Jan. 2, 2008 -- Ice skating, now a winter tradition around the world, may have been invented in Scandinavia 5,000 years ago, new research suggests.
According to Federico Formenti and Alberto Minetti from the University of Oxford, there is substantial evidence that ice skating began in southern Finland, where the concentration of lakes is the highest in the world.
"The peculiar shape and distribution" of lakes in that area can be credited for the advent of the "human-powered" means of transportation, the researchers wrote in the January issue of the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society of London.
"In this geographical region characterized by a harsh climate, especially in winter, our ancestors had to face the dilemma of walking around several frozen lakes --- an energetically demanding option -- or crossing them, which could prove to be more convenient in terms of distance traveled, metabolic cost, and/or speed," said the researchers.
Archaeological evidence suggests humans started skating on ice approximately in the second millennium B.C. The oldest known ice skates, found throughout Scandinavia, were made mostly of horse and cow bones, pierced at one end and bound to the foot with leather straps.
Bones lack the edge necessary for the modern skating stride, so forward propulsion came from the person's upper limbs: a stick was pushed backward between the legs, which were kept almost straight.
"Compared to walking, these bone skates actually do not offer any advantage in terms of speed," Formenti told Discovery News. "I asked myself, what was the meaning of building such a tool?"
The researchers created exact replicas of the ancient skates, adding only a safer binding. They then persuaded five retired professional skaters to test the skates at an ice rink in the Italian Alps.
The researchers measured the skaters' heart rates, oxygen intake and skating speeds, and the results were fed into computer simulations to determine how much energy our ancestors would have saved using skates during each of 240 six-mile journeys in different parts of northern Europe.
It emerged that while the energy saving was only 3 percent in Norway, and 1 percent or less in Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, skating across Finland's lakes would save 10 percent of people's energy.
The researchers believe that in Finland, the strong presence of lakes of irregular shape could force humans to develop ice skates in order to limit the energy cost of traveling.
"Ice skates in Finland were a huge benefit. Our study does not provide conclusive evidence that ice skating originated in that country, but poses strong basis for this hypothesis. In other words, if I were an archaeologist searching for the oldest ice skates, I would certainly start from Finland," Formenti said.
Steven Vogel, professor of Biology at Duke University, and the author of "Prime Mover: A Natural History of Muscle," agrees. These are "defensible but damnably hard-to-prove ideas," he said.
"That's the problem with such a subject. I have to applaud Alberto Minetti and his collaborators for doing what almost no one else does, applying what is our present understanding of these areas of science to human history and prehistory."
Related Links:
our sites
video
mobile
shop
stay connected
corporate
