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The true origins of some of our most beloved sports can be extremely difficult to pinpoint, but it’s
reasonable to assume that basic versions of them can be traced back to deepest antiquity. Play,
in nature, is a
natural developmental process designed to train an animal to perform the tasks
necessary for hunting and survival in a safe container.
Likewise, sports, which are a form of structured play that emphasise athleticism, have come to
represent a core means by which humans can test their abilities against one another and
compete in a harmless way.
While attempting to place a date on the first time one of our ancestors realised it was fun to kick
a round object across the grass is an exercise in futility, it’s reasonable to assume that
structured sports – that is, sports with rules and accompanying systems, came about around the
same time as the earliest civilizations.
This period is also where we find the earliest evidence in terms of
history of sports betting, and
it’s natural to suppose that, much like today, our Mesopotamian and Egyptian forebears would
place wagers on the outcome of sports events with equal interest as the roll of a sheep’s huckle-
bone.
So what are the earliest sports we know of, and how many of them are still enjoyed in some
form today? Let’s take a look.
source: unsplash
Athletics
The very first Olympic games in history was held in the year 776 BCE in Ancient Greece. These
five days of games saw prestigious athletes and warriors from all over the Mediterranean basin
come together to compete against one another in a range of events such as wrestling and
running.
Among those sports we know were contested at this event, we have horse-riding. Prowess in
the saddle, or more accurately, at the reins of a chariot, was naturally a laudable skill in the
ancient world, and is one that we can roughly date an origin to.
This is because it is generally agreed upon that the nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppe
domesticated the horse at some time around 4000 BCE, and it’s hard to imagine that it took
long after this watershed moment for the first equestrians to begin racing one another.
As for the other sports we hear of at the Olympics, it’s hard to locate a definitive starting point.
Javelin throwing, for example, clearly has its roots in hunting, and the earliest speculative
evidence we have for spear throwing goes back half a million years.
Football
The perennial appeal of kicking a ball around, it appears, is as old as time. While football
(soccer) can, in its modern incarnation be dated to England in the 1860s,
the world’s oldest confirmed football we know of can be found in Stirling Castle in Scotland and was thought to
have belonged to Mary Queen of Scots, pushing the date back to the 1500s.
Yet if we expand our scope, we can find antecedents to this type of game that go much further
back. Perhaps the most colourful member of football’s family tree is known as the
Mesoamerican ball game and was thought to have been invented by the Olmecs around 2500
BCE before being passed on to the Mayans and Aztecs.
Archaeological findings and supporting depictions in art have suggested that, at least at times,
this game was played with a human head instead of a ball. The game is still played today in
parts of Mexico, where it is known as Ulama and resorts to using a regular ball, thankfully.
FIFA, football’s governing body, however holds to the opinion that the
4500 year old Chinese ball game, Tsu Chu, is the oldest example of football we know of.