musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Thou art not for the fashion of these times


Do you ever think about clothes? Not about what to wear, or what’s hanging in dark corners of your closet or anything, but clothes.

I mean, why are clothes, what are clothes, and who invented them? Existential stuff like that. There must be something important about them, otherwise we’d only spend our money on food and cars, or first dates. And clothes can’t just be for warmth, because most of us still wear them in the summer.

In fact, clothes make me wonder about the chicken and egg thing: did covering up our skin start with privilege, or the other way round? Which came first -embarrassment about nakedness, or embarrassment about being caught out of fashion? Important questions to be sure, but I have to admit that questioning the historical couture of clothes was not on my to-do list. Far from it; I buy them when they’re on sale, or Walmart puts out a special rack of sizes nobody seems to want. And anyway, I’m old now and nobody expects me to wear clothes that really fit anymore.

The history of clothes has never been a mystery in search of a question for me. It seems obvious that people figured out that with changing seasons and Ice Ages popping up every so often, clothes were handy things to keep them warm and protect them from ridicule; few of us look great without wrapping.

Of course, the thought did occur to me that the idea of wearing animal skins would not suit everybody. I mean running through the woods, or planting seeds under a hot sun sporting leather underpants in the summer would likely only be an advantage for fungi, so I can understand the lure of naked farming, in the early days. Until they understood more about weaving, I doubt that many farmers would tolerate shirts and pants made out of wheat stalks for more than a day or two.

Then again, apart from watching Flintstone episodes, just how much do we know about Stone Age clothes? I suppose leather endures the vicissitudes of time better than cotton skivvies, so that inevitably obscures an historically accurate account of day-to-day life in that era. I was comfortable with the curiosity among most paleohistorians and their relative ignorance of proto-clothes, until I happened upon an intriguing essay entitled The Clothing Revolution by Ian Gilligan, a prehistorian at the University of Sydney. He questioned whether the need for fabric, not food, in the face of a changing climate was what first tipped humanity towards agriculture. https://aeon.co/essays/how-clothing-and-climate-change-kickstarted-agriculture

Given that fabric does not preserve well through the millennia, Gilligan took to assessing the tools essential for its production and fashioning to infer its early days. ‘All the evidence we have for ice-age clothing is indirect but, nonetheless, the available evidence shows that people had tailored clothes in the last ice age… While clothing is one of the most visible of all human technologies, in the field of archaeology it’s almost invisible. Compared with stone tools surviving from the Lower Palaeolithic more than 3 million years ago, clothes perish rapidly… Not a shred of clothing survives from the Pleistocene, with just a few twisted flax fibres – used perhaps for strings or thread – found at a 34,000-year-old site in Georgia.’

Still, there is some indirect evidence of working with cloth: ‘The world’s oldest eyed needles are found in southern Russia 40,000 years ago, and one needle in Denisova Cave is said to be 50,000 years old. In the vicinity of Moscow at a site called Sunghir, 30,000-year-old human burials have thousands of beads neatly arranged on the skeletons. Russian archaeologists think that these beads were sewn on to fitted garments, including trousers with legs and shirts with sleeves.’

And then there are even more interesting indirect pointers to prehistoric fabric use: clothing lice. ‘These blood-sucking insects make their home mainly on clothes and they evolved from head lice when people began to use clothes on a regular basis.’ Scientists ‘analysed the genomes of head and clothing lice to estimate when the clothing parasites split from the head ones… Mark Stoneking at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, came up with a date of 70,000 years ago, revised to 100,000 years ago, early in the last ice age.’

Of course, wouldn’t you know it, things weren’t as simple as merely doing genomic analysis on lice. Gilligan divides clothing into simple and complex forms. ‘Simple clothing is loose, not fitted, and consists of just a single layer [like capes or cloaks]… Simple clothes can provide a certain amount of insulation in cold weather, although these loose garments can offer only limited protection from wind chill… Complex clothes are closely fitted around the body and can have cylinders attached to enclose the limbs properly; additionally, they can have up to four or five layers. Complex clothes were a more recent development… allowing humans to defeat wind chill and survive in the coldest places on Earth.’

And these different forms, although themselves unlikely to survive through the millennia, require tools to make them as I mentioned. When the Pleistocene ended 12,000 years ago, global temperatures increased and the ice sheets began to melt, making the environment wetter and more humid -not good leather-wearing weather. ‘Adapting to these moist conditions, people shifted to making their clothes with fabrics woven from natural fibres such as wool and cotton. Compared with leathers and furs, fabrics are better at managing moisture. The woven structure is permeable to air and moisture and, in warm climates, wind penetration can help to cool the body.’

In this warm era people began discover the value  and possibility of agriculture. Gilligan thinks that it was the need for fibre production that stimulated the transition to agriculture. As he points out ‘The popular notion of agriculture as a superior food strategy reflects anachronistic perceptions of foraging as a harsh, precarious lifestyle. In contrast, archaeologists have now recognised serious risks of famine and malnutrition in the early farming communities, and confirmed the relative ease of traditional foraging lifestyles, even in marginal environments such as Australian deserts.’

I gather his arguments, compelling as they may be to naïve readers such as myself, are not widely accepted. Still, paradigms do not shift lightly or without resistance, and I’d like to sign up with his group, if he’ll let me. I think he’s on to something when he feels that the need to grow plants for clothing, not lack of mastodons, was what tipped my ancestors towards settling down on the farm.

And anyway, I don’t think the hunter-gathering gene was actually lost when they decided to grow crops for food and fabric: there’s a MacDonald’s near the Walmart, so I usually head over there for lunch with the money I saved on tee shirts by hunting and gathering them on the bargain counter.

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gozzter

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