Reuters reports that China invented cross-country skiing:
BEIJING (Reuters) - Cliff paintings of hunters in rugged remote northwestern China appear to prove that Chinese were adept skiers in the Old Stone Age, Xinhua news agency said on Monday.
The paintings in Altay, in Xinjiang Autonomous Region, "have been verified as human hunting while skiing and, therefore, archaeologists prove the Altay region to be a place of skiing some 100 to 200 centuries ago", the news agency said.
Wang Bo, a noted researcher with the Xinjiang Autonomous Regional Museum, said he had seen a picture of four people chasing cattle and horses, three of them on a long rectangular board with poles in their hands.
"Hence, he held these instruments are skis and ski poles," Xinhua said.
"(Experts) held that cliff paintings in Altay were the earliest archaeological evidence to show how humans had skied in the early days and suggest skiing had originated in Altay."
Nathan has doubts:
One wonders if the Chinese scientific community will one day discover a long lost “original” copy of the Old Testament in China that begins, “In the beginning the Chinese created the heaven and the earth.” It makes about as much sense as the claim that a 10,000+ year old cave painting proves that a state that didn’t exist for another 8,000 years or an ethnic group that wasn’t a majority in that neck of the woods until very recently can claim to have invented skiing.
AsiaPundit would concur. But while China may not have invented skiing, they are perfecting it.:
