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Below the pictorial web page at the link are related articles including the Alexeev Harvard Lectures on African remains in Russia from 27,000 years ago. Women wear what anthropologist have determined is a weaved hat from that era (see upper page a and b).
Depending on the measure, the human being has existed for 7 million years. For all the concern over proper dress, we have been unclothed for 7 million years minus only the last 7,000 years. Part A: a - h, e.g., shows that from the first human sculpture, the Venus of Willendorf (b) 25,000 BC until, roughly, the Moldavian Venus (h) of 6000 BC, the human being went about naked.
Part B: 1 - 7 gives an encapsulation of the history of weaving, cloth-making, and clothes-making. Steatophygia is a trait associated with African women. The archeological record leaves us the evidence that it is these African women (B: 1c, 2d, 4c, 5c, 8d-e) and others present at the place and time textile-making was being created (B: 3b, 4b-d, 6c, 7b) who were involved in the invention and spread of the tradition of cloth-making to humanity.
HISTORY: the weaving of thread twining it by hand was the first stage of clothmaking. It was followed by the use of the spindle (or whorl) - a donut-shaped object (B: 1a, 2a, 3a, 4a, 6a-b, 7a).
EVOLUTION: We can trace the evolution of technology of textile-making in some locations as Egypt (3a to 3c); Greece (4a - 4d); Mexico (7a - 7c). We also see that dresses are the same today as they were when first made with, apparently, soft materials and dyed patterns as in the dress from Hacilar, Turkey (B: 1c) almost 9000 years ago or Greece (B:4c) some 8000 years ago.
WHO MADE, HOW MUCH, WHO WORE? Three dozen times in Homer’s Iliad and Odyessy, we read of queens and noble women weaving cloth. At the beginning, it is only royalty who had the time and right (as it were) to wear clothes. Over the millenniums, it became something for the masses and Madison Avenue.
Marc Washington . .
Posts: 2334 | Registered: May 2006
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