Just as w don’t know whether Venus statues with large breasts goddesses or fertility symbols we also don’t exactly know what did humans that lived thousands of years ago wore. Did they use wool or linen? But perhaps the new discovery in Turkey will give us the answer.
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When thinking about the stone age we usually imagine bands of roaming humans with flint knives and spears. But before the stone age turned into the bronze age we have something we call the late stone age. The Eneolithic period. This was the time when humans slowly switched from hunting large animals with their spears, getting comfortable and ready to settle down. Agricultural products started to become a staple of our diets and society changed from a matriarchal to a patriarchal form.
It’s not that long ago when students that said humans had cities during this period were sent home with an F. Now, it is actually a sign of knowing what was discovered in the Çatal Hüyük area. This area in South Anatolia has certainly seen better times. But it is an archaeological goldmine. It has 18 layers of ancient settlements and the oldest suggests humans lived there more than 9,000 years ago. The last ones that decided to leave and not return did so about 7,950 years ago. When the area was prosperous it had a population of up to 10,000 humans. And while we know of eve older settlements Çatal Hüyük is still the largest we found from the neolithic and the Eneolithic period.
Çatal Hüyük is a paradise for archaeologists. They are finding a great number of well-preserved artifacts. For example, figurines of female statues. They even found remains of ancient clothing. And it’s precisely this clothing that Lise Bender Jørgensen decided to study. With her colleagues Antoinett Rast-Eicher they found out what materials ancient humans used to wove their clothes, thus ending a sixty-year-long debate. Whether the clothes worn by people 8,000 years ago were from wool or from linen. Well, the ancient clothes were actually woven from oak bast fibers.
So, it seems while ancient humans wove their baskets from grasses they made their clothing from oak bast fibers. Well, actually this isn’t that big of a surprise. Fibers from such as linden, willow, oak, or elm were used for thousands of years to make ropes and threads. Oaks were plentiful in the area at that time and were commonly chopped down to make houses. Bast was a by-product and it would be strange if humans didn’t utilize it in one way or another.
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