F is for Fabric

Cloth is so integrated into our lives that it barely gets noticed. Of course, we’ve always had cloth, fabric, haven’t we? Didn’t cave people wear loincloths or rags? Not exactly. Even rags are woven. Whether it’s linen, silk, wool, felt, or cotton, fabric is a manufactured item requiring thread and some complex way of winding the thread so that it stays together.

We need to start with a bit more of a history lesson on clothing in order to get to fabric. It turns out we also need to understand a little about bugs. Then, we need to be clear about what a fiber is. As for when and where, that depends a bit upon the weather, access to specific “crops,” and technology. The global textile industry now is highly competitive, but that competition also is millennia old. So, let’s review:

1. A core definition of “fabric” as opposed to “clothing”
2. Where and when it happened first “around the world” — a lively debate of “firsts”
3. How it influenced human development — not everyone followed the same path

Clothing, Fabric, and Bugs

Here’s your two-minute history of clothing: Humans started covering themselves far earlier than they invented fabric. It was a complex dynamic (See “Motherhood of Invention”). Evolving hominids found a way to carry their babies, which enhanced bipedalism, which gave them advantages as hunters, which was handy once they learned to control fire and cook their food. With bipedalism, fire, and hunting/gathering at their disposal, they could move to other places, lose their fur and grow hair, which was more efficient in hot Africa and milder climates. But once they moved to colder Europe and temperate Asia with that body hair, fire wasn’t always enough for warmth, especially if they had to run around after mammoths or once the Ice Age hit. So they wore animal skins.

During that timeframe between 170,000-120,000 ya, humans adopted fur clothing. We know this for two reasons. First, among the stone and bone tools, like those in a 120,000 ya settlement in a Moroccan cave, researchers have found tools used for scraping. Knives were for cutting, but spatulate tools, a lynx or wolf jawbone, were better for cleaning off a hide. Early humans were using all parts of the animals they hunted, including the outsides.

The second reason we know they put on clothes is more complicated. Whether clothing is made from fur or fiber, it’s organic, and generally doesn’t last. Archaeologists could only find thread that was perhaps 10,000 years old or bone needles 20,000 years old, but believed that humans must have covered themselves much earlier, if only based on where they lived. If they’re going to shoot 71,000-year-old arrows at game in northern Europe, they can’t stay around the fire all the time, so at the very least hunting would make them cold. But, still no fabric is that old. What researchers did learn is that the bugs changed. Somewhere between 170 and 120,000 years ago, body lice changed. There was a louse that lived in Australopithecus fur, then a second type that evolved to live in human hair, and a third type that only lived on clothing. The clothing body louse only split off from the fmaily tree because there was clothing, and that was some 120,000 years ago. That’s when humans put on fur skin.

Yet fur is not cloth. That was another change. Old scraping tools are found near bone needles, which said humans had some kind of “thread.” Maybe it was animal sinew, like cut gut, at first. Maybe they noticed certain types of plants have stringy bits–fiber. Early humans would have found both of those more durable than, say, a vine to work with. If they learned to twist several strands together, they got a rope. Loop and strand, they got a net. Learn to twist the strands tight against each other, and they invented weaving and that created fabric.

The last thing you need requires you to stay put, in the same way that making more complicated pottery requires you to stay put. It’s not the kind of thing you can do in a cave, but requires something like a populated settlement of people who have built permanent shelters. Because nomads can’t really carry a loom around.

Threads and Fibers Older than Farming

The “invention” of agriculture is generally traced back to 10,000 ya. So when 21st century archaeologists stumbled upon fibers that dated back to the emergence of homo sapiens, around 35,000 ya, it was mind-boggling. I will note, in discovering this fact, that a lot of people are really into fabrics. I tried to research “Oldest Loom in the World” and dozens of websites told me about this 34,000-year-old loom found in the Caucasus in Georgia. Which is not what was found at all. Follow the trail people! Read the original sources!

What researchers at Harvard, the National Institute of Georgia, and Hebrew University actually found was fibers under a microscope. The trouble was that they weren’t looking for threads at all. They were analyzing pollen samples, cross-referencing them to changes in climate. They could date the Georgian site fairly specifically and were trying to hone in on ancient weather changes. But while they were looking at the pollen, they also found non-pollen “polymorphs” under the microscope. Those were flax fibers.

A brief foray into the nature of linen is useful here. As this description from a company that sells linen-based products explains, the plant flax is where linen comes from. Wild flax was native across the Eurasian landscape where humans were settling, so they likely stumbled across its fibrous properties. But it’s not easy to cultivate or go from plant to thread. It’s a time-intensive process, which involves separating the fiber part from the plant and seeds, then beating, drying, watering, drying again, and so on until the thing that starts out like straw, but ends with hair-like bundles of thread. Probably took centuries of experimentation, but that’s homo sapiens for you!

Flax fiber was what the pollen researchers found in Georgia, @34,000 ya, and even though it was microscopic, some of the fibers were was twisted and spun–meaning multiple threads were banded together–and some of them were dyed. Several different colors, pink, blue, and violet. Even though people were not growing crops yet, were still living near cave shelters, and were still experimenting, they had ways of turning plants into rope, baskets, and decorative cloth.

Ancient Textiles Were Worldwide (Mostly)

The oldest scraps of fabric back to around 9000 BCE, in Turkey. Other scraps from the 8000s were found wrapped around moose antlers which had fossilized. Furthermore in the Gobekli Tepe site, the one where they found ancient calendars, some of the carvings had humans wearing clothes. Even if thread doesn’t last that long, there was evidence of thread in a few place dating back to the birth of settled, agricultural societies.

It wasn’t only flax, either. Cotton was known to grow in the Indus Valley (India). Wool products were found all across Asia, from Denmark to Siberia to China, in settlements in the 5th-7th millennia BCE. The Mongolians and others learned how to make felt, a durable and dense, interlocking web of fibers created by repeated applications of heat, water, and pressure. The Mongolians made moveables tents out of felt as well as clothing and still do.

Even in the Americas, fabric was invented independently. For instance, about a decade ago, a startling discovery was made in a tiny town in Florida. A settlement of people from 6000 BCE used a bog as a cemetery. The peat acted as a remarkable preservative because bodies, named Windover after the site, were found with clothing wrapped around them and their tools.

Further south, Mesoamericans were creating coverings by 2500 BCE. As with other societies, the cloth they created included some plain and some dyed The most artistic pieces might be worn by the priests or royals. The warmer the climate, the less clothing was needed, which made it clear that some of it was just to impress or intimidate, for ceremony or for social status..

Not every culture invented thread or clothing. The Pacific Islander and Australians, whose weather is also hot and humid, didn’t see the need to move beyond small patches of cloth made from leaves and animal skins, not even for priests or dignitaries.

Fabric, Not Skins

By the time we get to Egypt–hey! that sounds like a song! But, really, by the time Egypt became a major source of population growth, agriculture, and cultural advancement, their mass production of textiles was an industry. Egypt had a large flax crop and became a worldwide hub for linen. It remained the place to get linen well into the Middle Ages, when France and England started advancing their own wool and linen production to avoid trading with the Muslims who had swept across North Africa.

What all the societies using thread and dying had developed was another important invention. Not only did they need to turn the flax into fiber, but they had to connect the fibers together tightly. They invented weaving. Looms might have started small, perhaps only a few feet across, with rocks used for weights to move the “shuttle,” But by the time of Egyptian pharoahs, 4000 BCE, even the artwork detailed mass production by the weaving industry.

We also know about Egyptian linen skills for another reason: mummies. How the Egyptians developed the medical advancements to preserve bodies is for another time, but a key part of their process was wrapping the bodies in linen. Like the peat bogs that preserved the bodies in Florida, the linen wrappings and burial process left the fabric intact for thousands of years, with the dye visible (see top of post).

As far as ancient classical civilizations go, weaving expertise was already sophisticated by the time the Greeks and Romans came along. The new aristocrats, people who were neither royal, military, or priests, were interested in fashion for its own sake. They loved brightly colored fabrics, from Egypt. And from elsewhere, too, because the Romans came across another kind of fabric, from off to the east. There was was a fabric industry almost as ancient as Egypt, one just as sophisticated, but which used a different kind of fabric medium.

Fabric So Special It Got Its Own Road

Bombyx Mori is the technical name; I wrote about it in 2023, also in April. The silkworm. China discovered that these insects created a different kind of thread, one whose fabric held the dye better and which was both smoother and more durable than linen or wool.

Archaeologists in China in 2016 also found ancient silk, in much the same thing as the researchers in Georgia. They scooped up bits of clay at sites to examine them under a microscope. In this case, it was a 9000-year-old site, one older than any previously-found silk cloth, but they believed silk was there. There were the ubiquitous bone needles, which suggested cloth making. So they plucked bits of matter off buried skeletons, specifically choosing bits near the nether regions, where clothing might have been worn. Then out came the microscope again. With a lot of fancy equipment like mass spectrometry, combined with a lot of reference to peptides, they did indeed find bits of silk.

With a roughly 7000 year head start, by the time the Chinese fabric industry was producing sophisticated garments for their aristocracy, @300 BCE in the Han dynasty , they let a few pieces cross the desert and steppes with the traders headed for west. When those bits of cloth ended up in Mediterranean, the Roman Empire went nuts. They were willing to pay top dollar.

And so the Silk Road was born. But if you read my A to Z posts from 2023, you already knew that.