[~52,000BC] The Eyed Needle: The History of Clothes, Fashion, Beauty and Status Games

[00:00:00] Naked Dreams

Let's start with a thought experiment. Close your eyes and imagine an ordinary Tuesday you're sitting in a team meeting. Your boss is pointing at a chart, and your colleague is clicking a pen. Everything seems normal except for one small detail. You look down and realize you've forgotten something very critical.

Your clothes, you are completely, utterly, undeniably naked now, how do you feel? Did your stomach just drop? Does the wave of panic urge you to run for the door? If so, you aren't alone. Every single night. An estimated 80 million people around the world have this exact dream.

It is the third most common nightmare in the human experience ranking higher than terrifying dreams of creepy coolies, global catastrophes, or even being late for a flight. But why? Think about how strange that is. Every other animal on earth is naked 24 hours a day. Your dog isn't embarrassed. A chimp doesn't feel exposed. Nature is naked. But for us nakedness is a psychological crisis. We expect that clothing was invented to keep us warm. But I would reasonably bet that the last thing on your mind when you realized that you were naked were worries about the cold.

When we first started covering our bodies with clothes, we opened a Pandora's box of shame, status, privacy, and secrets that fundamentally rewired the human mind. So put some pants on. We are going back into the Stone Age.

[00:01:38] Welcome

Welcome to How to Change the World, where we learn about the history and future of innovation by reviewing every impactful human invention ever in chronological order.

I am your host, Sam Webster Harris. Taking you on this casual 15 year journey through 3 million years of human history. Each episode can be listened to on its own, but for the full story, I recommend starting at the beginning because every step forward rests on the last. Today we are traveling through the Stone Age to explore clothing.

If one was to assemble a list of humanity's greatest inventions, the wheel writing, penicillin, the internet, you'd almost certainly forget to include clothing, which is odd, really, because without it, most of us wouldn't exist. The few of us remaining would be limited to the warmer bits of Africa shivering as the evening sets in wishing that someone would invent trousers already.

The thing about clothing is that it's so fundamental, so utterly woven into the fabric of being human, that we barely think about it as unnatural.

Some of us randomly fumble into our clothes in the morning while still half asleep and get on with our day others, um, and are over which piece of clothing to wear, wear, which color matches our color and which fit makes us look fit.

But the thought of whether or not to even wear clothes on your errands is like peeking out the window to check if gravity is working today.

It's unquestionable.

However, this unremarkable daily dressing ritual connects us to an innovation that happened hundreds of thousands of years ago and might be the most psychologically striking leap outta the animal kingdom into our own unique place on earth.

So with that, if you are not subscribed, hit the button to join the journey and let's dig in.

[00:03:49] Genesis[00:03:49] 1 - FIRST CLOTHES

in the Bible, there is a famous little story about the origin of clothes. Adam stands in the Garden of Eden. The sun is warm. The fruit on every tree is ripe and juicy. and God has just one rule. You are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil

act two God makes Adam a companion by removing one of Adam's ribs and turning it into a lady friend

with his spare rib, tagging along, they can explore this idyllic world together, they are utterly naked, but they don't need clothes. They'd never thought about clothes. They can do whatever the heck they want besides eat that one fruit from that one tree.

In Act three, the serpent, the craftiest of all animals, gets chatting with the woman about the forbidden tree, and he suggests a theory.

You certainly won't die, he says, you'll just be like God, no good and evil. The woman currently uneducated on good and evil

completely fails. The morality test God has set her and immediately takes a big bite of the fruit and gets Adam to try a little nibble as well. Lo and behold, they suddenly notice a ton of emotions about this whole being naked thing.

They quickly sow some fig leaves together to cover themselves. the first critical moment. What were previously just parts of their anatomy become private parts.

When God then walks through the garden, they hide behind a tree, where are you?

Adam confesses, I heard you in the garden. And I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid. the second critical moment, the shame, the moment when nakedness becomes wrong.To which God asks, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from Adam Lets out that woman you put here. , she gave it to me. Eve, then immediately blames a serpent.

But having heard enough, God has at it.

For the serpent. He removes his legs and makes him eat dust for the rest of his life. He cursed his women with incredibly painful childbirth, and if that doesn't suck enough, he states that man will rule over you, which seems a little unfair because for Adam, he gets off a lot lighter.

God gives him a sweaty brow whilst toiling the earth for food and curses him with having to deal with thorny weeds that will keep popping up for the rest of his life.

With the curses over God banishes them from the Garden of Eden. And as a parting gift, the Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them according to the Torah. This happened in 3,760 bc. Now, the facts may vary, but it is one of the oldest stories we have and many elements of it might actually be telling us something true.

This leads us to the alternate version, which begins with the obvious issue that humans do not have fur.

[00:07:01] Naked Ape vs. The Ice Age

I know that is not a shocking statement exactly, but it is weird. Every other primate has fur from the silverback gorilla to the bugeye tarsia, but us nothing, almost as naked as we were born.

We learned in the previous episode about weapons that Furness was an adaption for running long distances in the heat to become better hunters. But the awkward issue arrived around 800,000 years ago.

Homo Erectuss with their hunting success began to venture out of our cradle of creation in Africa, perhaps our proverbial Garden of Eden, , and they moved into the ice age landscape of Europe, watching winters settle over the landscape, shivering in the cold.

Some of you don't even make it through the night homoerectus face a decision

other animals have thick insulating fur, which seems like a fantastic idea. So option one, rely on evolution by waiting thousands and thousands of years to adapt. Or option two. Cheat. We of course, chose option two and we called it clothing.

Somewhere in the darkness of prehistory. This walking, talking ape with a few basic tools and the posable thumbs started borrowing other animals' fur. When the wind howls and the snow drives that you, if you drape an animal, hide over your shoulders, a whole new world of warmth appears

with clothing. You create a little pocket of air in between your skin and that borrowed layer of fur or leather. Your body warms this pocket of air up and it doesn't blow away. You have made your own personal microclimate.

For millions of years, in fact, across the entire history of animals, environmental conditions simply happened to you. Cold was cold, hot was hot. You endured what nature provided After clothing, you can add a layer. You can remove a layer we had created adjustable settings on our personal climate control, the prehistoric equivalent of installing air conditioning in your office.

For other animals, they depend on evolution or migration to handle temperature changes. Humans had engineered a solution to cheat nature and we got very good at it very quickly.

[00:09:13] Foot bags

Whilst these drape bits of skin covered our core, we can't ignore our extremities. If you've ever tried walking in snow, there's no chance you are going to ignore your feet. Even when Wim Hof hiked seven and a half thousand meters up, Everest wearing nothing but shorts to make a point.

He still had his boots on of course, the first footwear wasn't exactly your Nike or tailored boot. It was more of a foot bag, which was probably as good as it sounds, but it was enough to let you walk across sharp rocks or frozen ground without shredding your feet.

There is a saying that in difficult times, fashion is always outrageous Imagine a persistence hunter on the savanna. Every thorn is basically a stop sign from nature. The gazelle he's chasing has hard hooves. Biological shoes evolved over millions of years for running around,

but with pink feet that bruise and bleed, the human loses out.

But when he wraps a thick piece of bison hide around his foot and ties it up with a strand of sinew for his next attempt, he has stolen some of the gazelle's evolutionary advantage and strapped a piece of technology to his own body, he is a stone age cyborg. Not perhaps the height of technology we are used to, but every small step forwards builds on themselves.

So let's consider what technology was being worked on to get us to this point.

[00:10:40] Tanning a hide

One does not simply throw a raw hide over your shoulders and walk into an ice age raw hide is stiff. It rots and it's crawling with bacteria. So you're creating more problems than you're solving at this point. Luckily, if you remember our first tool, the Stone Flake, that was exactly what you needed. Imagine you've just killed a large animal. The evening wind is rolling in off of Savannah,

to remove its skin. You have a few hours of scraping away at flesh fat and guts with an almost musical rhythm. You are removing the sticky, juicy matter that will destroy your wonderful gar. you finish your back aches something terrible. Your cramped hands might smell like gazelle guts. but no more infestations of maggots in your fur.

Step one, complete.

Now you need to soften it. Here humans stumbled into a cosmic coincidence That must have felt like destiny. Leather workers have a grimly perfect saying that is, every animal has just enough brains to tan its own hide. It's literally true. The oils and fats in an animal's brain contains the exact chemical compounds needed to soften the leather, and each animal's brain is about the size needed to spread across its skin.

The process went like this

one, scrape the hide clean.

Two, pound the animal's brain into a paste.

Three, rub it thoroughly across the skin.

Four, let it soak,

and five, finally you smoke it over a fire to preserve it.

The result was a soft, supple leather, smells, a bit smokey and animal fatty, but it's flexible enough to move with your body, and durable enough to last through winter.

Somebody somewhere figured this out and they shared it. The technology spread and suddenly early humans could process leather in Africa, Europe, Asia, and everywhere that we went.

Yes, it isn't the height of fashion, but these draped hides tied together with bits of sinew or some thorns with quite literally the hottest thing around

This technology combined with fire allowed humans to expand into climates that should have been completely off limits to a hairless primate. I say Europe, frigid Siberia, and even high altitude plateaus.

As we learned to set our boundaries against nature, we also stepped beyond the boundaries that nature had set for us.

[00:13:03] Lice and Permanent Clothing

Okay, so we've got different human species wandering around with animal hide capes

our ancestors, homoerectus, the DES and Neanderthals were all doing it, but for a long time, clothing was likely a temporary affair, a winter wardrobe or used at night. Which leads us to the question of when exactly did close become a permanent year round habit

more like we know today.

Our first clue comes from looking at body lice

Back when humans lost their fur. We of course lost the parasites that lived in it, which was one less problem for us. But we still had the headlights that stuck around.

When we started wearing clothes regularly, we had a permanent second skin available and lice adapted. They evolved into a new species with claws, adapted for fibers instead of human hair, and They learned to lay their eggs in the seams of our clothes.

Looking at the genetics of head lice and body lice, we see that they diverged somewhere between 80,000 and 170,000 years ago, that gives us a vague starting date for when clothing became a regular thing.

It is a pretty big window, but it's further supported by other evidence such as the Contrabands Cave in Morocco, which is full of items that seem to be about 120,000 years old,

they found over 62 specialized bone tools . Specifically for fur processing, suggesting a sophisticated year-round, hide working operation.

One of the issues we've been experiencing for how we were adopting clothes was how we were holding them together. We were still stuck using thorns, bone splinters, and sinew for ties.

this baggy hanging clothes draped over us look, that had lasted for 700,000 years was starting to get popular.

Carl Leger Field was right when he said that trendy is the last stage before tacky. Some big changes were about to arrive y

75,000 years ago. Around the same time as the cognitive revolution. Some smart soul or maybe several different humans across Africa invented the bone. All it is a small pencil size tool made from a chunk of antler or bone, and it was lovingly sharpened to a point at one end.

And what is so important about this thing, it allowed you to punch a hole through a piece of leather without ripping it. It doesn't sound that impressive compared to, say, the complete language system that humans were inventing at the same time. But whilst we were naming the stars, these little holes in leather, were changing the world in a different way.

If you line up a hole in one piece of leather with another hole in a different piece, you could feed a small strip of leather or fabric through it and bring these two pieces of material together in any size and shape.

Before that, we were draping bits of animal around us, hoping they stay put, you might be praying that one day you find an animal that happened to be shaped like you, but now you could turn these bits of animal into panels that you piece together in exactly the shape of you.

thus the cape becomes a coat, the waist wrap became trousers dressed up to the nines. Homo sapiens were ready to venture out of Africa themselves into the frozen world, beyond a small step for man and a giant leap for mankind. In 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, he wasn't just a man, he was a fragile biological bubble inside a life support suit. If you take away the suit, the environment kills him almost instantly. If we rewind 75,000 years. A small, skinny human compared to the other apes steps out of a cave into Ice Age Europe, the temperature is minus 20 degrees.

The wind is a razor without his tailored jacket. His earth suit, he is dead in probably 20 minutes. Yes, we think of clothes as fashion, but their original purpose was space travel, allowing a tropical ape to walk anywhere on a frozen planet.

And with that new trick working, we were ready to work on something even more daring than the last.

At Abry de Maras in France, archeologists found something extraordinary. Clinging to a 50,000 year old stone tool, a fragment of three ply cord, three separate strands of inner tree bark. Each twisted clockwise, then wound together counterclockwise. And what's amazing about the rope making discovery is how sophisticated it is.

Making this cord requires knowing which plants have good bark fibers, because not all of them do. Knowing when to harvest them, which is spring when SAP is running, and then being able to separate the correct inner bark from the woody core and the outer bark around it. Then preparing the fibers by soaking and softening them, and then finally twisting three separate strands in one direction whilst applying them together in the opposite direction. It's more than just craft.

It's a seasonal knowledge leading to mathematically optimal engineering.

Creating rope and thread was, of course, revolutionary. You could create belts for carrying tools, freeing your hands up. You could make nets for fishing snares, for hunting bags, for carrying. You could lash poles together for huts, all from the same basic technology.

It also carries on the theme of Enclosure that started with close and closing Heat around us. Rope can be used as enclosure technology for many other things. Nets enclosed fish bags, enclosed possessions, snares enclosed prey. huts. Enclos us.

humans controlling nature, creating boundaries, capturing what we need instead of accepting what nature provides us.

And importantly for us learning about clothing, the next big leap was going to require the thinnest version of rope, commonly known as string or thread.

[00:18:49] The Eyed Needle

Of course, one issue with punching a big hole in the piece of leather and then feeding through your strip of sinu leather or string afterwards, is that it's not exactly fine tailoring, let's say the seams of our clothes had a lot of gaps, but around 50 to 60,000 years ago. These different waves of progress were coming together in their final form.

We can imagine snow scouring across the river ice. In the low blue morning light, a woman is huddling by the door of a mammoth bone shelter. It's possibly a Tuesday. The hunt will soon be leaving. When the sun rises above the trees, the broken hide that she needs to fix is stiff with ice and her fingers are frozen. Trying to force her piece of thread through the stiff hole is just another frustration.

She tends to fire for a while to take her mind off things and does something uniquely human. She imagines something that doesn't exist. She looks at her bone tool and pitches a version of it that can carry the thread through the hole with it.

At the same time, excitedly grabbing a piece of flint. She drills open an eye in the end of the bone in one stroke, she has combined the puncturing and the pulling. Before she knows it, the sewing is finished In a Jiffy Triumphantly,

she hurls the icy hide at her snoring husband and crawls back inside the warm shelter. The first labor saving device was born. Perhaps because someone just wanted to get inside a warm tent

needleless to say the actual details are completely unknown, but someone cottoned onto the concept and the eyed needle was invented.

Initially it was a five centimeter piece of bone, allowing us to pull thread through leather in one smooth motion. It's refined, precise, elegant, even, and suddenly you can make tight stitches that seal out wind and water.

You can create sleeves that kch at the wrist trapping warm air better.

You can feed drawstrings into your hoods. You can create trousers with fitted ankles. And here's the really big one. You can create underwear.

Now with this engineering at a completely different level means we can start mastering the art of layered garments for any season.

The earliest eye needle that we've seen, showed up in a Denisovan cave actually in Siberia 50,000 years ago. , but they could have been around earlier. And regardless, they quickly spread across the Calouses, east Asia and into Europe, across the world. Today, the needle is still an essential part of every tailor's toolkit and might be the most important device in the history of clothing.

Allowing us to tailor garments in all sorts of ways, unlocked a new level of expression with them. Before this status was basically who had the skin of the biggest bear, wolf, lion, et cetera. But now clothing was about to develop a whole new paradigm of imaginary meanings, hidden messages and forms of self-expression.

[00:21:48] Privacy[00:21:48] 2 - PSYCHOLOGY REVOLUTION

So we have a lot to unpack here, privacy, shame, and fashion. so let's start with privacy. Back. With that drape clothing idea. You are sort of covered, but loosely, no one needs to undress you with their eyes to know what is going on where, because they still get to see it.

With fitted, tailored clothing. That means sleeves, hoods, trousers, most importantly, underwear. Something fundamentally different happens. Your body does become concealed, not just from the weather, but from other people.

The human body becomes something you control access to. You choose what to reveal, and you choose what to conceal. So your body stops being public property and becomes a private space, which gives us the birth of privacy as a concept. And once that happens, a cascade of psychological changes that follows, who gets to see what, who decides what does concealment mean?

What does exposure mean?

Of course every culture, this evolved quite differently and it's worth noting that in hunter gatherer tribes today near the equator, running around with no clothes on, isn't even called naked. It's still completely normal. But if you compare that to say the Inuit in Alaska,

They're never doing anything Without being covered in clothes, unless they're in bed or bathing. ' 'cause otherwise they would die. So this whole nakedness thing is a spectrum and and of course we see ideas like in Islamic cultures thinking that seeing the wrists in the neck is indecent exposure,

and this shows us with the same species, different psychologies arise through culture, Which leads us into the psychology of modesty and shame.

[00:23:26] Modesty, Shame and Maturity

Modesty is not a biological fact exactly. A cat is never embarrassed about being naked, even when it's cleaning itself in the middle of your dinner party.

' cause being naked actually doesn't mean anything. It's only once covering up becomes normal, that uncovering becomes significant. And different parts of the body can even mean different things. Clothing creates the possibility of both modesty and display shame and seduction.

If you consider toddlers, they don't even know they are naked and they don't care. Just like, Adam and Eve were happy in their garden.

In fact, my own favorite activity with clothes as a toddler was taking them off because I hated them.

But suddenly, if you watch children when they reach the age of six or seven, something shifts, and the idea of being naked in front of classmates or other people feels wrong in a way that they can't articulate. They're not cold, they're not uncomfortable, but something psychological has happened.

They have internalized the concept that their bodies should be hidden, that nakedness is exposing, and that there's something shameful about the natural state of being human.

This is quite literally the Garden of Eden's story playing out and they knew they were naked.

Curiously in child psychology around the age of seven is when ideas like fairness and justice sink in. It's when we realize the world isn't just about us, and we start to see ourselves through other people's eyes. The revelation of Adam and Eve suddenly noticing their nakedness has parallels with that moment in the childish development of our own species when self-awareness arrives and the first innocence ends.

But there's an important twist. Once human groups learn what nakedness is, we can't unlearn it yet, the concept itself isn't actually hardwired into being human.

Tribes of modern humans can genuinely not care about being naked. That sensitivity, that shame, it's taught, reinforced and policed by our culture. There is another layer to modesty that we don't talk about very much because it's a bit awkward. Sex. Our sexual drive is hardly a modern invention, though it's an ancient animal program, most animals don't even know why they mate any more than they know why they're hungry.

The drive just switches on and their bodies take it from there. This means humans are stuck with a tricky upgrade. We carry the same drive to procreate, but we also live in crowded, permanent groups where we are supposed to teach classes, run staff meetings, and do tax returns without treating every room like a mating arena. Now, sure, this is not an area we excel in exactly as a species, but we have reached the minimum bar to build a society, at least. Imagine trying to do your daily routine, but everyone around you is completely stark naked.

, firstly, it would be awfully hard to work with anyone slightly attractive or slightly creepy. They'd probably all lose their jobs. Secondly, how would you feel about taking a taxi or dropping your kids off to a school of naked teachers or having a naked cleaner in your house once a week?

These are all ideas that make us kind of uncomfortable. So before laws and HR policies, clothing was the social technology that makes scalable society possible. by covering most of the body. Most of the time we lower the ambient level of sexual signaling just enough that a classroom can be a classroom and an office can be an office instead of it all being a very chaotic dating show.

Laws against public exposure are in a sense, an admission that not everyone will self-regulate perfectly. The fabrics we use, of course, are doing part of the regulating for us. This doesn't in any way make desire bad or shameful.

It just means that for a species trying to build courts, hospitals, and train timetables, it helps to put some thin cotton walls between. I notice you're attractive and I can't concentrate on my job. Clothing lets us schedule our animal nature into certain times and spaces.

I find it a beautiful coincidence that clothing began as technology to keep nature out, and yet it had this wonderful side effect of keeping our own nature in. But that's not the only side effect. Wrapping up our bodies creates a new canvas, and that's where fashion status and culture really start to paint on top of it.

[00:27:45] Fashion and Mammoth Beads

In an excavation in Sungi Russia, they found three burials from 34,000 years ago. The bodies were wearing clothes decorated with over 13,000 mammoth ivory beads.

Each bead was cast by hand, with a whole drill through it, and sewn individually onto leather garments and experimental archeology. Shows that each bead probably took about one hour to make.

That's 13,000 hours of labor or seven people working full-time for a year, grinding, carving, drilling, and sewing. They're not working to feed the tribe or build a shelter. They're working so one guy can walk around looking like a jewellery store

So having barely mastered the art of not freezing to death, we're already mastering the art of showing off fashion, it seems did not emerge in Renaissance, Florence, or Versailles. It emerged over 30,000 years ago when humans realized that once you've solved survival, the next competition is a status game with each other.

But why from a survival logic, evolution usually favors the efficient, right?

Well, of course it doesn't. We can look at the classic case of the peacock tail. the tail is heavy. It drags in the mud snags on branches, and it screams, eat me to every tiger in the jungle. Why does it

exist? If evolution was efficient, it should have rejected the idea straight away. Unless the point was never survival, it was seduction. The peacock with its large, silly tail is telling the female that I am so genetically superior that I can survive even with this giant target on my back.

What else does a coat of Mammoth ivory beads or a $20,000 handbag say, other than I am so resourceful, I can afford to waste resources.

[00:29:34] Beauty, Biology and Culture

Some concepts of beauty are hardwired into us for biological reasons, and they became the baseline for modern beauty standards like a symmetrical face, clear skin without infections, shiny hair youthfulness, broad shoulders in men suggesting strength, hips in women suggesting fertility. But other things that are fashionable are completely arbitrary, as we saw with the mammoth beads.

But it gets weirder. You've probably seen pictures of Ethiopian tribes where they support lip plates, these strange inserts to their lips that symbolize beauty status and readiness for marriage. They don't exactly soak a fire in the loins of a young man in Indonesia or Germany, but for a young Bachelor of the Mercy ORs tribes, it is quite the look.

But that's just the start of our weird fascinations across the world from the Mare of America, the Huns of Asia, and even old tribes in Egypt, Russia, and Australia. The practice of head shaping has been a thing,

and what the hell is head shaping?

Well, baby's heads were bound with boards or cloth to elongate the skull and squeeze it into a tall rugby ball shape of a head Whilst it was growing, the result to me, looks like an alien, and I'll share some photos on my website, but for these people, literally across the world, it was somehow the height of status. As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So there you go.

And essentially it's all about what the culture you are in says is. Cool. Our desire to be in the group is just a pretty chronic condition.

[00:31:12] Culture

So at this point, we might want to ask, where the hell does culture come from anyhow? Well, the word culture itself, Latin for cultivation, growing or tending.

it's all about growth. You can grow a culture of bacteria on a Petri dish where different bacteria fight to survive.

The word culture was then later extended metaphorically to the refinement of the mind and came to represent the collective customs of a people. So the culture of a group of people is like a bowl of different ideas, fighting for dominance in our collective imagination.

A bit like those are bacteria fighting for space in the Petri dish. Now with these ideas cultured inside your own mind, we can move into the final revolution of Stone Age clothing.

[00:32:03] 3 - EXTERNALISING ENCLOSURE

Around 11,700 years ago, global temperatures climb. Ice sheets retreat, and a new period begins. . A warmer, wetter climate, more stable than anything humans have experienced in the last a hundred thousand years. , this presents humanity with a new problem

We had been engineering clothing to fight the cold. We perfected layers of furs, sealed seams, fitted garments that trapped heat with incredible efficiency, survival technology. But if you've tried wearing a leather jacket or furs on a summer's day in this, the age of the Holocene, it's a bit stuffy.

The logical solution, of course, take all your sweaty clothes off and go back to being mostly naked like our Savannah dwelling tribes. But of course, we didn't.

Our minds, like a Petri dish, had cultured a strain of particularly resistant bacteria. The idea that nakedness was not normal

At least this is what Ian Gilligan thinks in his shivering to shame thesis.

He suggests that we didn't keep wearing clothing because our bodies needed protection. We kept wearing them because our minds demanded it. Adam and Eve weren't cold in the Garden of Eden. It's paradise. The temperature is fine, but once they knew they were naked, they couldn't unknow it.

If you're going to keep wearing clothes in the heat, you need completely different materials. And I'm not talking about strategically placed fig leaves. You need fabrics that breathe. They let sweat evaporate fabrics that you can wash in dry quickly.

Humans needed textiles.

And the first thing they were looking for was linen made from flax.

[00:33:41] Textiles and Weaving

Weaving after all, is essentially cordage technology on both a smaller and larger scale. You take smaller threads and instead of twisting three strands together, you weave hundreds of threads interlaced on a loom

between 20 to 30,000. Years ago, we can see the first woven textiles appearing, but they were rare. A niche hobby practiced by the odd nerd of the tribe, tinkering away in his tent, but suddenly with a change in the weather, this weaving of fabrics had its moment.

In the Neolithic period, weaving becomes completely ubiquitous across Eurasia, and we see every household dedicated space to textile production as fabric becomes just the everyday thing.

[00:34:19] Farming Clothes

So going back to Ian Gilligan and his ideas, in quite the provocative anthropological statement, he asks if we farmed fibers for textiles before we farmed for food.

The traditional story of agriculture goes like this. Humans discovered that planting seeds produce reliable grain. They settle down to tender their crops, civilization begins. Ian Gilligan flips this a little. If clothing had become psychologically mandatory, if you literally could not go naked without feeling profound shame, then you need a reliable supply of clothing materials.

Hunting for hides is actually quite inconsistent and hard to guarantee enough leather to clothe the growing community. But if you planted your flax seeds, you got a predictable harvest

and the same later down the line for domesticating sheep for wool. So the wonderful thing about agriculture is it gave humans control of their clothing supplies so we could keep clothing ourselves as we were scaling up all's wool that ends wool.

[00:35:18] Birth Control And Population Growth

Which leads us to the second idea for his thesis.

Ian suggests a fascinating biological ripple effect that clothing broke our natural birth control

in hunter gatherer societies, babies are typically carried skin to skin and nurse constantly, often, several times an hour. This relentless stimulation triggers a hormonal response that suppresses ovulation, naturally spacing pregnancies out making them about four years apart

As nomadic hunter-gatherers that had to carry their children around with them until the child reached being about four years old, , this was a very convenient piece of biology, but when you wrap a mother in layers of tailored clothing to hide her modesty,

You physically interrupt that open bar. Access for the baby. Breastfeeding shifts from a constant state to a scheduled event with less frequent stimulation. You break the hormonal cycle, ending the birth control effect. So women started being able to get pregnant again much sooner, and suddenly the gap between sibling shrinks from four years to two.

This has some important effects. Firstly, it makes it really difficult to be a nomad trying to carry multiple babies around on your travels and make settling seem much more appealing. But secondly, over a few generations, that small change in your wardrobe has led to explosion in population and significant food demands.

That also means you need to settle down and grow your food. This theory of Ian Gilligan's flips the causal link on its head completely. So what do you think? Is this unbelievable?

While the evidence from early agricultural sites show both plant fiber and food production and processing all happening alongside each other, looms and spindles for weaving appear immediately in neolithic villages.

So I don't want to raise the wrath of anthropologists against me and won't claim that clothing was 100% the direct cause of agriculture and the birth of civilization.

But I always appreciate ideas that make us rethink what we know, and it certainly feels like a very worthy contributing factor.

[00:37:21] New Religions

And on the topic of philosophical theories, Gilligan gives us one final provocative idea. He asks. Did covering our bodies change the shape of our gods?

If you think about this for a moment, in hunter gatherer societies where people live with constant skin to skin contact with nature, religion is almost always animistic. The spirit world isn't somewhere else. It is right here. The divine is in the river. You drink from the bear, you hunt and the wind on your skin.

God's a physical, invisible, immediate, and present. But as we began to wrap ourselves behind layers of clothes, we physically retreated from the worlds of nature. We created a barrier between our skin and the spirits, and coincidentally, or perhaps consequentially, our religions shifted. As we hid our bodies, we began to imagine Gods who were also hidden.

We moved from spirits that lived in nature to gods who lived above it. The divine became transcendent, unseen, and non-physical, just like the body beneath the clothes.

Big gods of latest civilizations are the ultimate enclosed beings. Powerful present, but forever concealed from view. Sure, it's a speculative leap, but it does align perfectly with our theme. We weren't just building walls to separate our bodies from the cold.

We built psychological walls that separated humans from the animal and possibly the divine from the earth. We had become a species of secrets.

[00:38:52] Shoe Technology

Now before we let our philosophical ponderings lead us completely off track, we have some work to do before we bring all our grand theories together and I want us to consider one final thing that is to look down at our feet. If you remember those simple leather foot bags from the ice Age Well, by 10,000 years ago, they had evolved into specialized engineering.

In Oregon, we find sandals woven from Sagebrush Bark, specifically designed to withstand the feet treading of volcanic terrain. In Armenia, there were single piece cow high shoes molded and stitched for waterproofing. But the true peak of Stone Age engineering was found on OIE the Iceman from five and a half thousand years ago.

His boots were more than just covering. They were a complex composite system. The sole made of bare skin had its first side down, creating natural crampons for gripping the ice. The uppers were made of dear skin, soft and flexible for long distance hiking.

And the lining was an internal net of lime tree bars packed with grass insulation. And of course, I had straps of cow hide to tie 'em together and animal fat for waterproofing.

Each material carefully chosen and combined into a single functioning system, an all terrain vehicle for the human body that allowed Ossie the iceman to walk across Alpine, glassier, mountain streams, and Rocky passes.

Marilyn Monroe famously said that Give a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world and history seems to agree with her. In fact, even in the Genesis story, God punishes the serpent by making it cruel on its belly in the dust humans. By inventing the shoe, we were doing the opposite.

We were severing our final physical connection to the earth. We stopped touching dirt and took a physical step away from nature towards becoming something other than animal.

[00:40:37] Enclosure Thesis

so with the right shoes on to walk the path of destiny, we are now ready to see where that path is going.

We can imagine this course of human advancement as a fight against entropy. Entropy is a chaotic mixing of things. The natural tendency for everything to bleed into everything else. Clothing was our first small act of defiance against that chaos, keeping warm air in and cold rain and wind out.

Carving a tiny pocket of ordered space around our fragile animal body, we can think of what comes next as a set of Russian dolls of enclosure. So we have the smallest doll, our clothes, this thin wall of fabric that says, this heat is mine. But once you've learned to do that, it's a tiny mental leap to start enclosing the space around a family.

So we built the second doll, the house, a wall of stone that is essentially a scaled up version of clothing. It's a controlled microclimate for multiple people, a shared pocket of low entropy carved out of a hostile world.

Step three is a settlement, clusters of enclosed houses, a small village ringed with walls that keep out our enemies.

A scaled up version of the home. Then we built a bigger doll of a fence, a wall of wood to enclose a plot of land instead of leaving your fields to nature, you create a barrier where you can control what plants grow, when, and which animals get in and out. So with all these enclosed spaces, your body, your house, your village, your field, the concept of ownership is emerging.

This space is mine. I decide who enters, I defend the boundary,

or finally, we get the biggest dollar of all the border, a wall of laws to enclose a nation. That initial idea of mine scaled up again until we are drawing territorial lines on maps.

The timeline of course, follows this ladder almost perfectly.

That clothing idea keep us warm and giving us new ways to play status games in a dramatic side effect. It quietly set us on the path to building civilization itself, one layer of enclosure at a time.

[00:42:39] 4 - PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES[00:42:39] The Cost of Beauty

So now that we have learned the history part of the invention of clothing and how the seeds were sown for the next steps of human progress that we'll be following on this show, we can look deeper at the impacts of clothing on our psychology culture and what it means to be a human today.

The first point I want to pick up on is both the concept of beauty and how it forms in our minds. Secondary theme here to explore in tandem is the different costs of beauty on men and women, because right from the start in that genesis chapter with God telling women that they would be bearing all the pains of childbirth and dealing with men's instructions, whereas men would have a sweaty brow dealing with weeds.

A theme was set as God was giving us our first clothes.

Women, it turns out, have suffered the brunt of all forms of strange and painful beauty trends that come and go. ,

so let's start with some ideas that have some biological basis

[00:43:38] Belladona - eye poisoning

Our pupils expand in response to adrenaline and attraction. Women's pupils also expand during their most fertile period when their biology wants men to be attracted to them and ultimately make some babies.

For males. Penises have also grown a lot compared to most apes due to sexual competition where longer penises had a higher chance of creating a pregnancy. So how did these biological ideas translate into fashions?

While a practice began in Roman times, but popularized in the Renaissance, in Victorian era, women would harvest drops of the deadly nightshade also known as Bella Donor. And they would stick these drops of poison in their eyes to make their pupils bigger. Because big pupils were alluring. The side effects of poisoning your eyes were extreme sensitivity to light

due to often breaking the muscles in your pupils or even complete blindness and sometimes death.

Meanwhile, men of the Renascence period, got into the practice of wearing a cod piece, a fluffy object between your legs to look like you have a big package.

So two ideas from biology turned into fashions that certainly gave women the raw end of the deal.

[00:44:45] Status beauty - skin and teeth

Biology aside, many more beauty trends relate to status expensive jewelry and hard to make. Things have always been cool, like with those mammoth beads,

but it goes much deeper than that. Tan skin, for example, used to be a sign of poverty in hard labor, whereas pale skin with a high status affair and so considered very beautiful. Of course, women then started applying lead-based makeup, which was slowly poisoning themselves to achieve the high status signal of pale skin that showed that they weren't working. Now, of course, today it's the opposite. As we work in offices and factories, time to go outside to get a tan is a signal of being able to afford a holiday.

So what's beautiful in our minds has completely turned the opposite way.

What I want to demonstrate here is how much of this is just in our minds. For example, after we discovered sugar, having rotten teeth became a trend because it signaled you were rich enough to eat too much sugar, like Queen Elizabeth the first.

In fact, rotten teeth were considered such a beautiful thing that people started painting their teeth brown and black to look as classy as Queen Elizabeth.

But in 1574, besides worrying about her teeth or war, queen Elizabeth was worried about hats. She passed the sumptuary laws, a literal fashion police code. If you were a commer and you wore velvet, you were sent to jail, if you wore the wrong color blue, you got a fine and you had to wear a wooly hat on a Sunday Now you might ask, why on earth would she do this?

She understood that if a peasant could dress like a Lord, the entire social hierarchy could collapse. So she wasn't regulating fabric, she was regulating the social order.

Laws like this were actually a very common practice and we see them occurring as early as the Greeks, later by the Romans and also the Japanese and Chinese did it, which leads us to perhaps the weirdest example we have time for today.

[00:46:33] Chinese Feet Binding

I'm gonna give you a warning here. If you do not like gore, please skip ahead two minutes as I'm about to permanently ruin the story of Cinderella forever. With its grotesque roots in China with the Song Dynasty around 1000 years ago, they started to experience a wave of prosperity. Families were able to sell their excess food or clothes, and they could employ workers this meant that rich people didn't need to work so much. So high status families began to bind the feet of their daughters to break the growing bones, and over time. Fold their daughter's feet in on themselves. Yes, you heard that right? Folding your feet, which are two words that do not belong together in my head.

The ideal look would involve some, or most of the toes dropping off completely.

The fairy tale of Cinderella originated in China where a prince fell in love with a woman with feet so beautiful and tiny that when she lost her shoe, she was of course the only lady in the town that could actually fit it

thus

The desire was to create incredibly tiny and useless feet rendering the woman incapable of working because she was so high status that she didn't need to do anything.

over the 900 years this practice existed, it grew from a trend of the elites to a common beauty standard so much so that by the 19th century, roughly 40% of Chinese women were having their feet crushed and rolled up as a child.

What's really mind blowing here is that men became incredibly attracted to it, not just how beautiful these mangled feet looked, but even how they smelled.

Consider the years that it took for the feet to break into these useless mini appendages, and the fact that it led to the feet themselves to rot with the most pungent of smells. Well, imagine that men considered this rotting foot smell an aphrodisiac. They would go crazy for it. Absolutely nuts. That shows the power of the flexibility of our mind to become attracted to things or invent fashions out of nothing.

This concept of culture, it doesn't just change what we can think of as normal. It can completely change what we think of as extremely sexy

So, yes. Before you think humans are just dumb as hell. Our imagination is part of our evolution. The ability to warp what we are attracted to, to suit our environment.

Makes sense. Having high status and access to resources has nearly always raised our odds of survival. It's just this feature in our head sometimes gets a little out of hand when we start poisoning and disabling ourselves.

We can get caught up in the moment and it's easy to forget that these trends appear out of our own imagination and can disappear just as quickly. Oscar Wilde even said that fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

[00:49:22] Modern trends and surgeries

This brings us nicely up to the modern day. You might look at foot binding or lead-based makeup and think. Well, thank goodness we've evolved past that crazy barbarism, but have we, the technology changes, but the psychology remains identical. Today, 90% of plastic surgery is performed on women, , and in these processes we inject neurotoxins into our faces to freeze muscles.

We laser our skin or cut bits of it off. We surgically break noses and jaws to reshape them. We insert silicon into chest and suck fat out of our waists.

The tools have changed from cloth bindings to scalpels, but the goal is the exact same to override biology in the pursuit of a cultural idea.

In 19th century China, a woman accepted the pain of broken toes to conform to a standard. In a 21st century, humans around the world accept the risk of a botched surgery infection, or at best, a painful recovery. For the same reasons, like the Chinese elite

celebrities have been the early adopters with almost all of them opting for some cosmetic alterations in one of our wealthiest nations America, 24% of adults have had something done, the industry in China is booming, and the rest of us are just behind. In 2024, 38 million people globally underwent aesthetic procedures. A 40% increase from just a few years ago. So the beauty tax is still very much alive and well, and we can expect it to keep growing

It connects us back to that first needle in the stone Age when we learned that we could alter our appearance with clothes and we didn't stop there and rapidly realize we could alter the body itself.

We've learned to treat our physical form, not as a vessel to live in, but as a project to be managed.

[00:51:09] Algorithm of Desire

The only difference today is the speed of the feedback loop.

In the past beauty standards moved at the speed of a painting traveling across Europe. Today, they move at the speed of a server refresh. We've created a new kind of digital mirror for ourselves.

We see thousands of perfected faces every day, faces filtered, edited, created by algorithms designed to capture attention. Our stone age brains, which evolved to compare ourselves to the 50 people in our tribe are now comparing ourselves to the top N point naught, 1% of the entire human race. And we're doing that instantly and constantly.

Our rapidly morph able psychology has created a new type of digital dysmorphia colloquially called Snapchat dysmorphia by surgeons.

Many people are trying to mold their physical biology to match a digital fantasy that doesn't even exist. So if you see a trend that looks painful or dangerous, whether it's a corset from 1850 or a bazillion butt lift from 2020, remember, it's not an anomaly.

It's just the human condition,

it's part of the timeless struggle as a species that decided that nature wasn't enough, and it's been trying to redesign itself ever since. Again, I'll say these trends appear out of our own imagination. And they can disappear just as quickly.

Perhaps with some of these ideas stuck in your head for the rest of your life, we can talk about fashion.

[00:52:28] What clothing means today

Clothing started as a survival trick, which became a status and cultural thing. Whether or not you care about fashion, what you wear says something about you.

The loss of a Kanye West once said, I believe that everyone is a fashion insider because it's illegal to be naked,

and he's summed up exactly what we've been talking about.

Clothes are no longer about functionality and their focus is what they say about you. Are you feeling summary today or flirty? Are you a serious worker or a serious gangster? Are you in this group or are you in that group?

Clothes are a language we just inherently understand from hippies and emos showing their music tastes to politicians, showing their views by the color of their tie.

In mean girls, the girls wore pink on Wednesdays, jeans on Fridays, and a ponytail once a week. But depending on the whim of the leader, the group requirements could change in a moment, which begs the question, who decides which clothes mean what?

In 17th century, boys used to be put in dresses until they were seven years old, when they would then be put in breaches to become a man.

As to why a skirt means that you should be a woman, no one actually knows, but it's a thing. Now, in fact, if a man wants to deny the definition of being in the male group, he might wear dresses and makeup, which leads us, again, back to culture. A force that shifts subtly by taste makers.

Be that the matriarch of a high school cafeteria or the dictator of a country, a designer for a fashion label or a designer of algorithms.

These influences on our taste means that the moods of fashion change with the temperament of an angry teenager. But there's another element to our tribal thinking. Fashion has always been as much about desire as it is about shame, a feeling associated with being rejected by the group.

It's curious, but perhaps no accident that shame is possibly the closest emotion to dying or wanting to die. We went from shivering, wearing clothes to not die, from cold to shame, , wearing clothes to hide our shame of nakedness. And over the years, fashion has taken that shame and used us against us in many other ways besides just nakedness.

That social competition that began with those mammoth beads 34,000 years ago. Now a commercial industry pumping out trends to keep you feeling behind. In another example of

Kanye West speaking his mind, he says, I won't go into a big spiel about reincarnation, but the first time I was in the Gucci store in Chicago was the closest I've ever felt to home. There's a lot going on in that sentence. Firstly, home, represents safety, completeness, and lack of vulnerability.

Secondly, reincarnation represents rebirth into your true form.

So we see that if you grow up with the shame of poverty, the Gucci Store in Chicago becomes a dream that will complete you. Fashion itself is a system of becoming.

Achieving an identity that you want.

And what is it the ultra premium brands do to stay at the height of fashion? They just have one strategy price. As Coco Chanel said, the best things in life are free. The second best are very expensive.

today, now that we've stopped mutilating our feet or squeezing our skulls to show how rich we are.

instead we can rely on identifiable ultra expensive brands to show how sophisticated we are.

So shame on you if you can't keep up.

[00:55:36] Why are we doing this anyway

Now, this might feel like it's all coming at you a bit fast, which is actually kind of the point. We get so busy wondering about what our clothes say that we forget what they are. Very few of us have ever made our own leather or spun our own wool, or even sewed together our own garments from scratch. They say that fast fashion is grown in one country, manufactured in another, shipped across oceans, worn briefly in a third country, and then dumped in a fourth.

The entire supply chain is invisible. The fashion industry doesn't even know where some of its materials are made, and they don't want to know, so they don't have to be accountable for.

I'm not about to dive into a politics statement on this.

Some of my favorite possessions have been clothes I've lived in, clothes can be a beautiful connection with our own humanity.

I'm just going to say that clothing started as separating us from nature, but now the clothing industry separates us from even understanding what we are wearing.

and I think the question that we face isare we choosing fashions to express ourselves or rather clothes we wear hiding us from ourselves?

[00:56:32] What does it mean to be a human?

Okay. Some big thoughts and that sets us up for the final, final discussion on what it even means to be human.

Going back to the start of the episode, I spoke about being naked in William Golding's.

Lord of the Flies, there's a progression when the boys first crash land, they keep their school uniforms on, they hold meetings, they have rules, but as the days pass, the shirts fray, the ties are lost, and eventually they're naked, they're painting animal blood on themselves, and the moment that the clothes vanish, the English schoolboy dies,

and they start behaving like animals between, dressed and naked. Civil order and animal order. It suggests that civilization isn't in our hearts. It's in our laundry.

When Europeans discovered tribes in Africa, new Guinea, or Australia that didn't understand nakedness, those Europeans thought those tribes were stupid. They could see them wearing jewelry on their wrists, ankles, and necks, no care for covering the parts that we consider private.

In fact, when settlers tried to give Aborigines clothes. The Aborigines would sometimes wear a jacket, but could not be convinced to ever put trousers on.

So it's not surprising that our ancestors were so racist and saw these tribal humans as animals. The tribal people didn't have writing or various modern technologies, but most strikingly, they just didn't have clothes. They weren't following the psychological rules

europeans were now used to that put someone in the group of being a human. Of course, we know today that biologically that you don't need clothes to be a human, but psychologically the connection is still unbreakable. We just don't feel complete stepping out the door without them.

In fact, the Nazis even stripped their prisoners of their possessions Clothes and even their names to dehumanize them. It's just a link we can't get away from.

[00:58:13] The evolution of nakedness and being human

But going forward, the definition of human, at least in our minds in psychology, is changing.

Again, when a modern person leaves for work and realizes that they've forgotten their phone, they don't curse their little accident and carry on their day. They awaken a panic monster inside them. They rush home to retrieve their precious device.

without their phone.

Many people report the alarming sensation of feeling naked.

Why? Because a phone is how we participate in a society of constant connection. It's also our memory aid and navigator. Our knowledge portal and payment terminal. Without it, we are exposed. We are less capable. We are less. Us.

It's not surprising that we're turning into cyborgs. Remember, humans are the animals that cheat. When nature gave us thin skin and no fur, we didn't wait for evolution to fix it. We skinned bears and wore their warmth, extending our own skin, by building a second skin, and now we're doing it again,

by extending our mind with silicon, we are building a second mind.

What we find is that nakedness is more than just people seeing you without your underwear. Nakedness is vulnerability. With biological creatures. Yes,

But we now feel completed by a technological exoskeleton.

When a soldier runs out of ammo in a gunfight, he feels naked. When a developer loses their laptop, they feel like they're missing a limb. If we lose our wifi signal on holiday, we feel cut off from the lifeblood of our species.

In the movie Spider-Man, homecoming, Tony Stark, AKA Iron Man tells Peter Parker, if you're nothing without the suit, then you shouldn't have it.

But in our own way, we're all becoming our own version of Ironman, permanently fused to our technology. When you button up a shirt and lace up your shoes, it's the same as when you unlock your phone or consult a digital companion.

You are engaging in a ritual that's over a hundred thousand years old, putting on the armor that separates you from nature. As long as we keep inventing new ways to cover our limitations, what it means to be human will never stop changing.

So imagine the future of our species. A human is born on a Mars colony for their entire life. They've never felt wind on their skin. They live in a dome. When they go outside, they wear a pressure suit

to this human. The concept of nakedness is less about shame and more about suicide. If they take off their glove, they die. If the batteries of their life support run out, they die. If they ignore the instructions of their AI companion, they die.

So what started with clothes covering our skin to survive the winter might well lead us to covering our entire existence to survive the universe.

[01:00:50] Become a member

Thanks for joining us on another episode of How to Change the World to follow the whole story. Please stay subscribed for updates and you can help us grow by sharing it with your nerdy friends and leaving a good review. But there's more. I'm delighted to finally have launched our Patreon for anyone wanting to support the show and also find out more about it and the things we talk about.

This show is made just by me, so I do need all the help I can get. But in return for the price of a coffee a month, I will give you behind the scenes details from the fascinating research on every single episode that doesn't make it into the final release. So for this episode, we have plenty more stories of insane fashion trends that people have died for.

Also have some psychology from the analysis of dreams. Some alternate close based theories on Neanderthal, extinctions,

psychology of sex, and most importantly, any questions that you have to ask me.

So if you join the membership, you can dive deeper into every story we cover on the show, and I'd love to see you there. The link to the Patreon is in the description, or you can find it at patreon.com/change the world pod. , right references for this episode are in the description and a worthy mention to Ian Gilligan and his book, climate, clothing and Agriculture.

The researcher, writer, editor, producer, whatever else you can think of responsible for what you just heard is me, Sam Webster Harris. So any mistakes, you know who to blame, and you can contact me through the website.

The topic of clothing is a very giant topic, and I know I left plenty of stuff out and I hope I didn't offend anyone. They say that fashion is not something that exists in dresses, only fashion is in the sky and in the street. Fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live and what is happening.

So any strong feelings that you do have in many ways are just a reflection of a current fashion in humanity, psychology. And with that, remember that what we know is a drop and what we don't know is an ocean.