My search for the origins of clothing | Hacker News Reader

My search for the origins of clothing

sapiens.org

79 pointsplimp47 comments

Another interesting exploration of this is The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel (https://vpostrel.com/the-fabric-of-civilization). Her first chapter talks about how one of the overlooked innovations of the Stone Age was that twine needed to be created to actually secure the stone tool head to a wooden shaft.

After that she discusses the enormous amounts of labor required to turn raw materials into threads and how the development of different tools was an important part of developing civilization. This book mostly talks about cloth, which is an entire other chapter owing to how that is its own step up in complexity from producing thread.

I haven't read Postrel, but the idea of twine being necessary to secure a stone tool to a wooden shaft seems wrong to me.

Jon Plant secures a stone tool head to a shaft by building a stone axe called a "celt" with more primitive methods [0]. The friction fit he achieves is likely more robust than a twine lashing because it helps deliver a higher impulse to the work-piece than a mount made of cordage.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN-34JfUrHY

I think sinew (long animal ligaments IIRC) is an option for attaching axe heads. I've heard of survivalists using it for similar purposes. And that's assuming simple strips of hide don't do it.

Sinew tightens and hardens with time, while hide stretches and ultimately becomes brittle, so sinew makes more sense to tie axe-heads. It is why early stringed instruments used sinew stretched across tortoise shells, since it could be kept at high enough tension to sound a clear note without breaking.

I would expect that the first attempts at attaching a handle would have been done in another way, and after twine was invented the former way was abandoned and forgotten.

One very low tech method is to drill a hole in the stone and wedge the handle in it - just like how a modern axe haft is attached.

Drilling a hole in stone isn't that hard. One twirls a stick (the drill) between one's hands, and use a mixture of sand and water at the work face. It's slow, but it works. I read that the ancient Egyptians used this technique.

in theory abrasion with wood or the harder reeds like bamboo seems like it ought to work, but in the archaeological record drilled stone in egypt occurs at the same time as the introduction of copper tools, copper residue is found in many of the drilled holes, and experimental archaeologists who have attempted to drill stone using reeds have failed, but succeeded using copper tubes

surprisingly copper works better than bronze for this

possibly better abrasives like emery (the ancient egyptians used quartz) or something like fire-hardened wood might enable this technique to work without metals, but the ancient egyptians don't seem to have managed it

celt axes are attached to the handle in the opposite way: a slot is cut through the wood handle, and then the stone head is wedged into it, pressing against the ends of the slot (which are end grain) but not touching the sides, because that would split the handle

Or cut a pocket in a thicker handle, and just press the stone into the pocket. Add some glue (from sap) to keep it from falling out.

i don't think that will work because of the large moment from ax strikes that aren't perfectly dead-on, but i'm interested to see your results

If the pocket is large enough that the center of moment is within the handle, it should work fine.

Why wouldn't you finish cutting through to make a slot? The slot has the advantage that using the axe fixes the axe head more firmly into the slot by wedging itself. Even if you wedged the stone in the pocket, the pocket will loosen and the stone will eventually bottom out and won't be wedged anymore.

> Why wouldn't you finish cutting through to make a slot?

Because then using the axe would quickly force the stone through the handle, as the only restraining force will be grip from the sides. That force on the sides will also encourage the handle to split. With it in a cup, the force will be on the back.

i explained upthread how the celt design solves the splitting problem, which you have correctly identified

I'm skeptical that plant glue alone would work without additional lashing. Its brittleness is used as an intentional feature in hunting weapons so that the small blades detach and stay lodged in the prey.

i don't see why it matters whether the center of moment is within the handle or not; the problem is that the glue has to be able to resist the moment without breaking, but it's much closer to the center of moment than the blade edge

say the blade is 100 mm long and 30 mm thick with a cylindrical back edge; the moment is being applied to the blade edge 85 mm from the center of moment, while the glue is resisting the moment from only 15 mm away, giving a 6.7:1 mechanical advantage, and the force is the full force being applied to the workpiece multiplied by sin θ, where θ is the angle the central axis of the blade makes with the force applied by the workpiece on the blade; typically this will be on the order of 0.1, but in a bad strike perhaps closer to 0.3

i don't know, give it a try?

> It's slow, but it works.

This is why so many people cannot fathom things like rocks cut accurately or large structures like pyramids, Stonehenge or the Moai; they don't consider what can happen if you spend days, weeks, years on something. I think it's evidence of this claim that people back when had much more spare time for things not directly related to their survival.

Weren't pyramids built by slaves? Not necessarily disputing 'more spare time' (I don't know) but it's not really evidence of it is it?

Most modern historians seem to agree that they were mostly built by paid labor.

I've read that pyramids were probably labor projects like the WPA or the CCC. The workers weren't slaves (they went on strike at one point), but they didn't have a ton of other ways to feed their families.

I wonder if gut is suitable. It's still made into musical instrument strings, so it's properties are not entirely a mystery. The shaping of the string to a constant diameter along its length is a final processing step, meaning that a basic string for holding things together is a simpler technology.

And yet we still wrestle with how to make comfortable clothes. Someone once suggested to me that nudist camps may be at least in part about people who simply cannot get comfortable in their clothes to the point that would like to have a break from the whole thing.

that is definitely a factor, yes, speaking from experience

They're tradeoffs in cost vs cut / appearance in a lot of cases. In part thanks to the panny-D, I've taken to wearing PJ trousers and 3XL oversized shirts (but in a cut that doesn't make it look baggy), they're comfortable but I wouldn't want to go out wearing them. Okay the shirts are acceptable.

How credible is sapiens.com? After reading the OP, I found this article (https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/neanderthals-outlived-ho...), which I feel takes some pretty speculative claims as facts (on the psychology of an long exist species).

The author of that article is a professor of archaeology who seems to hedge their language throughout. What speculative claims are presented as fact?

> What speculative claims are presented as fact?

Specifically these:

> Neanderthals were more inclined to stay in their family groups and were warier of new people.

In the absence of living Neanderthals to study or written records describing them, I don't see how what's stated there about their thoughts and mental attitudes could be known at all, let alone with such certainty.

Archeological evidence might be able to say they tended stay in their family group, but it seems like a speculative leap to say they did so for particular subtle psychological reasons.

> ...given that they were genetically disposed to being less friendly to those beyond their immediate family.

I'm no expert on genetics, but I'm skeptical any kind of existing genetic analysis could give that kind of behavioral detail.

The usual book suggested with many counterclaims which is less famous is "The Dawn of everything". A beautiful read and a lot clearer on what is research and what is opinion.

Not for Harari or Pinker readers, see here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/23/the-dawn-of-ev...?

I have struggled greatly with that book, and finally set it down so that I could pick up some other books in my reading queue and enjoy reading again.

I don't have detailed notes for what I've disliked about it. When I pick it up again, I'll start from the beginning and keep a log. But, broadly, the authors make a great deal of claims that are unsupported by their fields of study and they don't consult with people from other fields of study. Also, at least up to the point that I had read it, the far East was entirely absent from any mention of human history, which seems like quite a grave oversight given the kind of book it set out to be.

FWIW, a good friend of mine is a recently-degreed archaeologist, does cultural anthropological work, and I was able to reliably get her wound up with excerpts from the book.

My impression is that the authors started out with some particular ideologies of their own, and sought to support those ideologies with evidence from their fields. ...which is fine, but it's not what I was expecting from it. The book is pronounced on places like HN as a must-read re-examination of human history, but framed in that way, it's not a very good book (IMO).

As far as I can tell, Sapiens the anthropology magazine is unrelated to Sapiens, the book. The value of its contents should probably be evaluated along with the field as a whole (which tends to fit somewhere between archaeology and sociology on the Science Field Mohs scale).

I haven't read The Dawn of Everything, but I have read other Graeber books. His ideas are interesting, but "clear on what is research and what is opinion" is not the impression I would take away. "Willing to draw grand conclusions about the arc of history from research based on tiny, unrepresentative data sets" is more like it.

Don't know about .com, but the .org one linked here: https://www.sapiens.org/about-sapiens/

> SAPIENS is a publication of the Wenner-Gren Foundation and published in partnership with the University of Chicago Press, while maintaining unconditional editorial independence.

Their advisory board is all university people from across the world; from a distance it seems pretty legit to me.

An interesting question might be: "Do any other species wear clothing?"

Hermit crabs and octopi come to mind. Do any other species make anything to wear?

Taylor birds sew their nests, but not something to wear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQMYpzbQIDA&t=53s

Then there are parasites, which might be said to be wearing another entire animal for protection.

Orangutans and apes use large leaves and other materials as protective "clothing", e.g. to keep themselves dry in rain.

But they don't make clothing, they repurpose found objects.

Green Lacewing larvae, aka trash bugs, place the exoskeletons of dead prey on their backs.

https://www.uaex.uada.edu/environment-nature/anr-blog/posts/...

https://www.madmagazine.com/blog/2015/11/20/don-martin-one-d...

When did we lose our fur? When did we start to track the herds?

Being able to control your temperature (reasonably) independently of the seasons is a very useful adaptation in a migratory species.

Both of those probably coincide with the practices of fire and cooking, which meant our bodies could more easily process calories, better regulate temperature (humans aren't the fastest but they can run for hours because of temperature regulation), and need less of a digestive system.

Personally I think aesthetics and whatnot became a bigger factor in our development over time, that is, preferring partners with less hair so it was "bred out".

My theory is that weaving was the first human invention (fire and dogs don't count, being taming and domesticating a wild thing).

The idea is attachment by alternation. You can create roofs, baskets, clothing and so on. You use leaves, vines, sinew.

You are probably wearing woven cloth right now.

Depending on the audience (and here I’m assuming mostly tech folks in t-shirts), it’s just as possible that you might not be wearing anything woven, and instead entirely clad in knitted fabrics. I’m by no means an archaeological technologist (or a fiber artist), but it seems conceivable to me that knitting was invented first.

Everything I'm wearing right now is knitted.

I guess clothing made for comfort is usually knitted instead of woven, so that it can stretch in any direction.

This is not about the origin per se but more about the making of clothing in ancient times an I am sure you will find it interesting : https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-t...

Not entirely related, but "The Origins of Clothing" was somehow a prompt our elementary school teacher came up with the first time we got Internet connection at school and could use Google. The top result was a malware page... the computer room has been unusable for the rest of the week.

I'd be curious how work from home trend has changed this. I think I've worn the same shirt for a month straight.

Origin of clothing is when someone felt cold

sunburn; walking through brush; insects

> sunburn

There's variety. Ancient Egyptian dress didn't amount to much. Traditional Bedouin dress (granted, a much more recent tradition) is full-body robes.

And that’s the naked truth!

And looking in a grandparent's direction at precisely the wrong time

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