Manthropology Read online

* * *

  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.