I hate it when people make all the good points before I get to post! I'm sure the origins are lost in the mists of time. Where there is conflict, there will be Martial Arts. The more conflict there is, the faster they develop... like an arms race.
If it works, and it serves a common human purpose, you can bank on it showing up independently in several places. Look, for example, at the technology used to erect the huge sarsen uprights at Stonehenge in the last building cyle. There's now very clear archaeological evidence for the method, involving shaped logs as rollers, pulley systems to get the masoned blocks onto the rollers, predug pits and a bunch of other things that take advantage of the relative frictionlessness of the wheel, the use of leverage to manipulate extremely heavy objects with relatively long axes, and so on. And this method, with locally different embellishment but virtually identical mechanics, was also used by the ancient Easter Islanders who put those enormous stone head sculptures up. There are only so many ways to manipulate something very big and heavy when you have relatively low populations and and only muscle power. And there seems to have been zip contact between the Easter Islanders and any population in Europe; the EIers were actually among the most isolated of the Oceanic groups. Over and over again, you see the same thing. There are certain resources and physical constraints, representing opportunities and limitations respectively. The solution space that arises from these two dimensions may be rather small. If so, look out for repeated independent discover of one or another of the few solutions available. I suspect the MAs, particularly the empty-handed kind, fall into that category...
As a WMAer, I would like to believe that Pankration was the grand-daddy of all MA, but really... to think that Asians didn't know how to fight until the Greeks came along is kind of silly. Did the Pankrationists influence their Eastern counterparts? Maybe. And maybe the Indians influenced the Greeks.
But the independant development is likely the best theory.
Independent invention probably coexists quite happily with mutual influence. People independently come up with the same key idea, and since they share that idea as a kind of common ground, the somewhat different ways each group implements that key idea will be of interest to them. It's like, if you and the gang over the hill have both independently discovered bicycles, then the shape and placement of their handlebars and how they solve the braking problem is going to be of interest to you and vice versa. But if they've dicovered roller skates instead, then you aren't going have much to say to each other of interest. In principle, one or the other group might adopt the other technology... but it's probably
more likely that instead, each group would make up an astonishingly large number of very insulting jokes and comments predicated on the stupidity of bicyles (if you're one of the roller skaters) or roller skates (if you're a cyclist). You know... `how many bicyclists does it take to change a light bulb' sort of thing. (And no, I'm not going to try to figure out what the punch line should be! :lol
So you probably can have your cake and eat it to, in terms of contact vs. independent invention.
Simply taking a look at the stances of both German and Japanese swordsmanship seems to confirm that quite well. As well as the similarity between Ringen and Jiu-Jutsu. There was no German knight wandering Japan in the 1300's showing them swordsmanship and grappling, even though the arts are so similar it's spooky.
The limits imposed by swinging a long blade and stabbing with the point of that blade are probably enough to explain most of the swordsmanship resemblances; similarly for the grappling MAs. It would be interesting to work out the space of possibilities in detail on a priori grounds; my guess would be that in neither case would there be an awful lot of alternatives. I
love it when I hear of cases like that.
So I will go out on a limb and say that
I am the source of all martial arts, since it's just about as proveable as any other theory.
Mark.... think again.
PLEASE! Given all the moaning, griping and whingeing that MAists do about the MAs... do you want to be identified as the person all of them can
blame for whatever it is they don't like?? Talk about drawing a target and sticking your head in the bullseye... please reconsider!!!
)
