Bowling has a long and rich history, and today is one of the most popular sports in the world. A British anthropologist, Sir Flinders Petrie, discovered in the 1930's a collection of objects in a child's grave in Egypt that appeared to him to be used for a crude form of bowling. If he was correct, then bowling traces its' ancestry to 3200 BC. A German historian, William Pehle, asserted that bowling began in his country about 300 AD.