The Role of Baseball in Human Evolution

This is an interesting rumination on the fact that, despite their being much stronger than human beings, the best chimpanzee pitcher can barely throw at 20 miles an hour.

It turns out that this has driven human society, because while a chimpanzee finds it very difficult to kill a bigger and stronger rival, almost any human can kill another human being at a distance because of our ability to throw rocks at each other:

To understand human power dynamics, you must first understand why chimpanzees can’t play baseball. Once you do, it suddenly makes sense why we organize our societies as we do — and also why “strongman” leadership irrationally persists in our species.

Between four and thirteen million years ago, our primate ancestors diverged from chimpanzees on the evolutionary tree. They remained brawnier, while we became brainier. Chimpanzees, who have twice as much “fast-twitch” muscle fiber as we do, are about 1.35 to 1.5 times stronger than us. With stronger arms, and muscle fine-tuned for speedy contractions, chimps should be able to throw a baseball much faster than the most skilled human.

But it would be unwise to bring in a chimpanzee as a relief pitcher. With robust training, they can only throw an object about 20 miles per hour, and it usually flies off in random directions. Meanwhile, we play a sport that involves exceptional humans throwing a ball over 100 miles per hour with astonishing accuracy.

We’re the only species capable of this feat. Why can’t chimpanzees do the same?

Spoiler, it turns out that shoulders shoulders and elbows are all wrong for this.

………

Dominance in chimps is usually taken by force. Chimpanzee politics are complex, but the bigger, stronger chimps tend to lead, while weaker chimps tend to follow. There are exceptions, and leadership isn’t just about size and strength, but it matters. This is true across much of the mammal kingdom, with some exceptions (for example, ring-tail lemurs, hyenas, and bonobos have female dominance that is untethered from physical size). For chimpanzees, if you come at the king, you best not miss.

Humans, with their modified super shoulders, became capable of severing the link between physical size and social dominance. The smallest prehistoric human, with a bit of practice and the right rock, could kill the fiercest, biggest warrior from far away, lurking hidden in jungle.

Necessarily, this creates a dynamic as societal groups get larger where the leader assembles a pyramid of power upon which their authority rests.

The single leader walking alone is vulnerable to anyone with a good arm, the leader of a city state has the support of bodyguards, a local constabulary, and a patronage network, so anyone who attempts to kill or overthrow them has a far more difficult cast.

As such this creates a dynamic that leads to ever increasing societal complexity.