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The eyed needle, a sewing tool made from bone, antler or ivory that first appeared around 40,000 years ago in southern Siberia, may hold important clues about the beginnings of fashion, a new study suggests.
The researchers examined existing archaeological evidence from dozens of sites in Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South Africa and Australia where ancient tools used to make clothing have been discovered, according to research published June 28 in the journal Science Advances. The circumstances surrounding the eyed needles have raised a number of questions.
“Needles with eyes made sewing more efficient and reflected the advent of tailored or tailored clothing,” said the study’s lead author, Ian Gilligan, an honorary associate in the discipline of archaeology at the University of Sydney in Australia.
There is, however, historical evidence of older tools used for making clothes, albeit less precise ones. “So why did needles with eyes start to appear in the colder regions of Eurasia as the climate cooled, starting around 40,000 years ago and continuing until the peak of the last ice age around 22,000 years ago?”
According to Gilligan, this increased precision may have served a purpose beyond sewing for prehistoric humans: self-expression.
“During the coldest periods of the last ice age, people had to cover their bodies more or less permanently,” he said, adding that clothing would have negated 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 have to wear clothes all the time because of the cold, how do you decorate yourself? How do you change your appearance for social purposes? The answer is to move decoration from the surface of the skin to the surface of the clothing,” Gilligan says.
According to this interpretation, needles with eyes, one of the symbols of the Paleolithic age, were not simple sewing tools but also instruments of social and cultural development of prehistoric man.
Eyed needles weren’t just used for decorative purposes, the new study says. They could also have been used to create more fitted garments or to create tailored layers of clothing, such as underwear.
Archaeological discoveries have uncovered older sewing tools, such as bone awls, which are simply sharpened animal bones that would have been used to cut animal hides.
“We don’t need needles with eyes 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.”
Mariana Ariza
An artist’s illustration shows how prehistoric man might have used tailored clothing for decorative purposes.
There is evidence of clothing decoration during the last ice age, Gilligan added, citing the discovery of a burial site near Moscow where 30,000-year-old skeletons were adorned with thousands of ivory beads and pierced shells. “In all likelihood, they were sewn onto the outer surface of the garments for decorative purposes,” he said.
These elements would support the theory that needles with eyes served a decorative role, without excluding their use for sewing. “These two functions are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they go hand in hand,” Gilligan said. “Once you cover a body more completely, you need to transfer the decoration to the garment, and needles with eyes would be useful for both.”
It is likely that this hypothesis will never find material confirmation, since the oldest clothing ever discovered dates back about 5,000 years, and textile materials and leather cannot be preserved much longer. However, this practice suggests a cultural and social use of clothing much older than previously thought.
“Clothing only acquired its social function towards the end of the last glacial cycle. This 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 needles with eyes are a marker of this shift in the function of clothing, from a thermal necessity to a social necessity,” he added.
This study is important not only because it reinforces the importance of clothing and attire in understanding the development of human cultures, but also because it brings together the different perspectives of art and science, said 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. Foley was not involved in the research.
April Nowell, a professor and Lansdowne Distinguished Fellow in the department of anthropology at the University of Victoria in Canada, said it can sometimes be difficult for scientists to help people connect to a past as distant as the Paleolithic, and archaeologists have the added challenge of having to make the most of every artifact they find.
“Objects like clothing don’t last for thousands of years, but mammoth bone and ivory needles do, and they can tell us about our ancestors’ technological knowledge and how they adapted to their physical and cultural environments,” said Nowell, who also was not involved in the study.
It’s these kinds of objects that we can all relate to that help humanize the past, she added.
“Apart from the material, the needle eye hasn’t really changed from a practical standpoint in millennia,” she said via email.
She concluded that there are already traces of woven and even loom-dyed textiles dating back about 30,000 years. Scientists can now infer the kinds of decisions people had to make to make a spun and dyed garment: which plants to use, how to spin it, how to decorate the garment, and how to protect it from the elements when they lived mostly outdoors.
“And all of 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 life for Ice Age people.”