Where and when did people learn that hitting other people with their bare hands could really hurt them? Are there pictures of cavemen kung-fu fighting? (No disrespect intended:)) And what exactly does something have to have to be considered a “martial art”? For example, do boxing or amateur wrestling count?
Well, Martial just refers to something relating to War.
Would you only consider human warfare or fighting to count as the origin?
I assume that you are speaking of martial arts such as Ju Jitsu, Muy Thai and Karate.
Pretty much every culture has some sort of martial art. Most people simply know more about the Asian ones because of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Each country in asia has some form of martial arts that is homogenous to it. Although most of the Japanese ones are influenced by Chinese martial arts.
Other parts of the world have there own martial arts though. French has La Savat (kickboxing), Greco-Roman wrestling used to involve kicks, puches and illegal holds, and before the Marguis of Queensberry British boxing was more like brawling. On a more surreal note Brazil (I think) has one called Caporeia (sp?) which is also a dance.
I realize that I gave no sources so some one else will have to provide the cite site
Sam,
Doing a quick google turns up Egypt and China. I have never heard of Egyptian hand-to-hand warriors, but hey, they built the Pyramids, so anything is possible 
I suspect that the various forms developed seperately, so it will be difficult to get a precise answer.
BTW, I am wondering, is your sig from a ‘The Tick’ episode?
Capoeira, and sources disagree on whether it originated in Africa or Brazil.
Capoeira is very interesting to watch.
It’s a dance style of fighting. You’re dancing with your opponent but also trying to hurt them… GOOD TIMES!
Yes, it is from an episode of the Tick…If I’d thought ahead I’d have named myself after the EMBWBAM (Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs At Midnight) instead of a Roddy Piper movie :).
I was perhaps too nonspecific, I meant martial art as in “unarmed hand-to-hand combat.” I suppose that someone could assume that any civilzation with a significant military (Rome, Sparta, or Egypt for examples) taught its soldiers some way of defending themselves if they were unarmed. Either that, or the soldiers taught themselves.
Hmm… the only culture that I know of that didn’t discover how to fight with hands and feet were the Native Americans (Until the pilgrims came). How they went on without discovering it is beyond me, but I’ve heard it a few times in my life.
In the sense of a martial art being a “war art”, I’ll hazard a WAG that every culture has developed them to some level of sophistication. Hitting someone else more efficiently has been something we’ve been working on since before we were walking erect.
Try not to think of a martial art as simply an unarmed combat style with a surrounding philosophy in the sense of kung fu and other modern styles. Martial arts have their origins much farther back, back to a bronze age swordsman or a “caveman” swinging a club to agin an advatage over someone who ahdn’t quite learned the trick yet. What we think of martial arts nowadays come from eons of physical conflicts with each other, but are only a small part of the picture. We usually think of martial arts as only the unarmed showy hand to hand fighting styles of karate and kung fu, etc., but i’s arguable they are often learned this way in modern times arguably only because laws generally prevent us from roaming the streets with javelins and broadswords. They don’t differ from armed combat that came before it as much as one would think.
As far as an unarmed combat style, wrestling and striking has probably been with us since before we descended full time from the trees. Laws concerning weaponry may have been the factor that caused unarmed combat to eventually become as highly developed as it is. But martial prowess is not at all limited to unarmed combat and is probably older than history. Modern martial arts are just a recent manifestation of our oldest science, killing each other more efficiently.
O Lord, forgive my many vile typos and failures in subject-verb agreement in the above post.
I think pravnik is on to something: Martial arts, as we think of them usually, are beyond simple brawling or streetfighting. They involve discipline, skill, and tactics beyond what normally would be used (special pressure-point touch-hits, for example). They have a philosophy around them, usually involving a strict mental purification discipline as a means of absolutely hardening the body from the inside out (pain is cut off as the practitioner enters a religious dissociative state). They are, in short, Oriental and tied up with the very mystical religions of the area that do not differentiate between religious observance and lifestyle (being a yogi is not a day job, but a way of looking at the world).
Defined in that way (definite philosophies of fighting, disciplined practice to give the knowledgable an advantage over the brawler in both body and mind, and a skillset that extends beyond the trivial punching and kicking), I think the martial arts aren’t quite as universal as the overbroad definition above would make it seem. The Berserkers (Norse maniac-warriors identified with the bear) have the mental and physical discipline down, but I doubt they had a broad skillset of unarmed tactics. I cannot think of any other non-Oriental traditions right now that might fit.
Yes, I think Derleth hit well on what I was trying to say (with better english). What constitutes a martial art may be up for debate, but the martial arts in general are more or less prehistoric, and more encompassing of warfare than what we tend to think of now.
Here’s my fairly useless contribution: I remember reading that kung fu originated as a form of fighting usable by peasants during times of revolt and such. Weapons were in short supply, but a well-practiced kung fu type could presumably do a good amount of damage, especially in large numbers.