Welcome to Mind Flexing, your fortnightly thought expedition to everywhere and anywhere. Strap on your boots (or put your feet up), take a deep breath, and let’s get flexing.
They must have looked very warm, those darling little animals in their fur coats, skinned for meat and then what? We might as well wear them, share in their warmth. You’d have to hypothesize that’s how it all started, this wearing of clothes business; for comfort, for warmth. For surely we didn’t jump straight in with intricate embroideries and uncomfortable cuts for peacockery. In the 300,000-year history of homo sapiens, and in the history of this blue planet, we’re the only living creatures to wear clothing. It’s quite a development, really, to be able to warm ourselves so that we could take over the world—live in the most inhospitable of climates where we surely would not survive if it were not for warmth and shelter.
It would have been quite practical at the start, don’t you think? Imagine, the joy of shoes on your feet on hot scorching sand. The oldest clothing ever found is a pair of woven sandals from Oregon in the United States; shredded sagebrush bark, twined and twisted to form a sole that was tied around the ankle. Found preserved in a cave, they are somewhere between 9,000 and 10,500 years old. The problem with clothing (at least, the lovely biodegradable threads our ancestors wore) is that it doesn’t last. We’ll never find the oldest clothes to have sashayed across the palaeolithic, try as we might. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.
Sewing needles from Siberia date back 50,000 years, and tools found in Morocco, aged between 90,000 and 120,000 years, look similar to those still used to make pelts today. This is reassuring. It would be terrible to think our ancestors shivered their way through the last ice age when it began about 115,000 years ago—it lasted for over 100,000 years! There’s other evidence to suggest they didn’t. Thanks to lice (yes, let’s take this rare opportunity to thank them), we now know humans were dabbling in the craft of clothing long before then. They would have been quite prepared for a little drop in temperature, and for the long overland journeys they were soon to take out of Africa. Researchers at the University of Florida studying the history of body lice discovered through DNA testing that clothing lice diverged genetically from hair lice about 170,000 ago, suggesting they must have had clothes to infest. That’s 170,000 years of fashion design, from fur cloaks to barrel leg trousers, woven sandals to super-high heels. What a transformation! It also means we were naked for a very long time, possibly 130,000 years.
At what point do you suppose things changed? when clothing began to serve more than just a practical purpose? That moment in time when someone thought, Gee, that leopard print loin cloth is doing wonders for Bob’s popularity with the ladies. I gotta get me one of those. Leopards did live in Africa 170,000 years ago. It’s remarkable, really, that leopard print must be the longest cyclical fashion trend on earth and very likely, the universe. Apparently, leopard print shoes are all the rage right now. (but you’re hearing this from someone who lives up a bush track and whose footwear collection consists of gumboots, hiking boots and Ugg boots, so correct me if I’m wrong.)
We may be the only species to wear clothes, but we’re not the only one to appreciate a fashionable display. Birds are very good at such presentations—peacocks, lyrebirds, pheasants, turkeys—the males have evolved to dazzle their women with flair. To shake a tail feather here and do a shimmy over there. It is, in the animal world, mostly the males that put on such displays, to court, to challenge another for a female’s attention. So could it be that men were the very first fashion designers all those palaeolithic years ago? Parading their furs as a sign of strength and wealth? There’s some logic to that, but I can’t imagine women would have been far behind. Perhaps, by two minutes.
Shell beads, around 150,000 years old, found in a cave 50km from the coast in Morocco appear to have been strung on a necklace or garment. Shells are neither warm nor comfortable, although they sure are pretty and so suggest we’ve taken pride in our appearance for a considerable time.
The oldest woven garment ever found is what appears to be a woman’s dress—the Tarkhan Dress—discovered in a mastaba in Egypt and carbon dated to about 5,500 years old. It’s exquisite; teeny tiny linen fibres woven ever so intricately, with little pleats that run up the arms, then gently bend over the shoulders to continue across to a delicate v-neckline. It must have taken weeks, if not months to fashion. A cool $7,327.20 over eight weeks on today’s minimum wage. Wouldn’t that flip fast fashion on its head if we were to pay two-month’s wages for a dress. You wouldn’t casually throw that one in the op-shop bin. And to think, if you looked after it, it could last over 5,000 years!
It's a beautiful dress, this Tarkhan garment, thought to have been worn by a young, slim female within the royal household. It would have to have belonged to someone wealthy at that price! Funny, how clothing had then as it does now, this intrinsic ability to reflect social status, or shape opinion, just through its mere presence. What did the commoners wear in those ancient times? Surely not a two-month weave. It would have to have been, for practicality and economy, more akin to a two-week weave—a bit chunkier, maybe a little scratchy. And wouldn’t we all have known with a side glance of the eye who was of the palace and who was of the street. Despite the years, times haven’t changed.
Virginia Woolf in her 1928 novel Orlando wrote:
“Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.”
Indeed, they are little social indicators, quiet signals, telling others who we are or who we’d like to be, ever changing to reflect our identities. Humans have evolved to wear clothing, and clothing has evolved with us. After 170,000 years, it’s quite clear, they are stitched into the fabric of who we are.
Don’t miss…
If, like me, you were unable to make this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival, don’t despair. SWF has begun to drip feed its live sessions to its Podcast and there are some excellent discussions to tangle your thoughts, notably:
* Making a Writer—Charlotte Wood and Colm Tóibín with Michael Williams.
* The State of the Art: The Novel—Samantha Harvey, Rumaan Alam, Torrey Peters, and Robbie Arnott with Kate Evans.
* Samantha Harvey: Orbital—Samantha Harvey with Claire Nichols.
Enjoy!
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