From the birthday suit to textile: 9,000 years of clothes

[PaulMarcW]

Below the web page at the link are related articles including the Alexeev Harvard Lectures on African remains in Russia from 27,000 years ago.



http://www.beforebc.de/Related.Subjects ... 60-01.html


LEGEND from the web page above:

Depending on the measure, the human being has existed for 7 million years. For all the concern over proper dress, we have been unclothed for 7 million years minus only the last 7,000 years. Part A: a - h, e.g., shows that from the first human sculpture, the Venus of Willendorf (b) 25,000 BC until, roughly, the Moldavian Venus (h) of 6000 BC, the human being went about naked.

Part B: 1 - 7 gives an encapsulation of the history of weaving, cloth-making, and clothes-making. Steatophygia is a trait associated with African women. The archeological record leaves us the evidence that it is these African women (B: 1c, 2d, 4c, 5c, 8d-e) and others present at the place and time textile-making was being created (B: 3b, 4b-d, 6c, 7b) who were involved in the invention and spread of the tradition of cloth-making to humanity.

HISTORY: the weaving of thread twining it by hand was the first stage of clothmaking. It was followed by the use of the spindle (or whorl) - a donut-shaped object (B: 1a, 2a, 3a, 4a, 6a-b, 7a).

EVOLUTION: We can trace the evolution of technology of textile-making in some locations as Egypt (3a to 3c); Greece (4a - 4d); Mexico (7a - 7c). We also see that dresses are the same today as they were when first made with, apparently, soft materials and dyed patterns as in the dress from Hacilar, Turkey (B: 1c) almost 9000 years ago or Greece (B:4c) some 8000 years ago.

WHO MADE, HOW MUCH, WHO WORE? Three dozen times in Homer’s Iliad and Odyessy, we read of queens and noble women weaving cloth. At the beginning, it is only royalty who had the time and right (as it were) to wear clothes. Over the millenniums, it became something for the masses and Madison Avenue.

Marc Washington
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[PaulMarcW]

Oops. The link doesn't work. This one should:

http://www.beforebc.de/Related.Subjects ... 60-01.html

[rich]

Dang - it must've been awfully cold during the ice ages then. No clothes - yikes.

[Ishtar]

Part A: a - h, e.g., shows that from the first human sculpture, the Venus of Willendorf (b) 25,000 BC until, roughly, the Moldavian Venus (h) of 6000 BC, the human being went about naked.
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PaulMarc - that's a quantum leap in logic may I say.

That their statues were naked means that they went around naked?

Say if we all got nuked and when some Martians arrived here some 25,000 years later, all that had survived was an old copy of Playboy. From that, they decide that we went around naked. It may seem ridiculous but how you've arrived at your conclusion here is no different.

Or what about the Greeks? Many of their statues are unclothed, but we don't assume Plato and Aristotle went about naked.

Man has aways admired the female (and male) form, and so has always depicted it in his art.

[PaulMarcW]

Ishtar. You're right. Seeing unclothed figurine is not the same as people going around unclothed. Certainly animal skins were worn. After all, needles go back to the Paleolithic and needles are for sewing.

That animal skins were worn before textile clothes is at least shown by the more-or-less plethora of early people wearing animal (e.g. leopard) skins so you're right that absence seen doesn't necessarily mean absence found.

What percentage of people wore clothes on an average before the spinning wheel? I guess I'd imagine fewer rather than more. I could be wrong. If I were wrong, it wouldn't be the first time and by far wouldn't be the last.

All the best,

[dannan14]

Animal skins are still clothing if worn for that purpose. If you said specifically that humans have only been wearing textile clothing for the last 7 millenia then you would be closer, but i seem to remember reading about some 10k year old remains that had evidence of textiles with the burial. Sorry i don't remember the specific reference, but it was most likely a link someone provided on this board.