A new study has discovered that the eyed needles, a sewing machine made of bones, antlers, or ivory that first appeared in southeastern Siberia around 40, 000 years back, may be hiding significant clues about the development of fashion.
According to the study published on June 28 in the journal Science Advances, researchers examined historical data from lots of websites across Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, southern Africa, and Australia, where old equipment used to produce clothes had been discovered. Spotted pins and the conditions surrounding them left a lot of questions to be asked.
Direct study author Ian Gilligan, honourable affiliate in the field of antiquities at the University of Sydney in Australia, claimed that “eye pins made sewing more effective and reflected the development of fitted or tailored clothing.
But, historical evidence exists for earlier instruments that were used for making clothing, albeit with less detail. Why, then, did eyed pins start to appear in the colder regions of Eurasia around 40,000 years ago, which also coincided with the last glacial period’s top, which occurred 22,000 years ago?
According to Gilligan, this increased efficiency may have served a objective beyond tailoring for ancient humans: personal- expression.
“During the colder parts of the last ice age, people needed to cover their bodies more or less continuously,” he said, adding that clothing had had nullified some conventional ways of decorating the body for social purposes seen in many hunter- gatherer societies, such as body painting, tattooing and scarification.
How do you decorate yourself if you have to wear clothes all the time because of the cold? How do you alter your appearance to fit in social situations? And the solution is to shift the decoration from the skin’s surface onto the clothing’s surface, Gilligan said.
According to this interpretation, the Paleolithic era’s eyed needles were used to advance both the social and cultural development of prehistoric people as well as as as simple tailoring tools.
A marker of change
According to the new study, eyed needles were not only used for decorative purposes. They might have been used to make more slick clothing or tailoring layers, like underwear.
Archaeological discoveries have revealed older tools for tailoring, including bone awls, which are simply sharpened animal bones that have been found to have been used to cut animal hides.
“We don’t need to have eyed needles to manufacture clothing”, he said. We now know that other technologies have already been developed, which raises the question of why eyed needles were created.
According to Gilligan, there is proof that clothing was decorated during the last glacial cycle, citing the discovery of a burial site close to Moscow where skeletons thought to be 30, 000 years old were adorned with thousands of pierced ivory beads and shells. “In all likelihood, they were sewn onto the outer surface of clothing for decoration”, he said.
Without excluding their use in tailoring, this proof would support the hypothesis that eyed needles were used in decoration. “Those two purposes, they’re not mutually exclusive at all. And in fact, they go together”, Gilligan said. “Once you’re covering a body more completely, then you need to transfer decoration onto the clothing, and eyed needles would be useful for both.”
Because the oldest clothing ever discovered are about 5, 000 years old, it’s likely that the hypothesis will never receive a material confirmation because textile materials and leather can’t be preserved for very long. However, the practice would suggest a much earlier social and cultural understanding of clothing than was previously believed.
“Clothing didn’t acquire its social purpose until towards the end of the last glacial cycle — that’s why we think clothing, for the first time, has continued to be used by humans when it wasn’t needed for thermal insulation, around 12, 000 years ago”, Gilligan said.
“Our study shows that eyed needles are a marker for this change in the function of clothing, from thermal to social necessity”, he added.
Connecting to the past
According to Liza Foley, an assistant professor at Ghent University and curator of fashion and textiles at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, Belgium, this study is significant because it emphasizes the importance of clothing and dress in the study of the development of human cultures. Foley was not involved with the research.
It can sometimes be challenging for scientists to connect to such a distant past as the Paleolithic, according to April Nowell, a professor and Distinguished Lansdowne Fellow at the University of Victoria in Canada. Additionally, archaeologists have the added challenge of having to make the most of every artifact they find.
Nowell, who was also not involved in the study, said that “objects like clothing do not preserve over thousands of years, but bone and mammoth ivory needles do,” and that they can reveal details about our ancestors’ technological knowledge and the ways in which they adapted to both their physical and cultural environments.
These kinds of objects, she continued, help to humanize the past because they are universally relatable.
“Other than material, the eyed needle really hasn’t changed in any practical sense for millennia”, she said via email.
There is for loom- woven and even dyed textiles beginning roughly 30, 000 years ago, she concluded. As a result, scientists can infer what kinds of decisions people would have to make when making a spun, dyed garment, including what plants to use, how to decorate the item of clothing, and ultimately how to protect it from the elements when they live outside most of the time.
Something as simple and seemingly insignificant as a needle opens up a window onto the unexpected richness of the lives of Ice Age people, according to Nowell, “because all of this knowledge would be passed from generation to generation.”