The Ancients - The Origins of Clothing

Episode Date: June 9, 2022

Clothing has been essential for human evolution. From protection against changing climate, through to the driving force behind technological innovation in the production of fabrics and agriculture.In this episode, Tristan with the help of Ian Gilligan, delves deep into our prehistory to uncover why and how our human ancestors may have begun to cover up, and how climate change, from the Pleistocene to the last ice age, may have also influenced this.Ian Gilligan is a prehistorian at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Climate, Clothing and Agriculture in Prehistory; Linking Evidence Causes and EffectsProduced by Elena Guthrie. Mixed by Thomas NtinasFor more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, where we're doing another huge topic today, another origins topic, because we are going back to the origins of clothing. Yes, that thing that we're all likely wearing right now. Some of you may not be wearing clothes if you're listening to this podcast. You know, that's up to you. No shame, no shame whatsoever. Anyways, moving on. Joining me today to talk all about the origins of clothing,

I was delighted to get on the podcast, Dr. Ian Gilligan from the University of clothing, I was delighted to get on the podcast Dr Ian Gilligan from the University of Sydney. Ian dialed in, he's been doing a lot of work around the origins of clothing over the past few years. He's even written a book all about clothing and its emergence in prehistory, the reasons why. It was a great chat. We go across the globe from Tasmania to Ice Age Europe. So without further ado, to talk all about the origins of clothing, here's Ian. Ian, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. My pleasure, Tristan.

Now, this is a fascinating topic. I love doing origins of because it's so interesting looking at where things come from. So many different things things originate and this is a similar case the origins of clothing it's fascinating to think and to and i admire that you've been studying this as well in to think about when when and why clothing came into existence yes well there are two different questions to look at the why question that's been debated for a long time. There's essentially three theories about why humans begin to wear clothes. One is that we have a sense of modesty, we like to cover ourselves, and that's, of course, the biblical narrative. There's the idea that we like to decorate ourselves, we like to get dressed

and that's another theory for why we invented clothes in the first place and the third theory is that we invented clothes in order to keep warm because we're a naked hominin and we don't cope very well with cold climates and clothing functions as thermal insulations. They're the three ideas about why humans first invented clothes. As to the when, that's a slightly longer story. I mean, a few background questions first of all, before we really delve into it. And this first one, it might seem a bit, maybe a simple and easy question to answer, but it's important nonetheless. Definition-wise, how should we define clothing

when approaching this topic? That's a very important question, Tristan, because there's been a lot of, I think, confusion over the years about what we mean by clothing. And it's very much conflated with the whole notion of dress and fashion, of course, particularly in the world today. And the functions of clothing have changed over time, and clothing now has many functions. So defining clothing, I think, is important. And I like the simple definition in the concise Oxford English Dictionary, which is clothing refers to items that are worn to cover the body.

And there's two important elements in that, Tristan. One is the whole idea of cover, that clothing is a cover. Whatever else it is, it covers the body's surface. And secondly is the notion that the purpose that the item is used for is to provide cover. So, for instance, we might say that we wear a watch on our wrist in order to tell the time. That also covers some of our skin's surface on our wrist. But is that an time, that also covers some of our skin surface on our wrist, but is that an item of clothing? And according to the dictionary definition, well, no, it isn't really, because we don't wear a watch in order to cover our wrist. We wear a watch to tell the time,

or if it's a nice expensive watch like a Rolex, we might also wear the watch as an item of dress, really, to adorn ourselves ourselves it's the notion of covering the body and that being the purpose of clothing that really i think precisely defines what we mean by clothing and that has i think enormous implications when we come to ask about the origins of clothing as you say this importance of covering and if we therefore go right back hundreds of thousands of years to the early homonyms before homo sapiens and the like it sounds as if we used to have natural clothing natural covering in the well in regards to us used to having fur well presumably yes

tristan as mammals most mammals have fur it's one of the attributes of mammals. There are some naked mammals like dolphins and elephants, but they're the exception rather than the rule, and they're all really special cases. Body hair is really one of the defining attributes of mammals. Red bulls don't have fur, and fur is there for thermal insulation because mammals, we're warm-blooded creatures, and we're at risk of losing heat to the environment,

and we need to maintain a constant, fairly high body temperature. And fur is very important in doing that, mammals. So we're very unusual as a mammal, I'm talking here about modern humans, Homo sapiens, in that we are essentially naked. We lack that layer of fur cover. Most of us retain a reasonable cover of hair over our heads and that's interesting when we come to look at the origins of nakedness that we've still retained hair cover over the tops of our head but we are naked in the biological sense in that we lack the natural cover of the mammalian cover. So in that sense we're regardless of whether we wear clothes we are naked uncovered in the biological sense. Well, let's focus in on the origins of nakedness.

First of all, that is a great title for a podcast episode in its own right. But do we know, therefore, do we roughly know when, do we know why humans went, well, went naked? Do we know anything about the origins of nakedness in our Homo species? We don't have any fossil evidence because obviously soft tissues like hair are not preserved archaeologically. So we have to look at indirect evidence. We do have some genetic clues. There are some genes that are involved with the expression of body hair and it looks like possibly around two to three million years ago. That's the estimate from the genetic studies for why we may have begun to lose our fur cover. There's also the interesting point that fur cover relates to skin colour. If you look at our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees for example,

they have really light skin colour and it's likely that once we lost our fur cover, we developed a dark skin as the natural or basic skin colour for humans in Africa. And that dark skin colour, of course, protects us from damage due to UV radiation. And the genetics of skin colour suggest also that dark skin probably evolved two or three million years ago as well. So we're looking at possibly around two to three million years ago on the genetic evidence for loss of body fur what are the theories surrounding this in as to why this comes about well the simple notion is that we lost our fur covered as a adaptation to heat stress on the african savannah and that obviously has a common sense validity, but it turns out that, like a lot of things in science, it's not as simple as that. Most mammals in the tropics

aren't naked. They retain some fur cover. And it turns out that exposing a naked skin surface in the tropics actually is a problem. It creates more heat stress because fur is thermal insulation. It not only acts as insulation against cold temperatures, but it also acts as sort of portable shade in the tropics. So that's why most mammals in the tropics

haven't lost their fur colour. So it raises the question of why did this happen in hominins? And I'm really an enthusiast for a theory proposed by Peter Wheeler in the 1980s. He published a series of papers in the Journal of Human Evolution where he looked at the connection between loss of fur cover

and adoption of an upright posture, bipedalism in hominins. And he actually did experiments involving mannequins as models and measured the heat load on bipedal and quadrupedal mannequins with and without a fur cover and what he showed was that for an animal getting around on four legs it actually is better to retain a fur cover in the tropics because it does provide that portable shade that insulation from heat stress but if you have an upright posture there is a particular advantage in having a loss of fur cover over the torso and over the limbs over the arms and the legs but retaining a fur cover over the head as portable shade and

the head is a particular problem in hominins because brains generate a lot of heat and with our larger brain size we actually produce more heat so we need more protection from heat stress on the tops of our heads so i think that's a good way of looking at the likely reasons why bipedal hominins lost their fur cover in an african context probably around judging from the genetic evidence two to three million years ago so in in that regard then we're looking at the various different hominim species homo species this occurs hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans, before homo sapiens. So I'm guessing we can presume that there are many, many various different species of homo that came and went, that stayed naked for all their,

well, the existence of their species. Yes, we don't know, for example, with Homo erectus or Neanderthals, whether they were as biologically naked as Homo sapiens. The popular assumption is that they were hairier than us, but we don't know. We actually just have to suppose that probably at least by halfway through hominin evolution over the last six to seven million years, probably by about halfway through that time period, hominins had begun to lose their fur cover and ian so if we therefore move on to modern homo sapiens and get into more recent history so to speak i've got my notes here i named the pleistocene era for when this happens now this seems important for setting the context of where we're going next. So first of all, Ian, what exactly is the Pleistocene era? Well, for most of the last six to seven million years that hominins have been around, the global climate has generally been warmer than it is at present.

That all changed quite dramatically beginning with the Pleistocene around 2.6 million years ago, and that's this period of recurring severe swings in global climate, particularly global temperatures, with a series of prolonged ice ages. Over the last million years, we've had about 10 major ice ages, each lasting perhaps, on average, around 100,000 years, separated by these shorter periods, these interglacials of warmer temperatures.

And we're currently living towards the end of an interglacial. The last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago. So during this last third of hominin evolution, we're exposed to rapidly changing and severely changing global climates. So if it's a much colder climate, how did our ancestors cope? I think the archaeological evidence suggested that hominins did expand out of Africa into Eurasia during the warmer interglacial periods, and they tended to retract or disappear from the middle latitudes of Eurasia during the cold ice ages. So in terms of the basic adaptations, if we're already essentially biologically naked, we can use fire and there's evidence for the control of fire probably from around a million years ago in Africa and from around 700,000 to 800,000 years ago in Southern Europe. And also,

of course, there's the use of shelter, both natural shelter in the form of caves and artificial shelters, particularly as protection from windchill. The problem with those adaptations is that they don't work when you're not in the cave. If you're out and about and you have to get out and about to get food at some point, then you really need portable insulation, portable protection from the cold. And that's where clothing comes in. So this do you believe is where clothing comes in in the context of this much colder or these much colder climates across the world during this as you get homo sapiens homo sapiens going around the world? Yes the first evidence we have for hominins outside of Africa is a year of around 1.8, 1.9 million years ago.

We have them in China probably from around 1.4 million years ago, if not earlier. But in terms of homo sapiens, the evidence is that we only began to get out of Africa probably around 60,000 years ago and into Europe perhaps from around 40,000 to 45,000 years ago. And so it's from that point onwards that we're exposed to the much colder climates of middle latitudes during ice ages. First of all, what's the evidence that we have for this, Ian? How can we presume that it's around this time and where exactly in the world that homonyms start adopting clothing for this purpose in this much colder climate? First of all, we can say that if we know that hominins were present in certain climates, where we know from the paleoclimatological evidence that conditions were very cold, for example, winter temperatures less than minus 20 degrees Celsius.

And we know that if they were present then, they would have needed portable protection in the form of clothing. We don't have any actual clothing remains from the Pleistocene at all. So what we do have, though, is indirect evidence, particularly in the form of technologies that were likely to be used to manufacture clothing. The classic example is the eyed needle, and we have the earliest

eyed needles appearing in southern Russia around 40,000 years ago. A little bit later in Europe, around 30,000 years ago. And the eyed needle, of course, is pretty much a signature for tailored clothing, for the fitted clothing that provides better protection from wind chill. And so we find that in this middle latitudes, the vicinity of Moscow, for example, we have actual remains of Homo sapiens at the site of Sungir, which is quite famous around 30,000 years ago. Not only do we find the technologies for manufacturing clothing, but at Sungir, they have a couple of deliberate burials of humans where there's thousands of beads arranged in a way that makes it clear that they were sewn onto garments, and not only garments, but likely two layers at least of garments around these skeletons.

So that's the kind of evidence that we have that clothing, tailored clothing in this case, was in use by 30 000 years ago in the vicinity of moscow during 30 000 years ago conditions are very cold at that stage it's so interesting so to try and learn about clothing in the distant past if the materials themselves don't survive you can ascertain it i guess partly by the climate we know about the climate at that time but largely through the archaeology through finding these remains that seem to indicate the making, the working of clothes. That's right, Tristan. A lot of the tools, for example, the basic tool is a hide scraper.

We're talking here about animal hides, not textile clothing. And stone scraper tools have been around for more than a million years if you look for example at Peking Man in China around 800,000 years ago we find scraper tools there that may well have been used to prepare hides for clothing we also have as I've mentioned the iron needles but even with the manufacture of fitted tailored clothing, we don't actually need iron needles. What you need is a piercing tool, and that's simply an awl. It doesn't have to have an eye in it.

And we find bone awls in the cooler parts of Africa, beginning especially around 75,000 years ago, during the very coal phase then. And we find that these bone awls occur with hide scrapers and also stone blade tools that would have been useful cutting the hides into specific shapes to make the sleeves and the legs for

the tail of the clothing. We find these technologies coming together in Africa and the core parts of Africa in northern and particularly in southern Africa during a coal phase around 75,000 years ago. It's consistent with another line of evidence we have about clothing, which is genetic evidence from lice, from clothing lice. And this has been some research that's come out in the last decade or so from researchers in Florida, in the US, and also in Germany,

where they've looked at the genetics of clothing lice. Clothing lice are interesting in that they have this unusual niche of living on clothing, and also they can survive to a certain extent in blankets and rugs. As long as they come into contact with humans regularly, at least every few days, and of course they feed on human blood. But they actually live on clothing or similar items that are in close proximity to human skin.

And the studies looking at the genetics of clothing lice and when they split from our head lice suggests that clothing lice developed probably during the last last hundred thousand years quite recently perhaps in even going back as far as maybe 170 000 years but essentially during this period of in recent hominin evolution there you go who thought lice could be so helpful in this topic it's about the only thing they are helpful for i think well you know we found a positive this is what we're always trying to do in so that's really good to know i mean you did mention a hundred thousand years and it's been on my mind so i would like to ask about it because i did mention homo sapiens earlier but of course there were other homo species at the time 60,000 years ago do you have any idea whether those other species in the colder climate such as the neanderthals

in europe maybe the denisovans in eastern Asia, whether any of those species might also have adopted clothes at that time. Do we have any evidence that might suggest this? We don't know much about Denisovans in terms of their bodies. We don't know how cold adapted they were with Neanderthals. We do know from the skeletal remains that they had a more stocky body build and they probably given that they were in europe for at least half a million years through a number of ice age cycles that they were reasonably well adapted to cooler conditions but we know they they weren't cold adapted to the they were limits to their cold adaptations they did not for example get into

northern siberia during the height of an ice age, which is why Neanderthals never got across into the Americas. During the very coldest phases, Neanderthals really retreated to the milder southern latitudes. But if you look at the stone tool technologies of Neanderthals, they really specialised in making scraper tools. And we know from studying those scraper tools that they were used on many materials, but they were really specialised for hide scraping.

Now, looking at the climates in Europe during that time, we can say that even if they were a little more cold adapted than Homo sapiens, they would have needed some portable insulation, some clothing. I suspect it was for large part restricted to simple loose clothing, capes and cloaks, not the fitted tailored clothing that we know Homo sapiens developed in the cooler parts of Africa. So I think we do have some evidence that the Anatoles, even if they were a little more cold adapted than Homo sapiens,'re making use of simple forms of clothing. Throughout June on Not Just the Tudors, we're honouring Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee by focusing on queenship in the 16th and 17th centuries. I'm Professor Susanne Lipscomb and all this month

with my guests I'll be exploring the coronations of Tudor queens, queen's regnant and queen's consort who wielded power in ways we haven't thought about. Really when we begin to look at queen consorts we notice that there's a lot of ways that the Renaissance court that women could hold informal power through their relationship with the king. Then there's the queen who ruled over the Spanish Netherlands and the female Swedish king. You heard that right. What did a 17th century person actually mean by saying, oh, she dresses like a man? If she would have worn male clothing, she wouldn't have been able to rule Sweden.

So for a month of all things magisterial and monarchical, look no further than Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. I mean, you mentioned leather hides as this key resource for clothing at this early stage in our prehistory. I mean, does this all fit into the whole lifestyle of these early homonyms, this hunter-gatherer lifestyle, in the fact that the material that they're using is the hide of animals? Yes, Tristan, it's not until we get to the end of the last ice age, at the beginning of the current Holocene, the post-glacial epoch, where we've got massive global warming and also greater environmental moisture,

atmospheric circulation, where we see a transition from using animal hides, which was the norm during the Pleistocene, to the use of woven fabrics as the major form of material for clothing. And the reasons why that happened is essentially that in the post-Glacial era, we have warmer temperatures. We also have higher moisture levels and woven cloth functions better as clothing in those environments. During the Pleistocene, although textile technologies did exist, they were probably used more for things like baskets and bags, and for clothing, better protection was afforded by hides and furs.

So Ian, I'd like now to turn to a particular case study, so to speak, that I know you've done quite a bit of work around, and this is regarding people in Tasmania during the last Ice Age. Now, what is your research around this revealed about the origins of clothing here? Yes, that's a very good question, Tristan, because the Tasmanians at the time when the European voyagers first made contact with them were essentially naked. Even though Tasmania is fairly chilly by our standards. They were able to get around with very little in the way of clothing.

However, we know that Tasmanians, indigenous Australians, arrived in Tasmania from around 35,000 years ago, and they remained there during the coldest part of the last ice age, around 20,000 years ago, and they remained there during the coldest part of the last ice age, around 20,000 years ago. And throughout much of that time, they developed new technologies. They specialised in stone hide scraper tools, very similar to Neanderthals in Europe, interestingly enough. They also developed bone tools, bone awls,

and we know they're used as awls from studying the wear traces on the tips of the bone awls. In the case of Tasmania, if you look at the available animal species for providing hides for clothing, the largest animal species was a little wallaby, which is a miniature kangaroo. And during the coldest parts of the last ice age, they would have needed more thermal protection. They were treated, interestingly enough, to the southwest corner of Tasmania,

which even though it's higher altitude, it's a much more rugged landscape and there are a lot of caves there. So they were treated into caves, which gave them some protection from windchill. They had use of fire. And judging from the archaeological evidence, they specialised in hide scraper tool manufacture. But they also developed these bone tools, these awls, because they needed to sew multiple wallaby skins together

to make a decent cloak to cover the whole of the body. So we find those technologies emerging in Ice Age Tasmania. But we also, intriguingly, find those tools disappearing from the archaeological record with global warming at the end of the last Ice Age. So from around 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, the bone tools disappear and the hide scraper tools also largely disappear from the archaeological record in Tasmania. So what we see in Tasmania in some ways parallels what we see in Europe with Neanderthals but it's different also that we have bone tools and we have good reason for those bone tools because they only had small animals to get hides from But we also find those tools disappearing from the archaeological records.

And by the time the Europeans arrived 200 years ago, Tasmanians are essentially not wearing clothes. And I think that's interesting because in other parts of the world, people carried on wearing clothes. Do you think this is reflected in prehistory elsewhere in the fact that hundreds, sometimes thousands of years ago, when some communities for cold, for climate, just do decide to start wearing clothing. But other communities, hunter-gatherer communities or whatever communities opt not to wear clothes, perhaps because the climate, they didn't need to. Do you think this kind of reflects it in Tasmania? Yes, I think that's very much the case, Tristan, because during the Pleistocene,

essentially clothing was worn for practical purposes. And from a hunter-gatherer point of view, making clothing, particularly complex fitted clothing, is technologically very time-consuming and involves a great deal of work. And remember, too, that as a mobile hunter-gatherer, whatever technologies you have, whatever material possessions you have,

you have to carry them around with you. So generally speaking, technology is kept to a minimum and the emphasis is on efficiency. So if you don't need clothing, then you don't make clothing. You don't invest in the technologies. Where that begins to change for the first time, and this is very relevant to what happened at the end of the last Ice Age, is that in northern middle latitudes,

the conditions were much colder there even compared to Tasmania, clothing had to be used on a much more regular basis and complex clothing was mandatory in places like northern Europe. That kind of clothing, it covers the body very effectively, pretty much completely. And at that point, people also want to, as they usually do, want to dress themselves up even for special occasions. Instead of doing what hunter-gatherers generally do which is to paint their bodies or tattoo cover themselves with tattoos those functions had to be transferred onto clothing so obviously i think in

the northern hemisphere where conditions were colder is that by the end of the last ice age even though conditions were not requiring clothing for thermal reasons people still wanted to keep wearing clothing because the clothing had become dress in a sense that did not happen in Tasmania because the clothing there was simple clothing it didn't cover the body completely it wasn't tailored clothing so I think the Tasmanians were able to drop their clothes at the end of the last ice age whereas that did not happen in many parts of the northern hemisphere. Why do we see at that time in the northern hemisphere this almost evolution in the purpose in the function of clothing where it goes from

just being about warding off a harsh climate to perhaps being an object of social status and perhaps this adam and eve idea of modesty coming in too. Yes I think what happened in the northern hemisphere is conditions were much colder in the northern hemisphere than the southern hemisphere that's mainly because there's a much greater ocean mass in the southern hemisphere so terrestrial temperatures in the southern hemisphere are generally milder than they are in the northern hemisphere and you haven't got the great land masses in the southern hemisphere that we have with Eurasia. In those environments, Homo sapiens had begun to develop tailored, fitted clothing probably at least 75,000 years ago

during a very cold spell. So you'll have humans wearing clothes on a daily basis for reasons of thermal insulation. One for tens of thousands of years. Over that longer time span, the decorative purposes of body decoration has to get transferred onto clothing because you can't take off your clothes and paint your body's surface in a cold, ice-age climate. And I think also, Tristan, that when clothing in the body is covered routinely, it becomes an effect of covering the body that uncovering the body becomes socially unacceptable,

or at least psychologically problematic, shall we say. So I think we have those two things happening. By the end of the last ice age in the Northern Hemisphere, we have clothing that's beginning to function as dress and as a social requirement for display, for status and so on, functions that were previously served by decorating the naked body, and also this biblical element of shame, of feeling that the naked body is unacceptable in public. And I think both of those motives for wearing clothes had come were in place by the end of the last ice age in parts of the northern hemisphere and it begs the question ian i guess a bit more a bit more on it on the on the why and how this might potentially link if it's at the end

of the last ice age the end of in some parts of the world the hunter-gatherer lifestyle how might this link be connected to the origins of another huge topic the origins of agriculture yes tristan now we have these a couple of major changes occurring at the end of the last ice age in the beginning of the post-glacial epoch in terms of, we have a transition to warm weather clothing, to woven textiles, where, for example, wind penetration is good for actually helping to cool the body and helping to evaporate perspiration. And there's more body perspiration in the warmer climates of the post-glacial epoch. So we have the transition in clothing from animal hides and furs to using woven textiles to make fabrics. And we also have the massive change in human society, the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture.

Of course, traditionally, the transition to agriculture is considered to be all about producing food, and it certainly did involve producing food but it also involved producing textile fibers for clothing particularly for example in the case of the first animals deliberately domesticated which are sheep and goats of southwestern asia and in the americans of course we have llamas and alpacas in south america the major only animal species domesticated early in the post-glacial epoch. So we have production of textile fibres as well as producing food for human consumption in the early stages of agriculture. So that's interesting.

So you mentioned that because obviously we mentioned in the past with the hunter-gatherers, you know, it's the hides of animals which is used as the material for clothing. But with the advent of agriculture and domestication of these various animals, it's almost as if the cat is let out of the bag in that you can start, I'm guessing these prehistoric humans could start playing around, testing these various different textiles and how they could work as items of clothing. Yes, and looking at the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, in relation to food, it's quite problematic.

We used to think it was an obvious motive for inventing agriculture, was to produce more food for human consumption, but we now know that the hunting and gathering lifestyle was actually a very efficient and very secure means of getting food and, in a sense, using agriculture to produce food. Certainly in the early stages it was more risky. It means putting water eggs in one basket, as it were. So just in terms of food,

it's difficult to see why hunter-gatherers would give up a relatively easy hunting and gathering existence to start producing food through agriculture, which involves a lot more work. But if we have textiles as a motive as well, then that may well have been what tipped the balance in favour of agriculture in only some parts of the world, and not in other parts of the world, such as Australia, where clothing wasn't used routinely. of the world such as australia where clothing wasn't used routinely in it is so fascinating when you think of how for us today where clothing is such an a key part where whether it's in regards to modesty or in regards to social status depending on what clothes you wear

so seeing how the origins of it is is really not about that at all it's all about climate it's also well very interesting and infamous in in one sense how clothing became associated by some with civilization and and civilized people when in fact as you mentioned with people in tasmania and australia the fact that clothing is not not adopted in the same way as it was let's say in in medieval england or in in the roman or greek worlds is because the purpose wasn't there. It's because the climate was, there was no need for it. It's not a, it's wonderful to get away from this idea of, you know,

they're not being civilised and civilised because it's not about that at all. No, and it would just become about that, I think, in the post-Glacial epoch. Once we have these consequences of being routinely covered, where we need clothing as dress and we also feel ashamed about being naked. That's not the case for homo sapiens in general, I don't think. And there are many hunter-gatherer examples,

not just Indigenous Australians, but in Africa as well, and even in, say, South America, where people were happy to get around without covering themselves for reasons of shame or modesty. And they're able to dress themselves very elaborately with body paints and tattooing and so on. In our case, though, those other functions have been transferred onto clothing and those consequences of clothing motivate us to continue wearing clothes even in hot environments where, in fact, wearing clothes is physiologically problematic. And that's where textile clothing in particular, of course,

comes into its own during the warmer post-glacial climate. So I think that's interesting, both in terms of accounting for why agriculture didn't occur in some parts of the world and what swung the balance in favour of agriculture for hunter-gatherers in other parts of the world. It's so interesting, therefore, how you've been able to see this link

between agriculture and clothing, especially as agriculture is one of the most significant revolutions in human history yes well of course it has transformed not just human society actually transformed the the surface of the earth agriculture has been responsible really for in a sense the end of nature and most of the world's surface is now affected directly or indirectly by agriculture and the global climate is now changing and probably began to change even before the Industrial Revolution due to agriculture. So it's transformed human society.

It's allowed the development of more stratified, complex societies and division of labour and so on, just led to the development beginning around 5,000 years ago in South-West Asia in particular and also in Eastern Asia of what we now call civilised societies. So, yes, it's been the beginning of the real transformation of the world over the last 10 to 12 000 years culminating in the rise of the early city states and civilized societies in the last 5 000 years well there you go in that's the topic for another podcast indeed this has been an absolutely brilliant chat and we've only scratched the surface because you cover even more in your book.

Last but certainly not least, Ian, your book on this topic is called? The Climate, Clothing and Agriculture in Prehistory. Brilliant. Ian, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. And thanks for the invite. Thanks, Tristan. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Ianilligan explaining all about

the origins of clothing i hope you enjoyed the episode now stay tuned for more episodes coming very very soon of course we've got just around the corner the 11th of june the anniversary of the death of alexander the great and now as the host i've insisted we do something special around that so stay tuned. A special episode is coming very, very soon. And I hope you'll enjoy it. Now, in the meantime, if you'd like more ancient history content from History Hit,

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