New book explores the ancient origins of swimming

Without swimming, there’d be no need for swimming pools. But where and how did it all begin?

An intriguing new book plots the birth of swimming all the way back to the ice age, in an original and comprehensive history of humans surviving and thriving in water.

Shifting Currents by Karen Eva Carr also examines the tension that arose when non-swimming peoples met other cultures that had embraced swimming.

Carr is an associate professor emerita at Portland State University and has traced human swimming back as far as 100,000 years ago.

Recent archaeological excavations in Italy found the remains of a group of Neanderthals with a very unusual growth in the bones of their ears that could only be put down to serious infections of osteomyelitis or otitis externa – better known as swimmer’s ear.

Swimmer’s ear, naturally enough, comes from swimming, and the theory is these people who lived by the Mediterranean Sea were diving to the bottom of a cove where they lived, bringing up shells from which to fashion tools. She says similar damage to earbones in other locations leads archaeologists to believe that most early people – both modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthals – knew how to swim.

Although our relatives in the primate world are poor swimmers, it is believed humans started by wading along the banks to collect mussels, prawns, white lotus and other foods.

The first depictions of swimming appear in rock paintings in southern Algeria, far out in the Sahara – a desert now, but a back after the end of the Ice Age, the Sahara held meadows

and forests, with creeks and ponds running through it.

Painted images on these rock walls show people hunting, sitting and dancing. In the cave, figures are painted parallel to the ground, with their arms outstretched – swimming! This location is now known as the Cave of the Swimmers.

Once Egyptians invented hieroglyphic writing they were able to leave us clearer information, including this poem about a young man swimming across the crocodile-infested Nile to reach his girlfriend (“sister” is a euphemism in this poem):

My sister’s love is on the far side.
The river is between our bodies;
The waters are mighty at flood-time,
A crocodile waits in the shallows.
I enter the water and brave the waves,
My heart is strong on the deep;
The crocodile seems like a mouse to me,
The flood as land to my feet.
What better reason to learn to swim!

The book is broken into four sections: Part I: Learning To Swim, looks at the ancient world and the earliest evidence of swimming humans; Part II: Forgetting How To Swim looks at the medieval world and Asia; Part III: Still Swimming investigates Africa, the Americas, China and the Pacific; while Part IV: Changing Places looks at swimming in the modern world.

Shifting Currents by Karen Eva Carr is published by Reaktion Books.

Contact: https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/shifting-currents

IMAGE: The first known image of people swimming, in the Cave of the Swimmers, Wadi Sura, Western Desert, Egypt, circa 8000 BCE. (Roland Unger, Wikimedia Commons)