Ice Skating Born of Necessity?

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?"