Shadowy figures hunch intently over the TV in the corner of the bar. They eat and drink, and chatter amongst themselves. It’s been a tense few hours, but the end is in sight. Suddenly, a siren blares, the announcer’s voice rises to a raucous cheer, and everything literally goes wild. Hooting, hollering, and waving their arms, the crowd erupts onto the streets.

From my apartment window, I’m watching them. The biggest activity is on Whyte Avenue, but 109th street sees enough without becoming a riot. Men and women flail down the sidewalks, hooting and screaming to the stars. Car horns blare. Half the men have yanked off their shirts. I know both extremes, personally. My ex-roommate, Matt, constantly rants about the noise while my old high school friend Kathleen is right out in the midst of the parties. I sit somewhere in the middle of it all too busy laughing and musing at the show down below to really pick a side.

How is it that there is still doubt about the path of our species’ evolution? How is it that the scientists are still searching for answers? Honestly, there is no better proof than right here, two stories beneath my window. All language skills are lost and all subtlety is gone. I grew up in a farming community with a pack of coyotes and several deer in my back yard and I’ve still never such a display of the wild broken loose. This goes beyond the idea of returning to nature. We’ve gone right back to the jungle.

This behavior isn’t just a product of hockey, of course. The most common allusion made in regards to the hockey craziness is to the infamous soccer riots of Europe. There are also the classic reports of violence between parents during high school tournaments and games. Heck, one doesn’t have to go as far as the violence. In any sport, be it wrestling, basketball, football, or any number of others, you can’t miss the classic cry of the raging fan: “WHOOO HOOOOOO HOOOOO HOOOOOO!” Tell me you haven’t heard that echoed in childhood memories of the zoo?

For decades, geneticists have been locked away in labs, scrambling through the human genome and all of its proposed relatives for that one key that links us all together in the history of this Earth. They dig up fossil after fossil, analyzing teeth, brain cavities, and the angles of various jaws. With all of this time spent digging in the dirt, however, they’re missing what’s right under their noses.

Go down two floors to the lounge, Dr. Peabody, and turn on the TV. The missing link is not in the bones and it’s not in the blood samples. It’s right here in our sporting culture. It’s right here in us. We never truly evolved. We just stopped stooping and invented the hockey puck.