It has been argued that the evolution of man (African Anthropology/stone age man) is synoymous with the evoultion of martial arts.
Hence;
Martial arts go way beyond in past history than Shaolin. (By the way much of that is legend and folklore tales told via raconteurs and written like Grimm’s)
India has much ancient culture as Egypt. (Egypt isnt the only culturral/social structure. Sure they built large cities, but this cannot soley define them as the oldest.)
And Iran/Irag/Persia have as much as India also.
The martial arts is man vs man. Not so simply as stone-age man (tribe) vs stone age man (tribe)
The term martial, being Mars/warlike, and arts, the study of, martial arts could also be defined as any system of fighting/defense, under one category.
(Websters has it defined inappropriately. And why not, its editors and researchers are probably not martial artists and did not disect the wording per eytmology.)
Hence, and such system that can be taught, or have one trained, under a system fo war/fighting, is a martial art.
Since martial arts were developed systems of man against man, than it has developed almost since cultured/social man against another cultured social man. (Cultures social meaning a large human dewelling of cultural and social exchanges, not tribal)
So, can stome age man ever be considered as the first martial artists?
And your point in descriptive other than a chart is what???
In what ways is it helpful?
Could you please explain what you think about stone age man being the first martial artist?
So far it’s been traced to go back as far as India, but I don’t think any more than that yet.
If you really want to get technical, the ability to throw rocks back in the Stone Ages could be considered a martial art if one was constantly working on throwing said rocks, made techniques to throw the rocks better, and taught others how to do so.
Martial arts are about fighting efficiently. For this to happen it is required to develop codified and trainable techniques which attempt to make a task (the task of kickcing ass) more efficent.
As an example, a wild haymaker is somewhat “natural”, but less efficent than a properly executed hook. The hook requires (required) some sort of development. That is, observation, testing and a conclusion “hooks drop people out cold better than haymakers”.
Yes, but the question is a what point the natural act of fighting evolved into a set of codified and studied techniques aiming for efficency?
I would say that it happened at the time the first homminids began to manufacture utensils (not usisng, but creating them). My reasoning is that at that point, the brain was developed enough so people began to think about most efficent ways to perform tasks.
Now, supposing that the tribes/bunchs/whatever at those times fought each other from time to time (about hunting territories, females, oil… uuhhh… forget the last thing), fighting would be a skill which needed to be attended too.
And once the got spears anf slings, you can say there were martial arts. The same spears and slings used to take down mammouths, would be suitable to kill humans too.
Yeah, but the problem understanding martial art origins, is that people want to relate it to anthropology.
When in fact it is based upon cultural/social societies, as lights out would word it-evolving into a set of codified and studied techniques aiming for efficency
Therefore it could be further explained as;
The term martial, being Mars/warlike, and arts, the study of, martial arts could also be defined as any system of fighting/defense, or set of codified and studied techniques, under one category.
Surely, this cannot be the same for stone age man.
let’s use common sense for a moment and I’ll try to be serious…
methods to kill or defend oneself would have been used early to protect one’s belongings or territory. Whenever Homo sapiens finally started to bring their family groups and tribes together to live in villages, they probably started to hunt and defend in packs, while also at this time using tools such as spears or crude axes/knives. I believe all of this would point us in the direction of the birthplace of humanity: Africa. As far as codifying martial methods, they probably started before we started making war where we were sacking each other’s village for food and women and whatnot.
None of this matters. It’s probably safe to say that Western martial arts as we know them started in Ancient Greece. Eastern martial arts probably started in India, but simultaneously could have been practiced in China and Japan. Depending on when you think Japan was populated and by whom. It’s not a stretch that Native Americans had their own martial traditions of their own but just weren’t as advanced as the older civilizations and probably because of time constraints.
Don’t over complicate things, when warfare become commonplace, MA were created.
People, logically, started to device and to “stylise” certain ways of fighting and killing.
I’d actually suggest Egypt over Greece (if we’re using artifacts for dating). Or more likely co-occurance.
The most logical view is that there was a lot of codevelopment and then evolutionary sharing based on trade routes. There’s no such thing as a pure idea or a martial art for that matter.
As far as all of this Anthropological claims… they’re news to me and I’m currently pretty deep into Anthro at one of the top centers for it. Martial arts isn’t a big area of study for current Anthro folks (though I’m trying to change that a little bit at a time).
There definitely was a huge wrestling/physical culture tradition in the Middle East. A number of folks have made a strong arguement for Gilgamesh being the first great Martial Arts epic.
