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The eyed needle – a sewing tool made of bone, horn or ivory that first appeared around 40,000 years ago in southern Siberia – may hide important clues about the beginnings of fashion, a new study has found.
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 clothes had been discovered, according to research published June 28 in the journal Science Advances. The circumstances surrounding the needles with eyes 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 fellow in the discipline of archeology at the University of Sydney in Australia.
However, there is historical evidence of earlier tools being used to make clothes, albeit with less precision. “So why did eyed needles start to appear in colder parts of Eurasia as the climate became colder, from about 40,000 years ago and leading up to the peak of the last ice age, about 22,000 years ago?”
According to Gilligan, this enhanced precision may have served a purpose beyond tailoring for prehistoric humans: self-expression.
“During the coldest parts of the last ice age, people needed to cover their bodies more or less constantly,” he said, adding that clothing would have canceled out some traditional ways of decorating the body for social purposes seen in many hunter-gatherer societies. such as body painting, tattooing and scarification.
“If people need to wear clothes all the time because of the cold, then how do you decorate yourself? How do you change your appearance for social purposes? And the answer is that you move the decoration from the surface of the skin to the surface of the fabric,” Gilligan said.
According to this interpretation, needles with eyes, one of the symbols of the Paleolithic era, were not simple sewing tools, but also instruments for the social and cultural development of prehistoric people.
A marker of change
Needles with eyes were not used exclusively for decorative purposes, the new study noted. They could also have been used to create tighter garments or layers of tailoring such as underwear.
Archaeological discoveries have revealed older tools for tailoring, such as bone awls – which are simply sharp animal bones that are found to have been used to cut animal skins.
“We don’t need to have eyed needles to make clothing,” he said. “We now know that other technologies already existed before them, which raises the question of why needles with eyes were invented.”
There is evidence for 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 beads and pierced ivory shells. “In all likelihood, they were sewn onto the outer surface of clothing for decoration,” he said.
This evidence would support the theory that eyed needles played a role in decoration, without excluding their use for tailoring. “These two goals are by no means mutually exclusive. And in fact, they go together,” Gilligan said. “Once you cover a body more completely, then you have to transfer the decoration to clothing, and eye pins would be useful for both.”
It is likely that the hypothesis will never find a material confirmation, because the oldest clothes ever found are about 5000 years old – textile materials and leather cannot be preserved for much longer. However, the practice would suggest a much earlier cultural and social use of clothing than previously believed.
Clothing did not acquire its social purpose until the end of the last glacial cycle – which is why we think that clothing, for the first time, continued to be used by humans when it was not needed for thermal insulation, around 12,000 years. ago,” Gilligan said.
“Our study shows that eyelets are a marker for this change in clothing function, from thermal to social,” he added.
Connection with the past
This study is important not only because it reinforces the importance of dress and clothing in understanding the development of human cultures, but also because it brings together different perspectives in art and science, said Liza Foley, an assistant professor at Ghent University and curator. of fashion and textiles at the Royal Museum of Art and History in Brussels, Belgium. Foley was not involved in the research.
April Nowell, a professor and Lansdowne Distinguished Fellow in the anthropology department at the University of Victoria in Canada, said it can sometimes be difficult for scientists to help people connect to such a distant past as the Paleolithic, and archaeologists have the added challenge of having to make the most of every object they find.
“Objects like clothing don’t last for thousands of years, but bone ivory and mammoth needles do, and they can tell us about the technological knowledge of our ancestors and the ways they adapted to their physical and cultural environments,” Nowell said. , which was. is also not included in the study.
It’s these kinds of objects that we can all relate to that help to humanize the past, she added.
“Other than the material, the eyed needle really hasn’t changed in any practical sense for millennia,” she said via email.
There is evidence of loom-woven and even dyed textiles beginning around 30,000 years ago, she concluded. As a result, scientists can infer what kinds of decision-makers people would have to go through to make a spun and dyed garment—which plants to use, how to spin, how to decorate the garment, and ultimately how to protect it. from the elements when living outside most of the time.
“And all this knowledge would be 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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