“ the captain of the losing team would be sacrificed to the gods”
Something similar will happen next Tuesday after the England Germany game.
In all seriousness though I guess we’ve been playing games ever since we’ve been in existence. The difference between a game and a modern sport would usually be that a sport is codified which by definition requires written form.
My guess is that without written form ancient sports survived within the collective knowledge of the local communities that played them hence it being difficult to really know what they were thousands of years later.
What it probably means as well is that in years gone by there have been a far greater number of sports mainly based on a common theme but with local variations.
Ha ha, indeed!
Good point. God knows what they were up to. It would be pretty cool to be a fly on the wall back then to see what they were up to. Mainly hunting and gathering and trying to not to be killed I'd imagine. Recreation was probably not something many had the time or appetite for?
Apparently (and I’m only quoting what I’ve read) we had significantly more free time as hunter gathers than we do now. Some of the advantages of settling down to cultivate land and keep animals are clear to see but an excess of leisure time is not one of them. Back in them olden times we almost certainly would have had the opportunity to develop lots of new games. These days we’re stuck in what anthropologists sometimes sometimes refer to as the luxury trap
https://erenow.net/common/sapiensbriefhistory/21.php
Interesting point that. I just have this image of them always breaking their arse working.