"And the Lord God made for Adam and his wife coats of skins …"
Genesis 3:21
Clothing culture. We are starting a new topic, so to speak, of a cultural and educational plan, designed for the widest audience and dedicated to such an aspect of the material culture of mankind as clothing. We will consider a variety of clothes. Ancient clothes - travel in time, and clothes, more or less modern, but different from ours - travel in space; clothes for peace and for war … Well, we will start it with an examination of the most ancient clothes of mankind - the clothes of the Stone Age.
Let's start with the fact that archaeological finds allow us to quite conclusively state that clothes were known to our ancestors already in the Paleolithic era. But the most important sources of information about clothing from this era are the rock carvings found in Spain and southern France. Modern ethnological comparisons of the life of people of the Stone Age and primitive peoples, who to this day still retain their "savage" cultural level, also have a certain value. Although, of course, it cannot be completely compared. Then and now these are still completely different historical eras, and what we have now can only give us a hint, nothing more.
But if we summarize everything that we know from the finds and monuments of art about the clothing of the Stone Age, we will find the curious fact that the two most important garments of today, the women's skirt and men's trousers, were invented by the people of the Stone Age. Just like the sewing needle, by the way, which was also already known in the Paleolithic era. Moreover, the eye of these bone needles could be as thin as a modern steel needle. And since there are needles, then we can assume that something was sewn with them!
But what exactly was sewn - that's the question? And they sewed the skin and skins of animals. When it got colder on the planet or people themselves wandered where the seasons changed, they naturally began to warm themselves. The meat of the killed animals, taken by the hunters, belonged to the entire tribe. This was the key to his survival. But it was impossible to divide the skin among the entire tribe, and it was from it that the ancient types of clothing began to be made. At first, it was simply wrapped around the hips to cover the dangling shameful parts, which in the same forests otherwise got both from the branches and from the animals. That is why the skirt, short or long, was so popular with many peoples, from the ancient Egyptians to the inhabitants of Europe, who were drowned in Danish swamps during the Bronze Age.
If we look at the famous frescoes of Tassili Ajer in the Sahara, it will be obvious that already in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras, people used a variety of types of clothing, and there is nothing to say about jewelry. Even in children's burials of this period, drilled shells are found, and by no means in the neck region. And if so, then they were sewn onto some rotten clothes, that is, even the children had those clothes, and they were decorated.
Was this clothing colored or natural? Let's think … Clothes made of fur of predators, most likely, were not dyed so that everyone could see what kind of beast the hunter could kill and be afraid of his strength and courage. But here are the skins of the herbivores … why not decorate them with stripes of colored fur to make them more elegant? Moreover, we know that the same red paint was known even to Neanderthals. It was used for cult purposes and for body dyeing, and it was customary to sprinkle dead bodies with red ocher. However, the same Neanderthals used not only red, but also yellow ocher. Colored powder is known to have been stored in processed tubular bones and ocher chunks were also used.
By the way, this raises an interesting question, which appeared earlier: clothes or jewelry? Today, the opinion of scientists is that already in the epoch of the Ice Age, people looked very … decorative. They painted the body, and maybe exposed the skin to cauterization and scarring. Judging by the drawings on the walls of the caves, they used feathers, skins, flowers, but in the ground we find shells, products made of ivory, amber, drilled bones, animal teeth, which obviously served as decorations. Fossil ammonites were drilled and worn as adornments, and it was also our ancient ancestors who were the first paleontologists.
Of course, the adornments of the men of the Ice Age were feather hats, similar to the headdresses of the Indians, which were supposed to inform about the success of its owner in hunting or in battles, so it is no coincidence that men in ancient images look, let's say, “more charming” than women. Amazingly, pieces of shells, amber, and other materials used to make Stone Age jewelry are often found thousands of kilometers from where they were mined. The Stone Age man must have exchanged them, or made distant hikes "for prey." The latter presupposes a certain "trade", which in this very early era was supposed to satisfy the need for precious adornments to complement clothing.
Moreover, the line between jewelry and clothing is much more difficult to draw than it seems. For example, many aborigines of Australia, going to war, simply painted their bodies and … that's it! Miklouho-Maclay wrote that he met a girl in the simplest suit one can think of: it was a mother-of-pearl shell hanging from her front hips on a string of coconut fibers. Some researchers even suggest that clothing evolved precisely from jewelry, and that it is they in the past that are primary, and clothing is secondary!
By the way, the fur of the same tiger could simultaneously be an ornament and clothing, just like a fur cape made of bearskin. But the claws of a bear, well, say, the same grizzly bear, which were very prized among the North American Indians, could only be an ornament. They could not keep warm!
Well, then we move on to the Neolithic era, when the development of agriculture and animal husbandry revolutionized the social development of society and created new material foundations for improving clothing. It was in the Neolithic era that two artificial materials were created that had not previously been on earth. These are ceramics and fabrics.
It was in the Neolithic era that a loom was created, the principle of which has not changed to this day. True, in Neolithic Europe, only flax and wool were known to people. But the oldest finds of fabrics come from Asia Minor, from where flax probably spread north and west. Cotton and silk were produced only in Asia and only much later came to Europe to the Greeks and Romans.
And here it should be emphasized that both wool and flax played a huge role in the development of social relations in society. Flax is a demanding crop, it requires a developed agriculture. It is not so easy to obtain a material suitable for spinning from raw flax. It takes a lot of work and time. Preparing wool for spinning was also a difficult task, since scissors were not yet known, which means that the wool had to be plucked or combed out, and be sure to rinse in warm water. To work with the fibers of flax and wool, it was necessary to come up with tools, the work on which greatly influenced the development of the human imagination. Well, and even about the most primitive loom, you can not even talk about. It was already a real machine (!) And it was created all in the same Stone Age, even at the very end.
Preserved stone or clay weights, with the help of which the warp threads were weighted. Which, by the way, allows us to conclude that already in this period on the European continent there was a vertical loom, that is, such as were depicted on Greek ceramic dishes millennia later. For the convenience of work, the width of the produced fabric was small, a maximum of 70 cm, which, in turn, required a masterful cut!
Woven sandals found in North America tell us that shoes were already there at that time. But then they also wore shoes made of skins, again similar to Indian moccasins, and for warmth they put dry grass in them! "Old Etzi", frozen into the ice in the Alps, although it should be attributed in time to the era of copper and bronze, most likely lived in the Eneolithic - the copper-stone age, so his clothes, fortunately well-preserved, told the scientists a lot.
