Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Michael Tervo asks, I read a book called “Natural Born Heroes” that, among many things, posits that ancient “pankration” fighters from the island of Crete traveled with Alexander the Great’s army into Asia and planted the seeds for what eventually became King Fu. What do you think? ?

Without having done any research into this topic, my gut says that this is probably not true. There are all sorts of historical theories that involve nothing more than vague coincidence, and this strikes me as one of them.

To prove the theory, you’d need to show some sort of transmission from west to east. Why aren’t there similar martial arts between Greece and China? How was this knowledge transmitted? How long did it take? Again, not having researched it, it seems more plausible that martial arts were independently discovered than that it was transmitted that far that long ago.