Before 1800

Retreating Ice Reveals Mate of 1,300-Year-Old Ski

Seven years later, Norwegian archaeologists have a full pair

In 2014, archaeologists found a lone “pre-Viking” wood ski frozen deep in the Digervarden Ice Patch in southern Norway, where it had been entombed since the eighth century. The ski was remarkably well preserved and included remnants of a birch-and-leather heel-strap binding, according to scientists from Norway’s Glacier Archaeology Program (GAP), who led the discovery (see “Glaciers Yield Ancient Skis,” Skiing History, March-April 2019).

Photo above: Credit Espen Finstad, secretsoftheice.com

Since skis travel in pairs, the scientists have monitored the ice patch for seven years, hoping that summer thaws and glacial retreat would reveal the ski’s partner. In late September, scientists discovered the site of the ancient yard sale: They exhumed the second ski less than 20 feet from the original discovery.

Buried deeper in the ice than the first ski, the second ski is better preserved, reported Lars Pilø, an archaeologist with GAP, on the organization’s blog, SecretsoftheIce.com. The ski measures about six feet long (187 centimeters) and 6 inches wide (17 centimeters). The skis had been repaired repeatedly, indicating heavy use. They were not a matched set and were paired after each had been used previously, which didn’t surprise Pilø. “The skis are not identical, but we should not expect them to be. The skis are handmade, not mass-produced,” he blogged. “They have a long and individual history of wear and repair before an Iron Age skier used them together and they ended up in the ice 1,300 years ago.”

Pilø reports that the two skis now stand as the best-preserved ancient pair on record. In 1924 a pair was found in a bog in Kalvträsk, Sweden—along with a ski pole—later carbon-dated about 5,200 years old, but one of the skis is in fragments and no binding parts survived (see “The European Origin of Skiing,” by Maurice Woehrlé, Skiing History, July-August 2021).

Squaw Valley Is Now Palisades Tahoe

After decades of consideration across multiple regimes, the resort scrubs the slur from its name.

A year after announcing that it would change its name, Squaw Valley-Alpine Meadows made the move in September and is now officially Palisades Tahoe, a reference to the rugged granite walls and vertiginous terrain that earned the resort early fame as the birthplace of American extreme skiing.

The name Squaw Valley pre-existed the founding of the resort in 1949. The term “squaw” is now widely considered a sexist and racist slur against Indigenous women. The new name unifies the Olympic Valley and Alpine Meadows base areas under one banner.

Members of the local Washoe tribe had advocated for years to rename the resort. Former resort owners Nancy and Alex Cushing told reporters in the 1990s that a name change was under consideration.

“We were compelled to change the name because it’s the right thing to do, especially for the generations yet to come, who will grow up without having to use a slur to identify the place where they chase their dreams down the mountain,” said Ron Cohen, who launched the name-change process when he served as the resort’s president. “We spent more than a year making sure that we were doing right by the community,” said Cohen, who now runs California’s Mammoth Mountain.

Efforts to wash offensive names off the map are gaining traction. The Reconciliation in Place Names Act was recently re-introduced in Congress to update the names of more than a thousand locations in the U.S. that are considered derogatory. For instance, Denver skiers heading to the slopes can see the peak of Squaw Mountain. The governor of Colorado has established an advisory board to consider name changes throughout the state, with similar efforts underway in Utah and other places.

Squaw’s name change has led to other updates within the resort. The base area village on the Olympic Valley side is now called The Village at Palisades Tahoe. The process to rename Squaw One and Squaw Creek chairlifts is underway. Officials expect the process of updating physical name designations and corporatewide branding to be a multi-year project.

“Part of me is going to miss the old name,” Charles Carter told the California Globe news website. Carter worked as a parking attendant at the 1960 Olympics and has lived in the valley ever since. “If you ask anyone here, the name doesn’t matter so much as these mountains,” he said. 

SKI ART: Tycho Ödberg (1865-1943)

Many years ago, while searching a catalog for old skiing-related postcards, I came across this 1928 painting by Tycho Ödberg, a Stockholm illustrator and graphic artist who was respected for his landscapes. In 1888, like many Scandinavian artists of his era, he made the trek to study at the Académie Julian in Paris. Upon his return, he was a regular at the Academy of Fine Arts in the Swedish capital from 1891 to 1897.

I was charmed by its direct and simplistic appeal to the joys of skiing in the winter landscape. To my amazement, it was an illustration on the inside of an envelope—the first I had ever seen. It was specially designed for seasonal greetings: Gott nytt år (Happy New Year). This was an extraordinary find: Not only does Ödberg portray correctly all the technical elements of skiing, but the context seems just right; a civilian-military mix that was partially responsible for the way modern skiing has developed.

The catalog listed another Ödberg ski painting and it, too, was on the inside of an envelope. I acquired both items and used the skijoring painting as the cover for my book Culture and Sport of Skiing from Antiquity to World War I, the first time, I believe, it has been given any publicity.

Ödberg illustrated a number of books, including Viktor Balck’s Gymnastics in 1889, so he was no stranger to portraying sporting activities. This was impressive—Balck was Swedish sport’s “Trumpet of the Fatherland.” Ödberg also turned a number of his paintings into postcards, as many artists did in the 1920s and ’30s.

Ödberg works hang in the National Museum, Stockholm’s City Museum and City Hall, as well as in Uppsala and Gothenburg. For me, pride of place in my varied ski image collection are these two paintings on the insides of envelopes. —E. John B. Allen

Snapshots in Time

1956 Shrewd Planning
Sirs: I am returning the $3 two-year renewal form unsigned though I have always enjoyed reading your magazine. On Jan 22, I will be married to a girl with one year left on her subscription. — E.C.S., BUFFALO, NEW YORK, “HOME ECONOMICS” (LETTERS, SKI MAGAZINE, FEBRUARY 1956)

1969 Price Hike
An increase in price for lift tickets was announced yesterday for the state’s two ski areas, Cannon and Mt. Sunapee. The price for adult tickets at both areas on weekends was raised to $9. Weekday tickets were raised to $7. Season tickets were increased about 20 percent to $145. — “PRICES FOR SKI LIFTS RISE” (NEW YORK TIMES, SEPTEMBER 21, 1969)

1979 Fully Crazed
The gelande jumpers are a traveling gaggle of fully crazed ski addicts without a brain in their heads who party ’til sunrise and fly over the 50-yard-line on 223s without helmets or insurance. Oh, wait. They asked me not to write that. — DAN MCKAY, “LIKE A GOLF BALL” (POWDER MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 1979)

1988 Measuring Up
When in doubt, go shorter. One of the main advantages of today’s improved ski technology is that you can get the same smoothness and stability from a 203 that once was only possible on a 210. — JACKSON HOGEN, “THE RIGHT SKI LENGTH” (SNOW COUNTRY MAGAZINE, MARCH 1988)

2021 High Expectations
This is not science fiction. This is real Olympian life. Shiffrin is entering a World Cup alpine ski season that begins this weekend in Soelden, Austria. It will include her third Olympics, this one in February in Beijing. She is 26 and won gold at each of her previous Games—in the slalom as an 18-year-old in Sochi, Russia; and in the giant slalom four years later in PyeongChang, South Korea, where she added a silver in the alpine combined. Win three medals— a distinct possibility, if not an expectation—and she’ll match Janica Kostelic of Croatia and Anja Parson of Sweden with the most Olympic medals of any woman on the slopes. — BARRY SVRLUGA, “MIKAELA SHIFFRIN KNOWS PAIN AND LOSS. NOW SHE’S BACK ON TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN” (WASHINGTON POST, OCTOBER 21, 2021)

2021 Aging Well
When he set off down the mountain, he skied straight into a Guinness World Record. No one his age had ever done something like this. [Junior] Bounous was 95 years and 224 days old on April 5—230 days older than the existing heli-skiing record-holder, a Canadian named Gordon Precious, who checked in at 94 years 306 days when he made his run in 2019. It was an achievement for the ages, literally. — LEE BENSON, “PRESENTING THE WORLD’S OLDEST HELI-SKIER” (DESERET NEWS, JUNE 6, 2021)

Archaeology and DNA evidence support the theory that skiing arose east of the Baltic, at the end of the last Ice Age.

Translated by Seth Masia

Photo above: The author proposes that skiing began between the Baltic and the Urals, in the gray oval containing all the archaeological sites that have yielded “fossil” skis. Skiing tribes then migrated north and west into Scandinavia, and eastward, up the Ob and Yenisei river valleys to the Altai region and beyond. Millennia later, the migration reversed, as Asian tribes moved west across the steppes and along the Arctic coast.

Where and when was skiing invented? In 1888, Fridtjof Nansen theorized that it was invented in prehistoric times in southern Siberia, in the region between Lake Baikal and the Altai Mountains. From there, he wrote, it spread with migrating tribes to the rest of Siberia and Europe. But archaeological sites in European Russia and recent DNA evidence suggest strongly that skiing began in the Baltic region, at the close of the last Ice Age.

While writing his book On Skis Across Greenland, Nansen asked his friend Andreas M. Hansen, a curator of the University Library in Christiania (today Oslo), to research the origin of the words for “ski” used by the peoples of northern Eurasia. This was probably the first linguistic study specific to skis. Nansen found Hansen’s report very curious. One surprise was to find the Finnish word suksi in much of Siberia.

In the middle of the 19th century, the Finnish linguist Matias Aleksanteri Castrén advanced the concept of a large Ural-Altaic language family, including the Finnish languages and languages spoken by the Tungus and Manchus, plus the Turks and Mongols. He located its birthplace in the Altai region. This concept could explain why the Samoyeds, who came from southern Siberia, spoke languages related to Finnish. The Ural-Altaic theory is now abandoned, but that was the dominant view in the 1880s and may have influenced the Hansen/Nansen linguistic theory.

Hansen reported that variations of the root word suk appear in the languages of the Baltic Finns and the Evenki peoples of Eastern Siberia and China, all the way to the Pacific. In Chapter Three of On Skis Across Greenland, Nansen wrote that both groups—along with the Samoyed tribes—originally were close neighbors in the Baikal-Altai region and migrated from there to the east, north and west. They traveled on skis and sleds. Nansen supposed that Scandinavian people learned to ski from Finns and Saami migrating from the east.

The Swedish historian and linguist Karl Wiklund (1868-1934) emphatically questioned the validity of Hansen’s study. The Norwegian linguistics professor Arnold Dalen, in 1996, did not reject Nansen’s hypothesis outright but found it most likely unverifiable. These reservations have not deterred wide repetition [of the Hansen/Nansen theory], and down the years the concept of a “Siberian cradle” is today set in stone.

(Translator’s note: In 1888, Hansen was a respected and influential geologist, but only an amateur philologist. His doctoral dissertation in geology focused on ancient shorelines and demonstrated that sea level rise and fall since the last Ice Age was a useful marker for determining the age of archaeological sites. He accurately placed the end of the last glaciation at between 11,000 and 9,000 years ago; and his ideas about the role of crustal “drift” were prescient. Nansen adopted Hansen’s geological ideas in his own studies of Greenland and Arctic geology. Hansen would go on to notoriety as an advocate of a racial theory of the Norwegian population that anticipated “Master Race” ideology.)

Origin of the Saami and Finns

According to Finnish anthropologist Markku Niskanen, Nansen’s contemporaries believed, on weak evidence, that Finnish-speaking Europeans, and especially Saami, were of Asian origin. Genetic studies have shown this to be wrong. Studies by geneticists Kristiina Tambets and Antonio Torroni show that the Saami come from the merger of two populations originating in Western and Eastern Europe. Specifically, the Saami are cousins of the Basques, merged with genes from the Proto-Finns of Eastern Europe. All Finns belong to European genotypes.

As Ice Age glaciers began to retreat during the warm Bølling–Allerød interstadial, about 15,000 to 13,000 years ago, tribes migrated north. One population left the ice-free Franco-Cantabrian region in the southwest [today’s Aquitaine and Basque country]. Another moved northwest from what is now Ukraine. The two groups met on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland and around 10,000 years ago created the Kunda culture.

The Meaning of Migration

This is the starting point for Nansen’s error. He was correct to think that the word suksi had traveled between Siberia and Europe, but he was wrong about the direction it took. Archaeological and genetic evidence, consolidated in work by Russian expert Yakov A. Sher, now strongly suggests that the direction of migrations, from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age, was mainly from west to east, before reversing. Andrey Filchenko, of Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan, mentions the presence in the Sayan region of ethnic groups of Finno-Ugrian origin, who came from northwestern Siberia and the Urals. They are known to historians as the Samoyed of the Sayan. The presence in southern Siberia of other Europoid populations prior to our era is otherwise firmly established.

The definite reversal of the direction of migration took place at the start of the Iron Age, when Asian nomadic hordes began to ravage the great Eurasian steppe that runs from Mongolia to the Carpathian Basin. The arrival of their avant-garde in Europe is dated by French archaeologist Michel Kazanski to the victory of the Huns over the Goths in the year 375. By this time, skiing had already existed in Europe for about 8,000 years.

(Translator’s note: Genomic research published in 2018 by Thisius Laminidis et. al. suggests that a Siberian migration entered the Saami/Finnish gene pool “at least 3,500 years ago.” By that time the Saami had been skiing for five millenia.)

The Cradle of Skiing Is European

The arguments in favor of this thesis are archaeological, geographic and cultural.

The oldest skis we know of come from west of the Urals: from the Vis peatbog near Lake Sindor, 800 miles northeast of Moscow, and even farther west, from the Nizhneje Veretje site, 200 miles north of Moscow (the skis found here have been little studied but are of comparable age—about 9,250 years old). Archaeological finds, including sled runners, show that these two prehistoric settlements belonged to a larger group. According to Russian archaeologist Grigory Burov, who led the Vis digs, the culture “was probably linked to Baltic cultures (Suomusjärvi, Kunda) and to sites located between the Baltic and northeast Europe (Veretje).”

In addition, it’s very likely that skiing was practiced in southern Finland around 10,000 years ago. I asked Finnish archaeologist Hannu Takala and Grigory Burov for advice on this. Their response is quite clear: Takala wrote, “It is certain that the first settlers who came to Finland at least had wooden sleds since we have the Heinola sled [10,000 years old]. They probably knew about skis, although we have not yet discovered any, but finds from Russia show this possibility.”

And Burov responded: “We can assume that skis were known and used by the people of Ristola, Finland. The Heinola sled runners are similar to those at the Vis site. This similarity can prove that relations existed between Finland and northern European Russia, and that in Finland they used Vis and Veretje skis.”

The geography of the eastern Baltic offered good conditions for the invention of skiing. According to Polish archaeologist Zofia Sulgostowska, in the Preboreal (11,500 to 10,000 years ago), the Kunda and neighboring cultures lived on low plains dotted with ponds, lakes and gentle streams, offering in winter immense flat surfaces. The southeast Baltic was home to pine and birch forests. These conditions were very favorable to the systematic use of canoes in summer and sleds in winter.

From there skiing would have spread to similar terrain in neighboring Finland, Karelia and part of Lapland. Most of Finland is covered with lakes. Similarly, on the other side of the Urals, the land of the Khantys contains vast marshes, with many lakes and rivers.

Cultural conditions were also conducive to innovation. Archeology shows that the Mesolithics were particularly mobile, adventurous and inventive. The peculiar landscape of the eastern Baltic could only push them to develop new means of travel. The manufacturing sequence of the canoe, to the sled, to harnessing dogs, to skiing was easily within reach.

We can hypothesize on the date of the invention of skiing by first relying on the manufacturing process. We have seen that the skis and sled runner of Vis were carved from tree trunks, in the same way as dug-out canoes. Skis manufactured using this process were necessarily heavier and more fragile than skis made by bending planks. They certainly knew how to bend wood sticks with heat. We can suppose that they still used the carved-log process because the transition from sledge runner to ski was very new at this time.

The Start of Skiing in Siberia

East of the Urals, the oldest evidence we have are sled runners, which we know were in use by 7,000 years ago. Ski expeditions up the ice-covered waterways to Lake Baikal are plausible at that point. The Russian archaeologist G.M. Vasilevich concludes that the Tungus probably lived south of Lake Baikal in the Mesolithic, and it’s reasonable to conclude that Finno-Ugrians from the northwest brought skiing here first, along with their word suksi. As we’ve seen, the word suksi has been preserved in the Tungus-Manchu languages, specifically among the Evenki, who transmitted it to eastern Siberia.

The oldest Siberian stone engravings of skiers are believed to be around 7,000 years old, but stone engravings cannot be carbon dated so their ages are notoriously difficult to estimate.

The four-hole ski-binding system tells us a little more. Skis with foot-plate and mortise, invented by the Saami in the Bronze Age, are carbon-dated to 3,400 years ago with the Høting (Sweden) ski. That design has never been found in Siberia, except in the Arctic trading post Mangazaya [founded 1600 AD].

After thousands of years of skiing in Siberia, one might expect to find more actual skis, or parts of skis. Apart from the unusual case of the Mangazaya skis, there are none. Not having been preserved in peat bogs as in Scandinavia, they have rotted or ended up as firewood. 

This article is condensed from the final chapters of the ISHA Award-winning book Les Peuples du Ski: 10,000 ans d’histoire, by Maurice Woehrlé; Books on Demand, 2020. Engineer and skier Maurice Woehrlé ran Rossignol’s race-ski development for four decades, beginning with the Strato.

Getting dragged across the snow by horses, planes, reindeer and dogs is a unique sport that’s at least 1,000 years old.

By Jay Cowan

Skijoring, one of skiing’s oldest activities, has become one of the latest feel-good winter sports. If you’re doing the popular dog-powered variation—whether pulled around a cross-country track by your own fleet of Corgis, or using huskies supplied by an outfitter—you’re enjoying a recreation that dates back at least 1,000 years. 

The term “skijoring” comes from the Norwegian snørekjøring and means “ski driving.” Rock art in Scandinavia shows humans skiing as early as the 5^th century AD. Later, there are depictions of skiers being pulled by elk (likely while being captured) and reindeer, possibly domesticated. The first written record of what we define as skijoring comes from the Altai Mountains of central Asia, via a Persian historian, Raschid ed-Din. He wrote in the 1200s AD, citing earlier use of skijoring from historical records of the Tang Dynasty (618 to 907 AD). ...

At a recent conference in China, historians explored the ancient birth of skiing and how it spread across the continents. By SETH MASIA

As host of the 2022 Olympic Winter Games, China seeks a major presence in skiing. President Xi Jinping has proposed to invest $400 billion in new ski resorts, and to recruit 340 million winter sports enthusiasts before the 2022 Games begin in Beijing. If successful, that would be 25 percent of China’s population, generating about $100 billion in annual revenue. China would have the world’s largest ski industry.

China may be the future of the sport. The Chinese government also promotes the concept that its Altai Mountains are the origin point of skiing, some 8,000 to 12,000 years ago.

Regular readers of Skiing History are familiar with Nils Larsen’s film, Skiing in the Shadow of Genghis Khan, which received a 2009 ISHA Film Award, and his article “Origin Story” in the May-June 2017 issue. Larsen was among the first to introduce to the West the work of Shan Zhaojian, Wang Bo, Ayiken Jiashan and others, who have been tracing the history of today’s traditional Tuvan skiing culture back to prehistoric origins in the forested mountains of Central Asia. 

In January, I attended the 2018 Ancient Skiing Academic Conference in Altay City, China. The conference focus was twofold: outlining recent research on the origins of skiing in Central Asia, and establishing cultural exchanges between the Tuvan hunting-ski culture and the Telemark tradition of skiing.

Recent work by archaeologists and anthropologists shows that rock art across the region, including much of southern Siberia, depicts hunters on snowshoes and skis, dating back as far as 7,000 years. Indirect evidence suggests hunters may have begun to use snowshoes and skis at the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago. Knut Helskog of the University of Tromsø in Norway noted that human habitation goes back 40,000 years in northern Russia and 9,500 years in Scandinavia, with more than 300 petroglyph sites across the vast region—including at least 100 dating from the Stone Age. Helskog posits a natural progression from short wooden snowshoes to longer implements suitable for floating on deep snow. At some point the bearing surface grows big enough to allow gliding. Climbing skins are the next development. Meanwhile, the spear and bow serve as ski poles. 

At Zalavruga in Russian Karelia, near the shore of the Arctic bay called the White Sea, a dramatic petroglyph shows skiers killing a moose or elk. We know the hunters are on skis, not snowshoes, because the artist(s) depict the tracks in the snow: tromping uphill with pole-marks alternating on both side of the track, and gliding downhill with pole plants widely spaced. The tactic depicted was to climb above the herd, then ski downhill at high speed to overtake the prey, half-buried in deep snow. In the Altay region, elk hunters on fur skis use the same technique today. According to Siberian rock-art specialist Elena Miklashevich of Kemerovo State University, the Zalavruga petroglyphs may be as old as 7,000 years (other experts suggest 5,500). In Southwest Siberia, along the Tom River, one petroglyph skier is depicted carrying what may be a lasso.

None of this should be surprising. As early as 1890, Fridtjof Nansen, in his book On Skis Across Greenland, cited linguistic evidence that skiing originated in Central Asia, along an arc between what is now Kazakhstan and Lake Baikal. This region includes the north slope of the Altai range. Nansen suggested that as skiing hunters followed herds of elk and reindeer, they spread northward and then east toward the Bering Strait and west along the coast of the Arctic Ocean, where ancestors of the Saami (Laplanders) brought skiing to Scandinavia around 5,000 years ago. 

Since around 2005, this view of skiing’s origin has come to prevail among anthropologists, especially in view of the survival of a Stone Age skiing culture among the Mongol Tuvan tribe of the Altai mountains. The very existence of Tuvan skiing was broadcast to Western audiences by Nils Larsen’s 2008 film and Mark Jenkins’ National Geographic article in 2012. But Shan Zhaojian first posited the Altai as the birthplace of skiing back in 1993.

Modern Tuvans make their skis with hand tools, notably the adze. Today, of course, they use steel tools, but metal tools have been available since the Bronze Age, which began in this region about 5,000 years ago. Before that, the stone adze was an efficient tool for turning logs into smooth planks, and so we can easily visualize smooth-surfaced skis going back 10,000 or 12,000 years. Remember that the word “ski” originally meant a split of wood—a plank or board. When skiing is prime, we still reach for our powder boards.

China’s skiing Tuvans are careful to point out that they no longer kill elk—the entire mountain region is a designated conservation area. They will admit to catch-and-release hunting, dropping a lasso over the prey’s antlers, though that practice isn’t kosher either. 

This skiing culture is said to have migrated into Xinjiang province about 400 years ago, from Tuva in southern Siberia. Since 2006 a ski race, first organized by Shan, has been one of many activities preserving the old culture. This year, more than 100 young men turned out for the race, run in two laps at the General’s Mountain ski resort outside Altay City. Each lap is about a mile: uphill, downhill, uphill and downhill again, with a total vertical of about 1,000 feet. The racers make their own skis—race skis are built for running, shorter and lighter than skis made for hunting. They’re covered with horsehide only on the bottoms, to save weight. The soft hair of cold-weather Altai horses glides much faster than Western-style climbing skins. 

Also in attendance at the Altay conference was a delegation of about 20 Norwegians, comprising a telemark racing team led by Lars Ove Wangenstein Berge. With the collaboration of Andrew Clarke, chair of the FIS Telemark committee, and Shan’s group, the team is trying to get telemark racing included as a demonstration sport for the 2022 Beijing Olympics. Berge organized a parallel-GS telemark race at General’s Mountain, won by a couple of his teenage protégés. Berge and Shan would like to establish a torch relay from Morgedal, Norway—birthplace of modern skiing during the 19^th century—to Altay City and on to Beijing for the 2022 opening ceremony.

The Chinese government fully supports the rapid development of alpine skiing as a healthy family sport. The country already boasts more than 100 small and medium-size lift-served ski areas. Altay’s Mayor Yu told me that local kids get free ski lessons and rental gear at General’s Mountain during school holidays, and estimates that 60 to 70 percent of the town’s population has tried skiing. The mountain has replaced its painfully slow old fixed-grip lifts with two new high-speed hybrid “chondolas,” one of which extends across the valley into new terrain to expand the resort by about 50 percent.

All of this skiing development is on government-owned land, with little or no delay for permitting or environmental studies. The central government does what it plans to do, without much feedback from local populations. Xinjiang province is home to half a dozen ethnic groups. The two largest—Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs, who consider themselves the original inhabitants, and Chinese-speaking Han Chinese, who dominate the government—have clashed in bloody riots as recently as 2014. To forestall ethnic conflict, all public gatherings are attended by riot police; government buildings, banks and hotels have barricades and tight security against real or imagined terrorists. It’s an odd cultural environment: a diverse population, free to travel around China and abroad, with a polyglot educated class well aware of news from around the world—all under an authoritarian regime led largely by engineers. Welcome to the Chinese century.   

Seth Masia is president of the International Skiing History Association, and represented ISHA at the 2018 Ancient Skiing Academic Conference in China.

In the article, Kade gives well-deserved acknowledgement to Shan Zhaojian, the father of modern skiing in China, as well as its chief ski historian. Shan is also the leader of the movement declaring that skiing originated here, thousands of years ago—a viewpoint that has sparked debate among historians. To read the article, go to: www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/sports/skiing/skiing-china-cave-paintings.html?_r=0

I first met Shan in Beijing in 2006, and again in 2007 at the traditional ski race in Altay City, an annual event that celebrates the declaration. We shared a strong interest in preserving the traditional skiing still found in the Altai Mountains, and with the help of Ayiken (my translator of both language and culture), we became friends, exchanging information and ideas on the Altai skiers and ways to support their ski culture. Though we were in agreement on the uniqueness and importance of the region’s ski traditions, we differed on the Altay Declaration. The main piece of physical evidence supporting the declaration are some cave paintings found near Altay City that appear to depict skiers in motion over a collection of wild animals. The paintings are wonderful, both in their location deep in the hills and in their execution. The dating, however, seemed problematic, and in talking to experts in the U.S. the difficulty in dating rock art was universally emphasized. 

In May 2017, Ayiken gave me an excellent paper written specifically on the rock pictographs that support the Altay Declaration. The paper (Naturalistic Animals and Hand Stencils in the Rock Art of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Northwest China) was published in 2016 and is written by Paul Taçon (Australia), Tang Huisheng (China) and Maxime Aubert (Australia), all experts in the study and dating of rock art. They suggest that the paintings are probably 4,000 to 5,250 BP. Ancient indeed, but likely not as old as the 10,000+ BP used by the 2006 declaration. This analysis is also not definitive, but it is the most detailed examination of the paintings to date.