I read up on the history of physical education, training and martial arts and lost all interest now.
Greeks/Romans/Medieval Euros invented everything. I am not kidding. Even the most obscure or exotic training methods or rituals in martial arts you can think off, stuff you are 100% sure you can only find in eastern martial arts, say, standing meditation in Kung Fu, Wai Kru in Muay Thai, Breaking boards in karate, killing small animals in a ritual to join a Chinese Mafia group, doing slow mo training, etc. etc. pp
All of it has been reported, described and analyzed by several authors in antiquity and the early middle ages.
Kung Fu is watered down Greek boxing. Chinese got acquainted with it after Alexander's conquests. There are loads of legends that they had fist-fighting before that, but actually no historical record. Their training methologies are the same too. Shadowboxing (skiamachia), forms (pyrrhichios ), push hands (cheironomia), punching bags (korykomachia). Greek boxers generally didn't spar except slap boxing because the fights were so dangerous you couldn't train them full-force (as seen at every contest, they punched each other into heaps of bones and meat and blood, basically). Sounds familiar?
There's more. You can trace back every single Asian martial art (except the indigenous wrestling styles) to an older (Kung Fu) or more recent (Jiu Jitsu is based on medieval European wrestling), or even modern (Muay Thai is Savate+Lutte Parisienne, just without the shoes) source.
I did my homework and read more books about this shit than I'd dare to remember. Except de arte Gymnastica from the Renaissance, which I only read parts of, and de sanitate tuenda by Galen (which is in the mail), I have read everything we still have about those times.
It's pretty disillusioning, to say the least. Asian martial arts basically don't exist.