Three leather balls discovered in northwest China set back the invention of ball games in Asia by hundreds of years.
These three leather balls with a diameter between 7.4 and 9.2 cm are between 3200 and 2900 years old.
Humanity did not wait for the advent of Fifa to play with footballs. Moreover, their use in Asia is even older than previously believed, reveals a study published on October 1, 2020 in the Journal of Archaeological Science .
A date that goes back 500 years
The oldest balls known to date were made of flax, in Egypt 4500 years ago. And in Central America, people have been playing ball for at least 3700 years. 3400 years old, the second oldest known ball court in America was discovered on the site of Etlatongo, Mexico as reported by Sciences et Avenir in March 2020.
Until now, archaeologists thought that Europe and Asia had adopted this way of playing much later, 2500 years ago. But an international team of researchers has revised this dating. Scientists from Switzerland, Germany and China have examined three leather balls found in graves in the ancient Yanghai cemetery in northwest China. With a diameter ranging from 7.4 cm to 9.2 cm, they were used between 2900 and 3200 years ago. "This makes these balls about five centuries older than ancient balls and depictions of ball games in Eurasia ", welcomes in a press release Patrick Wertmann, co-author of the study and researcher at the University of Zurich.
Hockey, golf or polo
But how did these people play ball? Representations found in China show that riders used curved sticks. Two of the three balls were discovered in the graves of horsemen and such sticks were found in Yanghai without certainty however that they were used to hit the ball. Their design predates that of the three leathers.
"Our study supports the age of the Yanghai balls, but the available data is not sufficient to answer the question of how these balls were played, emphasizes the study. While their use in team sport and with goals is likely, a game similar to hockey, golf or polo cannot be confirmed, as no suitable sticks have been found in direct association with these bullets ". Games with the latter were considered excellent for maintaining physical fitness and for military training. Researchers therefore suggest that they were designed "in the region at the time when horseback riding and warfare at horse began to spread in the eastern part of Central Asia ".