The accuracy is skewed by equivocation, by the constant reminders of “what we call yoga”, which is part of the reason why I pointed that out in the other topic.
Yoga is first mentioned by name in some 2,500-year-old Hindu religious texts called the Upanishads, but this is actually a term relating to a method of strapping horses together – literally the origin for our word “yoke.” The Upanishads use it as a metaphor for a mental prayer technique, but as far as all those weird stretches are concerned, the texts mention exactly one physical posture, and that posture is pretty much “sit in a way that makes meditation comfortable.” So the word “yoga” might describe an old Hindu teaching, but then so does the word “avatar,” and nobody’s claiming that the James Cameron movie reflects an unbroken line of ancient sacred tradition.
So, they are contradicting themselves quite sharply when they say essentially that “there is a 2500 year old mystical tradition called Yoga - but that’s not what we’re talking about”. Comparing their cherry-picking of facts with the James Cameron movie only makes their rhetoric seem more bizarre. The physical exercises never were the “ancient sacred tradition”. Some people’s failure to understand this in no way implies that there is no such tradition.
Non-monastic yoga which involved lots of physical training has been around since at least the 1700s, and there has been some scholarly evidence to suggest that sources of this era such as the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, Gheranda Samhita, Shiva Samhita, minor Upanisads and various Tantras have their origins earlier in Medieval Indian culture. What most modern people (arguably) might recognize as Yoga practice might not be 5000 years old, but it is probably at least 500 years old.
