Tag: #FOWC

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H is for House

A mammoth bone house displayed in a museum in the Ukraine. Humans get creative when it comes to shelters.

Home is where the hearth is. At least it was for thousands of years, when humans needed fire and shelter to stay alive. The tricky part is exactly how long ago this started, exactly or even in a rough estimate or even was it before they lost their fur and became hominids?

A house was pretty easy to define when I was six and learned “how” to draw them. Peaked roof, two windows in front, a door with a doorknob, and probably a chimney. I always drew a house with a chimney, after examples I’d seen, even though I didn’t have a fireplace until I was about twenty, and then we rarely used it, once I learned I had to clean it. But it turns out house=home=shelter is up for debate from the archaeologists, especially as they vie to see which came first. They did all seem to have fireplaces.

The last few days, my topics of ancient games, calendars, and fashion were on comparatively sophisticated inventions. Dates of 3000 BCE were modern compared with today’s topic. Housing is such a fundamental need that its origins go back much further other inventions, almost to the beginning of the human timeline. As usual, three angles of approach:

  1. What does “house” mean?
  2. When and where in the world was “housing” first created
  3. What other aspects of humanity are revealed by knowing #1 and #2?
We’re gonna need a lot more mammoth bones. Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg, photo by Godot13.
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G is for Games

Ancient Egyptian marbles, @2500 BCE. Similar, small polished rocks (marbles) have been found in the Indus Valley, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, i.e. wherever children existed. Photo by Rob Koopman at Leiden Museum.

Play is instinctive. Even without Nerf guns, Xboxes, or Hungry, Hungry Hippos, children will play. Young creatures from every species know how to splash their sister at the watering hole; every little brother will pounce on the older one to start a game of chase. Peek-a-boo must be universal. Although what about amoebas? Do amoeba children play peek–a-boo?

Before I go too far down the rabbit hole of biology, let’s just stick to play, specifically ancient toys and games. Strangely enough, academics hadn’t given much thought to play until a few years ago, especially in archaeological digs. Hstorian Philippe Arles actually put forth the theory that in the past children didn’t play, that they were effectively “mini-adults,” because there was too much to do and high infant mortality rates made their parents unwilling to invest in their childhoods–Arles sounds like a guy without children to me. For a long time, though, when archaeologists found a Stone Age figurine or a bit of broken pottery, even in a child’s burial site, they called the former a religious fetish and the latter trash. But those could have been dolls and action figures; they could have been game pieces.

The idea of childhood play wasn’t invented in the 20th century. Plenty of classical Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artwork includes children playing. We can let the academic journal papers debate whether the tiny horse with wheels was for a religious ceremony or a giggling child. For this purposes, let’s call them toys.

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F is for Fabric

Mummy-wrapping fabric, Egypt Middle Kingdom, @ 1980 BCE. Photo from the Met.

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
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