Think about how you make woolen or cotton cloth.*
You get wool off a woolly animal or cotton out of a cotton plant. You card it, spin the result into thread/yarn, and then weave it into cloth.
Isn't it amazing that humanity came up with cloth at all!
Each of these steps requires specialized tools, and I can't really picture how you'd arrive at a rudimentary version before the tools exist. Even just the idea of turning fluff into string is mindblowing, to say nothing of inventing a tool that makes it happen! (While writing this, I've been watching youtube videos of how spinning wheels work, and I still don't understand how they work.)
The only thing that exists in nature that's remotely cloth-like is animal pelts. So someone had to come up with the idea of turning fluff into something that resembled animal pelts (as opposed to seeing them as two completely disparate things), and then they had to figure out a mechanism by which to do it! Because they didn't have tools for as-yet-nonexistent processes just sitting around, they probably came up with rudimentary versions of carding, spinning, weaving and sewing that did not require any specialized tools! And the results of these processes would have been useful and satisfactory enough that people kept using and refining the processes over generations until we got the old-fashioned processes and tools that are part of recorded history.
Based on what I can google, the details of how people figured this out, and all the intermediary processes and tools that were once used and subsequently obsoleted, are lost to history. Which is a tragedy, because it's fascinating and mindblowing - possibly the most complex invention that we take completely for granted!
*Linen and silk are also types of cloth that predate recorded history. They have comparably complex, multi-step processes, but I don't understand them as well and you can google them just as well as I can. There are likely also other types of cloth I haven't heard of in other cultures whose histories I'm not up on. And there may well be yet more that were tried and obsoleted prior to recorded history.
2 comments:
Yes! As I always say, the ancients were geniuses, far more than our current societies. We have so much to build on, and so much specialized technology to build it with. They made something out of nothing! Absolutely amazing.
Even animal pelts -- turning hide into leather is a complicated, multi-step process involving chemicals and a lot of work. The neolithic people would have used raw pelts, but early civilizations made shelters and clothing from actual leather.
Cotton! The ancient Egyptians grew cotton and figured out how to make it into cloth! Then the people in the ancient Indus learned it all over again! Many !!s !
And silk... that is the craziest of all. People died trying to smuggle the process out of China.
OMG, I didn't realize until I read your comment that cloth was developed more than once, in different parts of the world! That's even more mindblowing!
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