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Eyed needles, a sewing tool made of bone, horn or ivory that originated in southern Siberia around 40,000 years ago, may hold important clues about the beginnings of fashion, new research has revealed.
Researchers looked at 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 study, published June 28 in the journal Science Advances. The circumstances surrounding the eyed pins raise a number of questions.
“Eye needles made sewing more efficient and mirrored the emergence of fitted or tailored garments,” said Ian Gilligan, an honorary fellow in archaeology at the University of Sydney in Australia and lead author of the study.
But there is historical evidence, albeit less definitive, for earlier tools used to make clothing. “So why did eyed needles start to appear in colder parts of Eurasia as the climate cooled, around 40,000 years ago and towards the peak of the last glacial period around 22,000 years ago?”
This heightened sensitivity may have served a purpose beyond being a prehistoric tailoring skill, Gilligan suggests: self-expression.
“During the colder periods of the last ice age, people felt the need to cover their bodies more or less constantly,” he said, adding that clothing would have rendered obsolete some of the traditional methods of body adornment seen in hunter-gatherer societies, such as body painting, tattooing and scarring.
“When people have to constantly wear clothes because of the cold, how do you decorate yourself? How do you change your appearance for social purposes? The answer is to shift the decoration from the surface of the skin to the surface of the clothes,” Gilligan said.
According to this interpretation, eyed needles, symbols of the Paleolithic age, were not only simple tailoring tools, but also tools of prehistoric man’s social and cultural development.
A sign of change
The new study noted that eyed needles were not used solely for decorative purposes; they could also have been used to create tighter clothing or to sew layers, such as underwear.
Archaeological discoveries have revealed earlier tools used in tailoring, such as bone awls, which are sharpened animal bones that have been found to be used to cut animal hides.
“We don’t need eyed needles to make clothes,” he said. “We now know that there were other technologies before them, which raises the question of why eyed needles were invented.”
Gilligan added that there was evidence of clothing being decorated during the last glacial period, citing the discovery of a burial site near Moscow where skeletons believed to be 30,000 years old were decorated with thousands of perforated ivory beads and shells. “They were most likely sewn onto the outer surface of the clothing for decorative purposes,” he said.
This evidence supports the theory that eyed pins played a role in decoration, without ruling out their use in dressmaking. “These two purposes are not mutually exclusive. And in fact, they go together,” Gilligan said. “When you cover a body more completely, you need to transfer decoration to the garment, and eyed pins would be useful for both.”
It is unlikely that the hypothesis will ever find material confirmation, as the oldest clothing found so far is around 5,000 years old – textiles and leather cannot be preserved for much longer. However, the application suggests a much earlier cultural and social use of clothing than previously thought.
“Clothing gained its social purpose towards the end of the last glacial period. So we think that clothing continued to be used by humans until about 12,000 years ago, when it was no longer needed for thermal insulation,” Gilligan said.
“Our study suggests that eyed pins are a sign of this shift in the function of clothing from a thermal imperative to a social imperative,” he added.
Connecting to the past
The study is important not only because it reinforces the importance of clothing and apparel in understanding the development of human cultures, but also because it brings together different perspectives in art and science, says 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.
Helping scientists connect to a past as distant as the Paleolithic can sometimes be difficult, and archaeologists face the added challenge of having to make the most of every artifact they find, said April Nowell, a professor and Distinguished Lansdowne Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Victoria in Canada.
“Objects like clothing don’t preserve over thousands of years, but bone and mammoth ivory needles do, and these can tell us about our ancestors’ technological knowledge and the way they adapted to their environments, both physical and cultural,” said Nowell, who was not involved in the study.
It is objects like these, to which we can all relate, that help humanize the past, he added.
“Other than the material, the eyed needle has remained practically unchanged for thousands of years,” he said via email.
There is evidence of textiles being woven and even dyed on looms around 30,000 years ago, she concluded. As a result, scientists can infer what kinds of decisions people would have had to go through to make a spun, dyed garment — what plants to use, how to spin it, how to decorate the garment and, ultimately, how to protect it from the weather when living outdoors 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 would provide a window into the unexpected richness of Ice Age people’s lives.”
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