Last week we talked a little about how humans have been adorning their bodies with various coverings. This week we will start to discuss the different types of coverings humans started to develop.
As far as archaeologists have been able to figure out so far (giving hard answers to such things is pretty impossible, especially as textiles and coverings are so hard to find intact in the archaeological record), the earliest materials our ancestors used would have been long grasses, large leaves, fur, leather, and sinew. The very first non decorative items humans made out of these materials were likely shoes and carrying items. You can probably imagine how to tie leaves around your feet or even wrap food in leaves to make it easier to carry and stop it from decaying quite as quickly.
It’s also easy to imagine our ancestors carefully removing all the edible flesh from the animals they killed to eat. Scrapers have been found nearly everywhere, proving that early people were cleaning the skins of animals thoroughly. As untreated skins become hard and rot, but chemically altered skins do not, it probably didn’t take long for people to realize that using a common product all humans carried with them (urine) and working the skin to keep it flexible while it was curing, and people had fur: to line sleeping areas, tie to their feet, use as decoration, create bags to carry things in, form walls to block sun and wind, and bundle up in as it got cold. Making leather was simply scraping the fur off the other side.
Internal organs of animals also found uses not as food. Bladders were easy to hold liquid in when clean (and formed early balls for play when filled with air), and the tendons and the ‘silverskin’ of the animals, which were not very edible, were treated much as the skins were. They were cleaned and dried and them pounded until they were flexible and stringy. Between this sinew (which we still use today) and naturally forming vegetation, people were able to create items that could be shaped permanently or made into larger items by using sinew to stitch (the earliest needed found to date is 30000 years old) several pieces of fur or leather together. Knowing how much humans like to decorate ourselves, many archaeologists are sure these items were held together with rudimentary embroidery stitches and decorative items.
