Paleolithic humans used needles with eyes for more than tailoring, scientists say. Could point to the birth of fashion

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The eye needle – a sewing tool made from bone, horn or ivory that first appeared about 40,000 years ago in southern Siberia – may be hiding important clues about the beginnings of fashion, a new study finds.

Researchers analyzed existing archaeological evidence from dozens of sites in Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, southern Africa and Australia where ancient tools used to make clothing were discovered, according to the research. Published June 28 in the journal Science Advances. The circumstances surrounding needles with eyes have raised a number of questions.

“Eyed needles made sewing more efficient and reflected the advent of fitted or tailored clothing,” said study lead author Ian Gilligan, an honorary associate in the discipline of archeology at the University of Sydney in Australia.

However, there is historical evidence of earlier tools that were used to make clothing, albeit with less precision. “So why did needles with eyes start to appear in the coldest parts of Eurasia as the climate was getting colder, about 40,000 years ago and leading up to the peak of the last glacial period, 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 continuously,” he said, adding that clothing would have overridden some traditional ways of decorating the body for social purposes seen in many Western societies. hunter-gatherers. such as body painting, tattooing and scarification.

“Since 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 change the decoration from the surface of the skin to the surface of the clothes,” said Gilligan.

According to this interpretation, needles with eyes, one of the symbols of the Paleolithic, were not simple tailoring tools, but also instruments for the social and cultural development of prehistoric humans.

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-fitting clothing or sew layers together, such as underwear.

Archaeological discoveries have unearthed older tools for tailoring, such as bone awls – which are simply sharp animal bones that were used to cut animal skins.

“We don’t need needles to make clothes,” he said. “We now know that other technologies existed before them, which raises the question of why needles with eyes were invented in the first place.”

There is evidence of clothing decoration during the last glacial cycle, Gilligan added, citing the discovery of a cemetery near Moscow where skeletons believed to be 30,000 years old were adorned with thousands of pierced ivory beads and shells. “Most likely, they were sewn onto the outer surface of the clothes for decoration,” he said.

This evidence would support the theory that eyed needles played a role in decoration, without excluding their use in tailoring. “These two purposes are not mutually exclusive. And actually, they go together,” Gilligan said. “Once you cover a body more completely, you need to transfer the decoration to the clothing, and needles with eyes would be useful for both.”

It is likely that the hypothesis will never find material confirmation, because the oldest clothing ever found is around 5,000 years old – textile materials and leather cannot be preserved for much longer. However, the practice would suggest a much older cultural and social use of clothing than previously believed.

“Clothing only acquired its social purpose at the end of the last glacial cycle – this is why we think that clothes, for the first time, continued to be used by humans when they were not needed for thermal insulation, around 12,000 years ago. ago,” Gilligan said.

“Our study shows that needles with eyes are a marker of this shift in the function of clothing, from thermal necessity to social necessity,” he added.

Connecting to the past

This study is important not only because it reinforces the importance of clothing in understanding the development of human cultures, but also because it brings together different perspectives in art and science, said Liza Foley, assistant professor at Ghent University and curator. of fashion and textiles at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, Belgium. Foley was not involved in the research.

April Nowell, professor and Distinguished Lansdowne Fellow in the anthropology department at the University of Victoria in Canada, said it can sometimes be difficult for scientists to help people connect with a past as remote as the Paleolithic, and archaeologists have the added challenge of having to make the most of every artifact they find.

“Objects like clothing are not preserved over thousands of years, but mammoth bones and ivory needles are, and they can tell us about the technological knowledge of our ancestors and the ways they adapted to their physical and cultural environments,” said Nowell, who was also not involved with the study.

It’s these types of objects we can all relate to that help humanize the past, she added.

“Other than the material, the eye needle really hasn’t changed in any practical sense over millennia,” she said in an email.

There is evidence for loomed and even dyed fabrics, starting about 30,000 years ago, she concluded. As a result, scientists can infer the types of decision-making people would have to go through to make a spun and dyed garment – ​​what plants to use, the way of spinning, how to decorate the garment and, ultimately, how to protect it. from the elements when you live 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 people.”

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