The history of skiing spans from the Cro-Magnon man to the chairlift. Find out where to get closer to its roots. The history of skiing spans from the Cro-Magnon man to the chairlift. Find out where to get closer to its roots. The ski was invented before the wheel. Twenty-two thousand years ago, when the Cro-Magnon man first attached two sticks to his feet, it was not to race down a snowy mountain just for the thrill of it. Skiing began as a mode of survival, writes Roland Huntford in Two Planks and a Passion: A Dramatic History of Skiing. According to Huntford, cave drawings suggest that man used skis during the last Ice Age in the Palaeolithic period. The oldest ski artefacts, though, come from the more recent Mesolithic period.