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A new study has found that the eyed needle – a sewing tool made of bone, antler or ivory that first appeared around 40,000 years ago in southern Siberia – may hold important clues about the origins of fashion.
According to research published June 28 in the journal Science Advances, researchers looked at existing archaeological evidence from dozens of sites in Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, southern Africa and Australia where ancient tools used to make clothing were discovered. The circumstances surrounding the needles with eyes have raised a number of questions.
“Eyed needles made sewing more efficient and reflected the advent of fitted or tailored clothing,” said the study’s lead author Ian Gilligan, an honorary associate in archeology at the University of Sydney in Australia.
However, there is historical evidence for earlier tools being used to make clothing, albeit with less precision. “So why did eyed needles start to appear in cooler parts of Eurasia as the climate cooled, about 40,000 years ago, leading up to the peak of the last ice age, about 22,000 years ago?”
According to Gilligan, this increased precision may have served a purpose beyond adaptation to prehistoric humans: self-expression.
“During the colder parts of the last ice age, people needed to cover their bodies more or less continuously,” he said, adding that the clothing would have abolished some of the traditional forms of social body adornment found in many hunter-gatherer societies. such as body painting, tattooing and scarification.
“When people have to dress up all the time because of the cold, how do you dress up? How do you change your look for social occasions? And the answer is that you move the decoration from the surface of the skin to the surface of the clothing,” Gilligan said.
According to this interpretation, needles with eyes, one of the symbols of the Paleolithic, were not simple tailoring tools, but also tools of social and cultural development of prehistoric people.
Change indicator
The new study noted that eyed needles were not used solely for decorative purposes. They could also be used to create tighter clothing or fit layers such as underwear.
Archaeological discoveries have uncovered older tools for tailoring, such as bone awls – which are simply sharpened animal bones that have been found to have been used to cut animal hides.
“We don’t need eyelet needles to make clothes,” he said. “We now know that other technologies existed before them, which raises the question of why eyed needles were invented.”
There is evidence of clothing decoration during the last glacial cycle, Gilligan added, citing the discovery of a burial site near Moscow where skeletons believed to be 30,000 years old were decorated with thousands of pierced ivory beads and shells. “They were most likely sewn onto the outer surface of the garment for decoration,” he said.
This evidence would support the theory that eyed needles played a role in decoration, without ruling out their use for tailoring. “These two purposes are not mutually exclusive.” And they actually go together,” Gilligan said. “Once you cover the body more completely, you need to transfer the embellishment to the clothing, and eyelet needles would be useful for both.
It is likely that the hypothesis will never find material confirmation, since the oldest clothes found are about 5,000 years old — textile materials and skins cannot be preserved much longer. However, the practice would indicate a much earlier cultural and social use of clothing than previously believed.
“Clothes only acquired their social purpose at the end of the last glacial cycle – which is why we think that clothes were first used by humans, even though they were not needed for thermal insulation, by about 12,000 years. before,” Gilligan said.
“Our study shows that eyelet needles are an indicator of this change in the function of clothing, from thermal to social necessity,” he added.
A connection with the past
This study is important not only because it reinforces the importance of clothing and dress in understanding the evolution of human cultures, but also because it brings together different perspectives on art and science, said Liza Foley, assistant professor at Ghent University and curator. of fashion and textiles at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, Belgium. Foley was not involved in the research.
April Nowell, a professor and Distinguished Lansdowne Fellow at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Victoria in Canada, said it can sometimes be difficult for scientists to help people connect with a past as distant as the Paleolithic, and archaeologists have another challenge: they must make the most of each artifact they find.
“Objects like clothing don’t last for thousands of years, but bone needles and mammoth ivory do and can tell us about the technological knowledge of our ancestors and the ways they adapted to their physical and cultural environments,” said Nowell, who was also not involved studies.
It’s these kinds of objects that we can all relate to that help humanize the past, she added.
“Other than the material, the eyed needle really hasn’t changed in any practical sense over the millennia,” she said by email.
There is evidence that loom-woven textiles and even dyed textiles began around 30,000 years ago, she concluded. As a result, scientists can infer the kinds of decisions people would have had to go through to make spun, dyed clothing—what plants to use, the method of spinning, how to decorate a piece of clothing, and ultimately, how to protect it. from the elements when you live outside most of the time.
“And all of this knowledge would have been passed down from generation to generation,” Nowell said, “so something as simple and seemingly insignificant as a needle opens a window into the unexpected richness of the lives of Ice Age peoples.”
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