Archaeology & Anthropology - Juniper Publishers Opinion This article explores the beginnings of sport and its development over time in the civilising process. It clearly started as a product of survival and fight or flight mechanisms. However, it is also representative of a desire to cooperate and helps to show the workings of the human social brain. Even in its early days, sport was viewed as a means to avoid war and massacre. Sport has thus played an essential role in the stabilisation of our societies and been a driving force in the Civilising Process [1]. Freud (1916-1917) pointed out that the quintessential primeval motivations of fight and flight response tend to dictate much of our actions. These responses are embedded deeply in the unconscious controlled by the hypothalamus of the brain which can initiate a succession of events in the autonomic nervous, endocrine and immune systems when required. In Sports in the Western World, Baker [2] posits ...
