“A FMA grandmaster posted in a forum that all martial arts were stolen from blacks and that the first Chinese were really black people. I ripped him a new one over that so I may be persona non grata in traditional circles now. FMA like everything else is relying on popularity to be successful so they seem as susceptible as any other movement to being pozzed.”
-Dave
First, Dave, Has this FMA grandmaster viewed this video?
If not, you might wish to enlighten him as to the general level of esteem in which our favorite type of American is held in China.
Secondly, let me give you what I know of martial arts evolution—setting aside the very martial art of skewering enemies with weapons and only considering ritualized forms of combat that focus on purposes below the military horizon, such as self-improvement, sports competition, and self-defense, stressing empty hand over weapon use.
Wrestling: Spain, 20,000 Y.B.P.
Boxing: Babylon, 3,700 Y.B.P.
MMA: Hellas, 2,700 Y.B.P.
Some martial arts researchers have attempted to trace the evolution of Chinese martial arts through monastic Indian contact, and have even suggested that the Indians learned it from the Greeks in 327 B.C., as the Ghurkas did, apparently, borrow a Greek sword design, which had been borrowed from an Egyptian pattern. However, a close reading of Alexander’s conquests reveals that Indians were already boxing when the God-Brat came on the scene. Below is what I have determined.
The three dates above are more indicative of media advancement than combative advancement.
Warriors wrestle because primitive warriors are hunters and hunters must wrestle game at some point, so wrestling becomes a warrior art.
Boxing is a specific ritual that is closely tied to pastoral nomadism and the battle-taxi chariot, in the period between 2,000 and 1,000 B.C. and was brought to the Near East, Egypt, Indian and the Balkan Peninsula and Adjacent Islands by invading Indo-Europeans. These invaders utilized the same steppes corridor and war technologies that enabled similar barbarians to invade Northern China. I see no reason why Chinese boxing would not also evolve under these same circumstances.
The idea that only one person, in one place, at one time invented, the knife, for instance, or first used a leaf for wiping his ass, or first made a fist and struck with it, and that all subsequent appearances of that practice must be traced linearly back to that source, is an outmoded theory called “diffusion.”
If one believes that everything in the human tool kit and skill set came about in this manner then an understanding of human behavior and the process of discovery is not likely and will probably not enable that person to process rational discussion.
Heck, i don't even believe in the "out of Africa" theory!
archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2014/10/200000-year-old-neanderthal-human.html
&
atlanteangardens.blogspot.com/2014/05/out-of-africa-theory-officially-debunked.html
What it comes down to is that whoever wrote about it first gets credit for creating it. Or whoever depicted it in a painting on a cave or tomb wall, as you alluded to James. For example who invented beer? I suppose most people today would want to give the Germans the credit for that. However, the Egyptians and Sumerians were writing, and illustrating, about brewing beer many thousands of years before the ancestors of modern Germans migrated to their current homeland, much less developed their own written language. Fast forward a few millennia we find that the oldest continuously operating brewery in the world is indeed located in Bavaria Germany. The Brauerei Weihenstephan, located in a Benedictine monastery, is said to have been making beer since the year 1040 A.D. During the past hundred and fifty years or so many of the major industrial breweries of the world, including ones in Mexico, Africa and China, were established by Germans. Regardless of who recorded it first and who dominates the brewing industry today, since fermented beverages occur naturally it is highly likely that different people in different parts of the world discovered how to make beer more or less independently. Likewise the arts of wresting and boxing no doubt came to be in many different cultures in much the same fashion. The North American aboriginal tribes seem to be among the few peoples in the world who did not figure out how to make fermented beverages on their own. But that is another story.
"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." - Benjamin Franklin
>all martial arts were stolen from blacks
This is all true. Martial arts, like the germ theory of disease, integral and differential calculus, the internal combustion engine, the integrated-circuit microprocessor, and the complete works of Mozart, were all stolen from black people. As was everything of value in the Western world. Except for the helicopter, which was invented and successfully prototyped in one single attempt by an industrious Russian peasant lad in 1884, but he was murdered by jealous and greedy kulaks.
>and that the first Chinese were really black people.
Ahahaha! Saying this to an actual Chinese person would get you either a completely blank look concealing seething hatred, hysterical laughter, or a punch in the snoot.