Pétanque descends from one of the oldest games in human history, the archetype of which involves throwing or rolling an object as close as possible to a marker.
Pétanque belongs to a family of ball games that developed in the Mediterranean, today called boules in French and bocce in Italian.
In 1907, Jules LeNoir altered an older game, called le Jeu Provencale thus inventing what eventually evolved into the modern sport of Pétanque.