king’s court, where he was honored with a feast and after-dinner entertainment that included a game played by young acrobats with “a beautiful purple ball.”
Following the feast, the king calls for the athletes of his kingdom to come together for a sports contest, so “that our guest may report to his friends when he gets home how we beat the world at boxing and wrestling and jumping and running.”
Odysseus resists joining in the competition, which leads the other athletes to taunt him, saying, “I do not see you as a fellow who goes in for games . . . you are not an athlete.” He finally rises to the bait, grabs a discus, and throws it far beyond the other marks, yelling “Touch that if you can, young men!” Young Princess Nausicaa was impressed—she “gazed upon Odysseus with all her eyes and admired him.”
Over time, though, ball games rose in popularity. Everyone who was anyone had a large room dedicated to ball play, called a sphairisterion. An inscription from Delphi describes the construction of one of these ball courts with its floor of smooth pounded “black earth.” The most common sport played in the sphairisterion was episkyros, a team game for which the fourth-century comic playwright Antiphanes passed down what may be the earliest surviving play-by-play sports commentary:
He caught the ball and laughed as he passed it to one player at the same time as he dodged another. He knocked another player out of the way, and picked one up and set him on his feet, and all the while there were screams and shouts: “Out of bounds!” “Too far!” “Past him” “Over his head!” “Under!” “Over!” “Short!” “Back in the huddle!”
Episkyros appears to have been a rugby-like game played with a stuffed ball and two teams of 12 or so players. The ball was placed on a center line marked by white gypsum, and two other lines behind each team marked the goals. The rules of the game aren’t well understood but seem to have involved passing the ball among teammates while advancing on the goal of the opposing team. A scene from a marble vase in Athens shows six nude players in the midst of a game, each in various stages of throwing, catching, or running. Other games were played with balls of different sizes. One was a child’s game played with a pig’s bladder inflated with air and then warmed over the ashes of a fire to help round its shape. Another game similar to basketball, called aporrhaxis, involved dribbling an inflated ball along the ground. A single tantalizing scene from Athens shows two men, positioned like hockey players, competing over a small ball with curved sticks, though no such game is mentioned in any surviving account.
Ball games rose to a higher level of competition in the city-state of Sparta, where all young men in their first year of manhood were generically referred to as “ballplayers.” Inscriptions found there describe an annual episkyros tournament where the winning team was awarded a sickle as trophy. One of the most famous ballplayers of the time was Alexander the Great. After giving up competitive athletics because his subjects always let him win, he turned to ball play for his sport of choice. He employed a professional ballplayer to train with and his endorsement of the game seems to have led to a spike in popularity and the construction of sphairisteria by other members of the nobility.
Following the lead of their predecessors, the Romans were enthusiastic about ball play, though the innocent games could hardly compete for public attention with the infamous spectacles of Rome’s Circus Maximus, which included gladiatorial combat, lion fights, and often deadly chariot races. Ball games, by comparison, were more private affairs that emphasized exercise over spectacle and sportsmanship over violence. The first-century AD poet Martial described four different kinds of balls and the accompanying games played with them:
No hand-ball (pila), no bladder-ball (follis), no feather-stuffed ball (paganica) makes you ready for the warm bath, nor the blunted sword-stroke upon the unarmed stump; nor do you stretch forth squared arms besmeared with oil, nor, darting to and fro, snatch the dusty scrimmage-ball (harpasta), but you run only by the clear Virgin water.
Every wealthy Roman had his own sphaeristerium—as the Romans called their ball courts—and they were often attached to the public baths. “Stop play,” wrote Martial the poet, “the bell of the hot bath is ringing.” Pliny the Younger had courts in each of his country houses, including one in Tuscany that was large enough to stage multiple games at once for his weekend guests. Another ball court in Rome was heated from underneath for winter games.
When wealthy Romans weren’t gathering decadently to watch slaves fight to the death or to crucify dogs in public, they passed time playing harpastum, the most popular ball game of the empire. Played with a softball-sized stuffed ball, the object of the game is hinted at in its name, which means “to seize” or “to snatch.” The vague descriptions available suggest an elaborate, rough-and-tumble form of monkey-in-the-middle with a player in the center of a circle attempting to snatch a ball passed back and forth between two lines of players.
One of the biggest fans of harpastum was Galen, a former physician to gladiators who rose through the ranks to be court doctor to the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Regarded as “first among physicians, unique among philosophers,” Galen went on to pioneer the science of anatomy, dissecting pigs and apes and Barbary macaques to study their bodily systems. He was forced to draw inferences about human anatomy from these studies since, despite finding entertainment in watching people torn limb from limb, the Romans prohibited the “barbarous” practice of human autopsy. In AD 180, Galen turned his scientific eye to ball games in a treatise entitled On Exercise with the Small Ball, where he made the first scientific case for the benefits of ball play to exercise and physical education. Waxing philosophical as well as scientific, Galen in that early age spoke more eloquently to the boundless joys and practical merits of ball play than any writer over the next millennium and a half.
“I believe that the best of all exercises is the one which not only exercises the body, but also refreshes the spirit,” he wrote. “The men who invented hunting were wise and well acquainted with the nature of man, for they mixed its exertions with pleasure, delight, and rivalry.” Galen celebrated the potential of ball games to unite people across class and status lines, noting that “even the poorest man can play ball, for it requires no nets nor weapons nor horses nor hunting dogs, but only a ball. . . . And what could be more convenient than a game in which everyone, no matter his status or career, can participate.”
Beyond its social leveling qualities, Galen also declared ball play to be the “best all-around exercise” because it worked out all the body parts at once.
When the players line up on opposite sides and exert themselves to keep the one in the middle from getting the ball, then it is a violent exercise with many neck-holds mixed with wrestling holds. Thus the head and neck are exercised by the neck-holds, and the sides and chest and stomach are exercised by the hugs and shoves and tugs and the other wrestling holds.
Despite the popularity of harpastum, Galen apparently felt the need to defend ball games against a critique that would be heard again and again in the centuries to follow: rather than preparing and training men for battle as archery or wrestling did, it did the opposite—distracting and diverting them in so-called frivolous play. Galen, presaging Vince Lombardi, argued that in fact “ball playing trains for the two most important maneuvers which a state entrusts to its generals: to attack at the proper time and to defend the booty already amassed. There is no other exercise so suited to the training in the guarding of gains, the retrieval of losses, and the foresight of the plan of the enemy.”
Galen was way ahead of his time. He was among the first accomplished surgeons to advance scientifically substantiated theories of human anatomy, the circulation system, and even neuroscience. The systems and methods he developed held sway for centuries, dominating medical science until the 17th century. As both scientific observer and, it appears, fanatical player and lover of harpastum, he saw early what we now know so well: that ball games are uniquely capable of exercising and challenging both body and mind, sharpening the senses, and inspiring the human spirit.