In a recent podcast, Proff and Pete opened this topic. Proff’s suggestion was that cavemen wore hides (plain or fur on). Pete’s view was that they probably wove their clothes out of linen, leather being difficult to treat given the rather limited range of tools available. Let’s dig into this a bit more.
Neolithic man lived in a hostile world, in general. Wild beasts, extreme or unpredictable weather conditions and relative isolation meant that food and security were the first consideration. So we can guess that clothing was functional. I say “guess” because very little has survived of the actual clothes. The earliest examples we have are from relatively late in the archaelogical record, but we do find examples of bone needles and hide scrapers from very early on. It is logical to assume that the first clothes were made of leaves and grass, tied together – simply because they were available. Treatment of animal hides, using stone scrapers, and stitching with what were very large needles in today’s terms, clearly happened early as well.
Decoration also started long ago, with beads discovered in Russia and other sites from about 35,000 BC, likely used to decorate clothing. Beads can be made from naturally coloured materials such as stones and agates, and, with a lot of careful drilling and shaping, can be combined for colourful effects, harder to do with fabric unless dyes were produced using roots and berries. Much later, the purex shells were used for purple dye, but that was not until people started to live in towns (around 3,000 BC, though Gobekle Tepe and other sites in Anatolia are much older (or at least believed to be).
So the caveman or his cousins who lived outside the caves, wore functional garments made of whatever was at hand, decorated painstakingly with beads and possibly died. Sewing must have advanced quickly, as there could be nothing worse than having your winter clothes fall apart at the seams while hunting a mammoth.
The picture below shows a man wearing a fairly stylish fur cape. While fur would have worked well against the cold, it would almost certainly not have been fluffy as the picture suggests, but greasy, the oil in the fur being what keeps out the rain and snow. And, tanning methods being what they were, the inside was probably fairly scratchy. But serviceable. A garment like the one that the man is wearing would have been a major piece of work, involving scraping, treating in some sort of liquids and combing out, no doubt the work of Mrs Caveman. Each man probably had one such coat, to last him at least several seasons.
Sadly, we will probably never know exactly what they did, or wore, unless some relic is found, preserved in perma frost.
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