单选题
Sporting activities are essentially modified forms of hunting behavior. Viewed biologically, the modern footballer is revealed as a member of a disguised hunting pack. His killing weapon has changed into a harmless football and his prey into a goalmouth. If his aim is accurate and he scores a goal, he enjoys the hunter's triumph of killing his prey. To understand how this transformation has taken place we must briefly look back at our ancient ancestors. They spent over a million years evolving as cooperative hunters. Their very survival depended on success in the hunting-field. Under this pressure their whole way of life, even their bodies, became radically changed. They cooperated as skillful male-group attackers. Then, about ten thousand years ago, after this immensely long formative period of hunting their food, they became farmers. Their unproved intelligence, so vital to their old hunting life, was put to a new use — that of penning, controlling and domesticating their prey. The hunt became suddenly out of date. The food was there on the farms, waiting for their needs. The risks and uncertainties of the hunt were no longer essential for survival. The hunting skills and the hunting urges remained, however, and demanded new outlets. Hunting for sport replaced hunting for necessity. This new activity involved all the original hunting sequences, but the aim of the operation was no longer to avoid starvation. Instead, the sportsmen set off to test their skill against prey that were no longer essential to their well-being.(To be sure, the kill may have been eaten, but there were other, much simpler ways of obtaining a meaty meal.)The chase became exposed and end in itself. The logical extension of this trend was the big game hunter who never ate his kill, but merely hung its stuffed head on his wall, and the fox-hunter who has to breed foxes in order to release them to hunt them down. An alternation solution was to transform the activities of the hunting pack into other patterns of behavior. The key to the transformation lies in the fact that there was no longer any need to eat the prey. This being so, then why bother to kill any animal? A symbolic killing is all that is needed, providing the thrill of the chase can be retained. The Greek solution was athletics-field sports involving chasing, jumping, and throwing. The athletes, experienced the vigorous physical activities so typical of the hunting scene, and the patterns they performed were all elements of the ancient hunting sequence, but their triumph was now transformed from the actual kill to a symbolic one of "winning".