Fireworks mark opening ceremony at Beijing Winter Olympics
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China’s tourism board has revealed an ancient rock art that claims to prove that skiing was originated in China. Originally, experts believed that the sport, or at least the practical use of the skis, was invented in Northern Europe after skis dating back to 2,500BC were found preserved in a Swedish peat bog. But archaeologists were stunned after finding drawings in the Xinjiang province of China which depict animals alongside the figures that seem to be skiing.
This suggests that people used the objects for hunting.
These paintings have not yet been carbon dated, however, Beijing has highlighted the discovery as a reason for them to host the 2022 Winter Olympics.
During the opening ceremony, the government cited Xinjiang province as the birthplace and future of skiing.
In a video broadcast, a spokesperson said: “You can see from the drawings that our ancestors from the Palaeolithic age made skis for transport and hunting in the snow.
“This was the prototype of the earliest skiing event.”
Xinjiang has become a significant point of conflict between Western governments and China in recent years, as UN experts and rights groups estimate more than a million people, mainly Uyghurs, and members of other Muslim minorities, have been detained in camps there.
China rejects accusations of forced labour or any other abuses there, saying that the camps provide vocational training and that companies should respect its policies there.
But allegations of human rights violations remain and the UN has been banned from visiting the camps.
The Chinese Communist Party maintain the existence of the camps is to reduce the supposed terror threat in the region.
Since the opening ceremony, the local tourism board in Altay, which is an administrative district in North Xinjiang, have changed their advertising to reflect their claim as the originator of skiing.
According to the New York Times, the earliest written description of skiing found is about skiers in the Altai Mountains, during the Western Han Dynasty from 206BC to 24AD.
Hai Nei Jing, a Chinese scholar during this period, once wrote about people who wore objects that seem to describe early skis.#
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He wrote: People of the Dingling nationality living in the Altay Mountains of northwest China sped like goats in the valleys and on the flatlands wearing the ‘horns of goats’ – a kind of knee-high fur boot under which is bound a wooden board with a hoof-shaped front tip.”
Even some in the West support this theory.
The legendary Norwegian skier and writer Fridtjof Nansen has previously pointed to the Lake Baikal/Altai region as the possible origin in his 1890 book First Crossing of Greenland.
If these wall paintings are carbon dated, it could conclusively prove the origins of skiing once and for all.
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