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It started as a necessity, now it is a form of art. The history of clothing is millions of years, and man’s vanity is even older.
“Wearing clothes and not appearing naked in public may seem perfectly natural to us, but this habit is really unusual,” comments archaeologist Ian Gilligan with. “There are no other animal species that wear clothes.”
This is excluded, of course, the adornments that some living beings use to draw the attention of the opposite sex, for example, as is the case of orcas that.
The clothes began to emerge, of course, out of necessity. About two million years ago, our ancestors began to lose their hairwhich has become a great disadvantage compared to other species, which use it to protect themselves from cold or pathogenic agents.
About 500,000 years ago, when temperatures began to lower, hominids then began to scrape the skin of animals through flat tools, turning it into clothing. “We don’t have clothing like that,” says Gilligan. “But we have indirect evidence in a series of areas.”
“It’s amazing to see this coincidence between the first tests of use of stone tools to work the skin and the fact that, between 500,000 and 400,000 years ago, if you enter this colder period and sometimes with Very fast climate change“Says the archaeologist Francesco D’Errico.
But at this time, there was still no talk of accessories – not in aesthetic clothes. By the way, as Gilligan explains, “people wore clothes to stay hot when necessary, but they were naked when time improved“.
However, footprints of a child, probably Neanderthal, show that it had been wearing shoes for about 120,000 years.
About 75,000 years ago, the peoples of southern Africa invented a new type of tool: the punchy. These piercing utensils made of bone allowed to make seams, which led to the clothes to become tighter. Other later tools, such as Burin (the oldest of which there are 39,000 years ago), also helped shape the skins.
And one of the most utilitarian inventions ever in this field was the underwearwhich could only start to be done when it was able to make fair clothing to the body.
This warmer clothing allowed people to expand to sites to which they were not physiologically adapted. May even help explain why Oh Homo sapiens He prospered after migrating to Europe about 45,000 years ago, suggests New Scientist.
But it was only with the appearance of needle that the truly spoken fashion came about.
The needles first appear in the archaeological record about 40,000 years ago in the Cave of Denisova, Siberia, but were rare until about 19,000 years ago.
A new Gilligan and D’Errico published last year in Science Advances explains that the needles not only allowed our ancestors to make more functional garments, but could also create more beautiful pieces through embroidery or the fixation of Decorative objects such as beads, shells and feathers.
In fact, our ancestors’ vanity is much older than that. Perforated shells found in Africa indicate that people had been necklaces for at least 142,000 years. But this was the Concretization of the aesthetic sense of men.
“What needles confirm is the transition from the function of clothing from a thermal need to a social need,” summarizes Gilligan. “People transferred the important social and psychological functions of body adornment From the surface of the naked skin – with body paintings, scarifications and tattoos – to the surface of clothing. ”
“The clothing is no longer functional and takes on these other symbolic aspects … as a way of transmitting who we are,” says researcher April Nowell.
The discovery that the spun 30,000 years old, found in Georgia, was tingle In black, gray, turquoise and pink, it confirms this idea that man has, for a long time, an artistic sense adjacent to clothing. “This completely changed the way I imagined this world,” says Nowell.
“The study of clothing can help us understand aspects such as planning, prediction and transfer of knowledge between generations,” he adds. “And then how is this taught over generations – dyeing, aesthetics? These are things that are learned from one generation to another. It is a massive and cumulative knowledge. ”
Now, fashion has gained another dimension – is used as a form of artistic expression, to convey messages, to serve different practical purposes but also to affirm an identity.
What we wear says a lot about us, our culture and our personality. And if you look at what you are using right now, you will realize that none of this would be possible without a simple needle.
