Yet the earliest humans from over 100,000 years ago taught themselves how to swim, for food and for pleasure. There is a long history of human swimming for utility and leisure, amply recorded in pictures from the earliest cave drawings and folk narratives. This year the OECD reported that only one in four people in low-income countries can swim.

Although humans have likely been swimming ever since the stone age, however, it didn’t emerge as a popular sport or past time until the early 19th century.

Swimming dates back to around 2600 B.C.E. This is when the first pool was created, in Mohenjo-Daro. Cave art depicting people swimming from approximately 2500 B.C.E was uncovered in Ancient Egyptian caves. Evidence proves that it later spread to civilizations like Ancient Greece, Rome, Japan, & Assyria.