[Low-Tech] Smallsword with the Bronze Age 'Rapier?'

[Prince Charon]

The earliest historical swords, or some of the earliest (the khopesh is almost as old, and is about as much and axe as a sword), were basically narrow long knives that archaeologists call 'bronze age rapiers' - here's a google image search of them. Lindybeige has a roughly four-minute video with some replicas as part of a series on Mick Skelly's collection. They seem to have started in the Middle East around 1700ish BCE and spread out from there, reaching Britain around 1550ish BCE (as opposed to the later leaf-bladed swords, which may have been invented in Ireland and spread west).

Anyway, it's pretty clear that you wouldn't use the Rapier skill with those, or most other examples, but the ones that we have often seem stabby enough for the Smallsword skill to work, and might even work better than Knife or Shortsword (although as noted in the video, you can chop with them). The question in my mind is, is it plausible for a skill that could reasonably be called Smallsword to have been invented during TL1, without that being too cinematic?

My first thought is that sword skills would have evolved from the Knife skill as the blades got longer, but it occurred to me just now that some martial arts styles I've seen write-ups for in GURPS use Smallsword and other sword skills with a baton or a short staff, so it could be that a skilled stick-fighter handling one of these new-fangled 'really long knives' noticed that it handled a lot like a sharpened stick, but was less prone to breakage, and thus adapted that skill to the new weapon.


Thoughts?