De Proefkeuken is a Dutch children’s show about science. In one episode, the two protagonists, Willem and Pieter, make their own skates.
One of their homemade bone skates.
They go to the Schaatsmuseum Hindelopen and see bone skates at about 6:20. Then they go back to their lab and create their own bone skates. They do not use the right bones and attach cords in a way that may cause extra friction on the ice.
They take them out for a test skate on badly chewed-up and snow-covered ice and find that they don’t work well. This is consistent with my experience: bone skates do not work well when the ice is rough and covered in snow. With smooth new ice they would have worked better!
The skates they take out to the ice do not appear to be the same as the ones they made in the lab.
The bone skates part of the film ends at about 9:30. At about 15:30 a sequence depicting a blacksmith making modern speed skates begins. They have more success with those skates.
In the second half of March, Google sent me a bunch of news articles about a bone skate found in Přerov, a city in the Czech Republic. This post is a summary meant to track the evolution of the story. There are of course many more articles and blog posts about this skate. I doubt this blog post will get picked up by Google’s alerts.
On March 14,Radio Prague International broke the news with an article by Ruth Fraňková that included photos and an audio interview with archaeologist Zdeněk Schenk with an English voice-over. That audio was the source for the interview fragments quoted over the next few weeks.
Schenk and his team dated the skate to the 10th or 11th century. It was made from a horse metapodium with the toe pointed and upswept. There is a small hole at the front and another (not mentioned in the first few articles) at the back.
All these articles focus on the “tools” aspect of bone skates, suggesting that people used them to travel and carry stuff across frozen waterways. This contrasts with the evidence from Scandinavia, where skates were generally used for fun. But so far, the articles are pretty good about sticking to the facts and providing correct information.
The newly found bone skate. Source: Lenka Kratochvílová via Times of India; first published by Radio Prague International (uncropped).
Google sent me its first update the next day, March 15. That link was to an article on BNN with the headline “Archaeologists Unearth Thousand-Year-Old Bone Ice Skate in Moravian City of Přerov”. Unfortunately the link doesn’t work any more.
A couple of other articles covering basically the same information appeared in the next few days. Mark Milligan published an article about the skate in Heritage Daily on March 16, and the Times of India published an anonymous article that, as of this writing, was last updated on March 18.
On March 20, Oguz Buyukyildirim provided a few more details in an article on Arkeonews: The bone is a metacarpus, and similar skates have been found in the past. Buyukyildirim cites specifically one skate found in 2009, but adds that “more such blades have been unearthed over the years in the wider area of the city.”
The next few articles didn’t add much other than a few more quotes from Schenk’s interview:
Christopher Plain‘s longer investigation, published on March 21 in the Debrief, quotes Schenk a few times as he describes skating with a pole and other skates from Central Europe and Scandinavia, especially in Viking settlements.
Abdul Moeed‘s article, published that same day in the Greek Reporter, gets more excited about the Vikings, but doesn’t provide any new information.
Amber Breese‘s article, published the very next day (March 22), includes some of the same details.
Slightly later, some more details emerged in a Newsweek article published on March 23 and updated on March 26. Now the skate has an additional hole at the heel. The article also mentions another skate found in the same city in 2009 and “nearly identical” skates found in specific places: Birka, York, and Dublin.
Another photo of the skate, this one showing a second hole at the heel. Source: Zdeněk Schenk via Newsweek.
Things started to go off the rails on March 25, when Deseret News published Xochitl Bott Rivera’s article “Did archaeologists find the oldest ice skate ever?”. The correct answer to that is, of course, “No”. The oldest skates are close to 3000 years older than this one. Eventually the article does admit that, citing the Chinese skates found not too long ago. Along the way, it quotes Federico Formenti via Smithsonian Magazine.
The skate remained popular in various news outlets a bit longer; subsequent articles stuck to the facts quoted in earlier articles:
Angel Saunders’ article “1,000-Year-Old Ice Skate Discovered in Czech Republic, But It’s Not Made of Metal” was published in Yahoo! Life and People on March 25 and in Prague Morning on March 26.
Sonja Anderson’s article, which appeared in Smithsonian Magazine and MSN on March 28, includes a nice retrospective on the Schenk’s childhood skating on the same river.
Samantha Franco published an article in The Vintage News on April 1.
Emily Chan published an article in Chip Chick on April 4.
Andy Corbley’s article in Good News Network, published on April 5, includes the retrospective from Anderson’s article as a quote from GNN’s interview with Schenk.
As for the skate’s future, Prague Radio and Oguz Buyukyildirim note that it will be put on display at the Comenius Museum in Přerov Castle.
The thousand-year-old skate discovered by archaeologists in Přerov will soon be shown to the public. It will go on display at the city’s castle as part of an exhibition dedicated to the history of the region.
This is just a list of links with some comments. It’s an interesting example of how a story spreads and grows despite a lack of reliable new information.
Ancient Origins article (3/1/2023, remixes information from Kang and adds a photo of four medieval Scandinavian bone skates in the Swedish History Museum, correctly attributed)
Miami Herald article by Aspen Pflughoeft; cites Kang and adds more context, including statements about the development of skates from bone skates to today’s all-metal blades and a link to a photo of a skate at the Museum of London; mentions “both pairs of skates”—previous stories just say “skates” and show the original photo of one, so perhaps this is drawing on the photo from the Ancient Origins article
The History Blog article (3/9/23, cites Metcalfe and quotes the “two pairs” invention of Plfughoeft)
Greek Reporter article by Abdul Moeed (3/9/23; includes the photo of four medieval Scandinavian bone skates from the Swedish History Museum correctly credited to the creator but mislabeled as “Bronze Age Ice Skates”; mentions “two pairs”)
LiveScience article by Tom Metcalfe that connects the skates to the unfortunate tale that skating began in Finland and to early skiing in the Altai Mountains. Derivatives include:
Headtopics article (3/7/23, summary that pulls from and references Metcalfe)
Video from The Prehistory Guys with a lot wrong: the picture from the Swedish History Museum and incorrect information about early European skates—but at least it puts the earliest ones in Switzerland instead of Finland, which is closer!
The idea that ice skates made from animal bones first appeared in Finland is based on a paper published in 2008 in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. The authors, two biomechanics researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University, measured the metabolic cost of skating as compared with walking, then ran computer simulations of traveling via ice or on foot (walking in snow) in the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. They concluded that
the present study supports the hypothesis that, in the second millennium BC, and compared to populations living elsewhere, ancient Finns were more likely forced to develop a tool that helped them save energy from travelling.
Formenti & Minetti 2008, p. 6.
Note that this doesn’t actually say that ancient Finns developed skating. All they’re saying is that, of the five countries they analyzed, skating gives people the greatest metabolic advantage in Finland—assuming skating was used for travel. That conclusion has been taken out of context and revered as truth by the internet. Somehow it morphed into archaeologists finding 5000-year-old bone skates in Finland, which never happened.
Unfortunately, Formenti and Minetti were not familiar enough with the archaeological evidence to pick the right places to analyze. Had they read further into the archaeological literature, they would have found Arthur MacGregor‘s description of possible Bronze Age finds from central Europe and “well-stratified Iron Age examples” from central Germany (p. 64) as well as the thorough discussion of Bronze Age skates from Hungary in “Skating with Horses” by Alice Choyke and Laszlo Bartosiewicz, among other fantastic references published before their article. Surely then they would have included central Europe (which MacGregor proposes as the homeland of ice skating (p. 67)) in their analysis.
Instead, they perpetuated the myth of skating history that connects the origin of skating with the Northern peoples. I wrote a paper about such mythologizing a couple of years ago. In that vein, how well Formenti and Minetti’s idea has spread is really interesting because of how it highlights the prestige accorded numerical simulations in recent years—it has been picked up by popular news outlets despite conflicting with what archaeologists have been saying for decades.
As for the date, I have no idea where the “5000 years ago” date for the first skates that keeps surfacing is from. The oldest skates that have been found in Finland so far date to the 14th century AD, i.e., the 1300s AD. The skates from central Europe go back at least that many years BC—to the second millennium, which is the timeframe Formenti and Minetti suggest. The skates recently found in China are only 3500 years old. They fit in with what I proposed in my book: like the archaeologists, I put the origin of ice skating in or near the Eurasian steppes.
References
A. M. Choyke & L. Bartosiewicz. 2005. Skating with horses: Continuity and parallelism in prehistoric Hungary. Revue de Paléo-biologie, spéc. 10:317–326.
This last week, the news has been full of reports on the recent announcement (in Chinese) that bone skateshave been foundin the Xinjiang area. The skates were reportedly found at a tomb in the Gaotai Ruins, which are part of the Jiren Taigoukou Ruins in Qialege’e, a village in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region of China. It’s hard to find on Google maps, but I think it’s Qialegeer Village in Nilka County, Ili, Xinjiang.
The proximity of the new skate finds to the Altai region. From Google Maps.
According to the news articles I’ve seen, the new skate finds are about 3,500 years old, putting them at about 1500 BCE. That’s on par with some of the earliest bone skates that have been found in Europe.
The location of these finds is really exciting because I predicted it in my book on bone skates, published almost exactly 3 years ago. I wrote a story—a rather speculative one since there wasn’t much evidence—suggesting that bone skates originated with nomadic pastoralists in the Eurasian steppes and may have been connected with the early evidence for skiing found in the Altai mountains. I wrote:
Further archaeological work could conceivably uncover early bone skates close to the Altai Mountains or early skis for comparison purposes.
Skates Made of Bone, p. 61
And here we have early bone skates found near the Altai Mountains in a tomb associated with pastoralists that also included pieces of wagons! I’m looking forward to learning more about these skates. I wish the report were more detailed.
These skates are among the oldest skate finds to date. The earliest European bone skates are hard to pinpoint because there has been confusion about identification and dating. The earliest artifacts I’ve seen identified as skates are the Early Bronze Age radius-based artifacts from Albertfalva, Hungary, which date to around 2500 BCE but are no longer generally accepted as skates (Skates Made of Bone, 52). The next skate candidates are metapodia found in Ukraine and connected to the Sabatinovka culture, whose dates are generally put around 1500–1100 BCE but could be earlier (Skates Made of Bone, 53). The earliest clear European skates are from the Late Bronze Age and appeared in Eastern Europe (Skates Made of Bone, 53). They’re probably a few centuries later than the Xinjiang skates, if the 1500 BCE date turns out to be right.
The Xinjiang skates do indeed look a lot like typical European bone skates, based on the photo included with some of the news articles:
The image has no caption, which made me wonder if it could be a stock image.
Both my story and these new finds contrast sharply with the popular but false story that skates were first used by ancient Finns 5,000 years ago. That story is not based on archaeological evidence, but rather on computer simulations by Formenti & Minetti that didn’t include Central Europe—where the earliest archaeological evidence is—as a possibility. Archaeologists have been putting the origin of ice skating in or near the Eurasian steppes since the 1970s (Skates Made of Bone, 51).
Fríssbók or Codex Frisianus is an Icelandic manuscript written in the first quarter of the fourteenth century. It includes a copy of Magnússona saga (called Saga Sigurðar, Eysteins ok Ólafs in C. R. Unger’s edition). The whole manuscript has been digitized and is available at handrit.is!
Here is the part about skating, with the phrase “ek kvnna ok sva a isleggiom” (I could also go on skates) underlined.
The top part of column B of Copenhagen, Arnamagnæan Institute, AM 45 fol., f. 63r. Photo: Suzanne Reitz. Taken from handrit.is. I added the red underlining.
The word for bone skates, isleggiom, crosses the line break. There are some abbreviations, as is normal for medieval manuscripts.
This is the only unambiguous reference to bone skates in the corpus of Old Norse literature, but not the only manuscript containing it: there are numerous manuscript copies of the saga.
The Catalogue of the Collection of London Antiquities in the Guildhall Museum lists 16 bone skates. The first, #134, is “said to have been found with two Roman sandals” at London Wall. A few of these skates, including #134, were drawn by Charles H. Whymper; his drawing is preserved in the British Museum.
“Five skates made out of bone” by Charles H. Whymper, c. 1891. British Museum no. 1931,1114.102; asset no. 1613392675. Reproduced under a CCC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
I’ve finally gotten hold of Oleg Oleynikov’s paper on the bone skates from medieval Novgorod. It came out last year, but only recently appeared in the online archive of Russian Archaeology (2021, issue 4, pages 102–118). It’s in Russian, and I don’t know Russian, so I have been looking at the pictures and references and using Google translate. This post is a summary of what I thought was interesting.
The paper describes 44 skates and 7 skate blanks. Virtually all the skates date to the period between the second half of the eleventh century and the beginning of the thirteenth century. There are no thirteenth-century skates (possibly due to a plague between 1216 and 1230?) , and three skates are later, two from the fourteenth century and one from the fifteenth. They’re made from horse and cattle bones, distributed as in this table:
Horse
Cattle
Radius Metacarpus Metatarsus
18 12 13
0 5 3
Bone types used at Novgorod.
Oleynikov thoughtfully includes the dimensions of the bones and remarks that ones in the 17–20 cm length range were sized for children. Seven of the skates qualify, plus five fragments that could have been under 20 cm as complete skates (I don’t know how much is missing). There are also five skates (including one fragment) that are just over 20 cm (less than 21 cm). That seems rather low to me; there are a lot of big skates in the collection, including some over 30 cm long. The biggest is 39 cm, surely an adult size, but there’s also a 29.8 cm long horse radius that could have been even bigger before it broke! It would be interesting to compare the distribution of skate sizes to the ones Edberg & Karlsson found for Birka and Sigtuna.
Moving on, Oleynikov classifies the skates into two main types based on whether they have holes for bindings or not. Most of them (23) are type 2, which means no holes. Eleven skates are type 1 (with holes); the other 10 skates are fragmentary with the epiphyses missing, making it impossible to tell whether they had holes. The remaining 7 are blanks. Oleynikov goes on to discuss the different types of holes in detail, coming up with 10 different skate types based on the placement and orientation of the binding holes.
The other classification dimension is group A or B. Most of the skates belong to group B, what I think of as “regular” skates—like the ones described in my book. The four group A skates seem to be “split bones“, a skate type that was apparently unique to Scandinavia (Thurber 2020, 106), now found in Russia! But it makes sense because Novgorod was known to be home to many Scandinavians.
Towards the end of the paper, Oleynikov mentions the two main skating techniques (pole-pushing while standing on two skates and skateboarding—standing on one skate and pushing with the other foot) but adds some ideas that I found interesting:
He suggests that pole-pushing was better with attached skates because skating with unattached skates would have required better balance. I’m not sure about this; I found it quite easy to pole-push with unattached skates (though Küchelmann and Zidarov had some trouble). He adds that the reason it’s so hard to identify the metal points from the tips of skating poles in the archaeological record is that they were made from random scraps, which seems possible.
He suggests that the skateboarding technique would have been better with unattached skates because it was easier. Personally, I found it much more difficult than pole-pushing, attached or not.
The paper concludes with the extremely interesting observation that the Russian word for skates (коньки) is a diminutive of the word for horse and that the pole-pushing technique looks kind of like riding a hobby horse. This connects with the idea of a link between bone skates and horses suggested by Choyke & Bartosiewicz that I included in Skates Made of Bone.
References
A. M. Choyke & L. Bartosiewicz. 2005. Skating with horses: Continuity and parallelism in prehistoric Hungary. Revue de Paléo-biologie, spéc. 10:317–326.
This short video illustrates the major advantage of metal-bladed skates over bone skates. Even if the earliest metal-bladed skates were used with poles (I’m not sure when people started pushing with their feet), it was much easier to turn on them.
Here I’m trying to keep the hockey circle between my feet on my archetype skates (left) and on my bone skates (right). Note that it actually works with the archetype skates! The bone skates keep going their own way.
Find 22/1524 is 130 mm long and features roughening of the “topside”, where the foot would rest, and an axial hole in the proximal end, under the skater’s heel (215). This feature is characteristic of skates from Great Britain (Thurber 2020, 112).
The other skate, find 22/1536, is only 89 mm long. It is described as having the “underside missing, proximal end sawn, topside polished from use” (215). It sounds like this is one of the unusual skates where the palmar side was used as the gliding surface. Usually the dorsal side glides on the ice. The missing “underside” makes me wonder if this skate was part of a pair of split bones, which would be highly unusual for Great Britain! Those skates, which have the top half of the bone removed to create a nice footrest, are generally only found in Scandinavia (Thurber 2020, 106).
These skates join five others found in Lincoln (Thurber 2020, 110). They unique in being made from cattle metatarsi; the others are three cattle metacarpi, a horse metacarpus, and a possible cattle radius, according to my database.
The book also mentions “an unfinished piece” found with the two fragments, which led the authors to propose “these were being turned out of a workshop nearby” (32).
Jonathan Clark, Justin Garner-Lahire, Cecily Spall, and Nicola Toop. Lincoln Castle Revealed: The Story of a Norman Powerhouse and its Anglo-Saxon Precursor. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
