By analyzing three contemporary foraging groups, the target article highlights how the material culture produced by modern humans often lacks moderate–strong taphonomic signatures. As a result, the author argues that the absence of artifacts from enduring materials at hominin fossil sites should not be interpreted as a sign of limited cognitive sophistication among ancient humans. We support this general thesis while highlighting an important and overlooked source of symbolic material culture with low preservation probability: sports, team games, and other forms of physical skill competitions.

Within the evolutionary behavioral sciences, an often-underappreciated feature of human nature is our strong interest in physical competitions of sport, team games, and athletics (Gallup & Deaner, Reference Gallup and Deaner2021). Ranging from childhood play to adulthood professions, these distinctive activities are impactful cultural and societal practices that appeal to humans on many levels and involve complex cognition and symbolic representation. Nearly all sports, team games, and athletic events have carefully designed rules and regulations that lead to the development of distinctive individual and/or team-based strategies and approaches for successful competition.

From an evolutionary perspective, the widespread nature of sports, team games, and physical skill competitions across cultures is considered a byproduct or manifestation of survival and reproductive adaptations (e.g., Deaner, Balish, & Lombardo, Reference Deaner, Balish and Lombardo2016; Furley, Reference Furley2019). While the types of sports, team games, and athletic events can vary considerably across societies and geographic regions, many of the fundamental features of these physical competitions are common across diverse groups and activities, including chasing, hitting targets with projectiles, and stalking (Lombardo, Reference Lombardo2012). Such behaviors, particularly when pursued by children and adolescents, could be adaptive in developing physical and social skills necessary for successful hunting and warfare (Lew-Levy, Reckin, Lavi, Cristóbal-Azkarate, & Ellis-Davies, Reference Lew-Levy, Reckin, Lavi, Cristóbal-Azkarate and Ellis-Davies2017; Roberts, Arth, & Bush, Reference Roberts, Arth and Bush1959). Performance in such activities could also influence status or rank within groups (Lombardo, Reference Lombardo2012). Consistent with this view, across most, if not all societies, men and boys are overrepresented and show greater interest and motivation to engage in sports (Deaner & Smith, Reference Deaner and Smith2013; Deaner et al., Reference Deaner, Balish and Lombardo2016).

Sports, team games, and physical skill competitions are obviously prominent cultural events and practices within post-industrial societies, but historically the evidence for participation in such activities among foraging groups was equivocal. In fact, it had traditionally been viewed that hunter-gatherers were perhaps the only human groups not to participate in competitive sports or games (Sutton-Smith & Roberts, Reference Sutton-Smith and Roberts1971). In addition, observations of native Kenyans by Europeans in the early twentieth century depicted an outright absence of sport-like activities (Bale & Sang, Reference Bale and Sang2013) beginning with Swedish ethnographer Karl Gerhard Lindblom (Reference Lindblom1916) stating that “no real sports” existed there (p. 425). However, more recent ethnographic data have refuted these claims, and it is now recognized that versions of sports, competitive team games, and athletics are quite common among hunter-gatherers and appear to be a human universal (Brown, Reference Brown1991).

One example of a competitive team game that is prevalent among foraging cultures is coalitional play fighting. Defined as “play activity in which one coalition uses coordinated action and nonlethal physical force to attain, and prevent an opposing coalition from attaining, a predetermined physical objective (i.e., ‘goal’)” (p. 223), coalitional play fighting has been documented among diverse foraging societies across five continents (Sugiyama, Mendoza, White, & Sugiyama, Reference Sugiyama, Mendoza, White and Sugiyama2018). Many of the activities classified as coalitional play fighting involve motor patterns of striking and throwing using balls and modified sticks (Sugiyama et al., Reference Sugiyama, Mendoza, White and Sugiyama2018). Often taking the form of team contact sports or games, which “typically involve coordinated group action aimed at advancing an object (often a ball) into a predetermined zone, while contravening an opposing coalition's attempts to do the same” (Sugiyama, Mendoza, & Sugiyama, Reference Sugiyama, Mendoza and Sugiyama2021, p. 94), coalitional play fighting is believed to function in rehearsing and calibrating motor and perceptual skills involved in intergroup aggression and lethal raiding. Observed in roughly half of the foraging culture clusters within Murdock's (Reference Murdock1967) Ethnographic Atlas, these competitions clearly denote a form of complex cognition and symbolic representation yet involve material culture with low preservation probability.

In addition, one of the three foraging groups investigated in the target article, the Mbuti, engage in a physical skill competition (“tug-of-war”) that pits men against women in which both sides sing back and forth as they pull on opposite ends of a vine rope (Turnbull, Reference Turnbull, Leacock and Lee1982). When an advantage emerges for one side, a member of the leading team switches and joins the opposition while playfully mimicking the mannerisms of their new team, for example, a man joining the women's side might sing in falsetto and a woman joining the men's side might chant in a deeper voice. These exchanges continue as each “tries to outdo the ridicule of the last, causing more and more laughter, until when the contestants are laughing so hard they cannot sing or pull any more, they let go of the vine rope and fall to the ground in near hysteria” (pp.142–143). While the Mtubi version of tug-of-war is ritualistic and intended to reduce intragroup conflict, this activity clearly stems from the original competitive form, showing the extent to which sports, team games, and athletics can further influence culture and society.

In summary, sports, team games, and physical skill competitions are a unique and omnipresent feature of human behavior that is cognitively complex, can be associated with distinctive material culture and symbolic representation, and may hold adaptive value in simulating hunting and combat and/or enhancing group dynamics. We posit that similar contests of physical skills were common in earlier Homo as well, perhaps originating following adaptations for overhand throwing and the emergence of hunting. Yet, within many contemporary foraging groups, and presumably in the past, many of the artifacts crafted and/or coopted for these activities would not leave an enduring signature. Therefore, the material culture associated with sports, team games, and physical skill competitions across a diverse range of foraging groups and habitats deserves further attention when considering evidence of cognitive sophistication.