the evolution of clothes?

Dear Whatsyourname:Humans began wearing clothes to provide camoflage for hunting other animals. The first clothing was skins, bark, plant fibers, etc., that provided cover of scent and provided camoflage by immitation of other naturally camoflaged creatures, plants, or provided an appearance similar to the animal pursued by the hunters so could approached prey close enough to capture or kill.Once man became adept at making and preserving skin clothing for the purpose of camoflage, man then possessed such skills as could be used to manufacture clothing for other purposes as such purposes became necessary, ie. for physical protection against thorns, weather, etc.Evolution of clothing occured like evolution of all other initial human inventions like tools, jewelry, art, etc. eventually becoming stylized and ritualized. However, all basic human invention (clothing, language, tools, religion, politics, etc.) intitially was due to survival necessity.This message has been edited by Abshalom, 01-03-2005 14:02 AM

Desmond Morris, The Naked ApeNot trying to post a bare link, just filling in Lam's info.

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Asgara
"Embrace the pain, spank your inner moppet, whatever....but get over it"http://asgarasworld.bravepages.com
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well my bet was exactly that these cultures are less common than those that glorified female beauty. i just chose to phrase it in a more humerous way.and yes, i suspect they did experience more male nudity. oh, and here's the kicker. it's a self-fulfilling prophesy. this is the reason women wear makeup and not men. and since beauty is a factor in sexual selection, and i'm sure is hereditary -- well you know where i'm going. the women actually DO become more beautiful than the men. ironically, in my art class, we all enjoyed drawing our male model more than our female model. even the straight guys. he just had a nicer looking, more interesting body.but i would also suspect that margin for male beauty is smaller than that of female beauty (in this society). ever hear the expression "the clothes make the man, but women look good in anything?"

I'm going to suggest a couple of other influences that seem likely in the development of clothing.-Status. Male primate status displays often involve the gentials. By controlling status displays by artificial decorations the amount of physical confrontation would be reduced. Less time and effort spent in confrontation, more time spent getting ahead as a group.-Sex. Two things to consider. Humans don't have estrus, and our lack of sexual dimorphism indicates monogamy was practiced rather early on by our ancestors. Some sort of method of signalling sexual availability would have been neccessary.-Ritual. In recent primitive societies that live in climates that don't require clothes body paint is popular. What muddies the waters here is that these peoples may have settled where they are after clothing was adopted, so the body paint could be a "rememberance" of the clothing that their ancestors wore.. shed because of climate.-DHuman nature. The human desire to decorate stuff. The human desire to have stuff. The human drive to screw around with things.Given that the technology was in place by 1.6 MYA (working hides, A robustus), and that the concept of shelter was in place at least by the time that human ancestors left Africa (2 MYA, H erectus) it doesn't seem a big stretch for human ancestors to go from incipient clothing to "man-portable" shelter. The "when" is the key. I hazard that a form of clothing/incipient clothing existed before human ancestors moved into less hospitable climes and was adapted to those areas.No matter what, clothing had to be in use before 300 KYA, when humans of some type (archaic sapiens or H erectus) moved into Siberia. You just ain't going there without warm socks.

i see, yes. all of those make a lot of sense as well.i was just being facetious, really, with my original point.

Caraculus: You say, "Given that the technology was in place by 1.6 MYA (working hides, A robustus)"This is very interesting. Can you please provide information you have regarding "hide-working technology" in place 1.6 million years BP.The earliest documented hide scraping tools I have seen displayed in studies indicate (middle and upper Paleolithic sites) circa 400K to 40K BP and were manufactured* by Neanderthal hominids. Do you have access to information that "hide-working" preceeds Neaderthals?* Just a moment...

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I once read a book called The Naked Ape by some guy

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Desmond Morris.I have elsewhere read that probably the first discrete, purposeful device built by humans was the baby-sling.I'm not convinced "because it is cold" is an adequate answer. It's cold for animals too, yet they either stick it out and adapt or migrate.Yes minimalist clothing is worn in the tropics, but that just raises the question again - if clothing is unnecessary in the tropics, why does anyone where any at all?And of course some don't - some stone age societies consider a rough belt and a feather in the hair to be superbly turned out. There are certain contexts in which even a Zulu wearing only a penis-sheath would be over-dressed. And I point out, it gets pretty cold in Zulu country on the big open plains in winter, and can even snow from time to time.What strikes me as much more interesting about clothing is its concentration on the face. That is, just about the only part of our body to NOT be concealed with a socially constructed set of symbols and signals is the face itself. I wonder if this plays a role in social construction, moving the communities psychology away from "animal" concerns and to more "intellectual" concerns, asd in a certain sense everyone is dealing with an early disembodied head.

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oh, and here's the kicker. it's a self-fulfilling prophesy. this is the reason women wear makeup and not men. and since beauty is a factor in sexual selection, and i'm sure is hereditary -- well you know where i'm going. the women actually DO become more beautiful than the men.

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Its only self-fulfilling becuase we fulfill it. There is more European history of extravagantly and revealingly dressed men (come on, hotpants over tights like Francis Drake?) than women.

Eyes and noses don't work too well when you cover them up; were it not for that I suspect these burkas would lack even the gauzy bit over the face.

Like I said before, perhaps walking upright made it necessary to display the sex organ all the time, and to some societies this became somewhat of an intimidation.Another reason is christianity.Anyway, I grew up in Vietnam and I can assure you that it's not warm and humid all the time. Sometimes it gets unbearably cold, and I'm speaking as someone that is used to North American winters. Well, if we didn't have an evolutionary advantage such as our brain power, we would probably have stuck it up too. You are forgetting the human factor. It's like asking why aren't we going around raping every female we could find just so we could plant our seeds? Well, we can think. Well, I guess they decided to stick it up like the animal. Nothing wrong with that.Anyway, at one point, I said that the cold wasn't the only reason and that my position was nothing more than an educated guess.

Absolom: Taphonomy of tools at Swartkrans. Admittedly there is also a possibility that it was H erectus as there is no absolute association between the A robustus remains and the tools. By about 1 MYA you have a number of H erectus evidences. As windbreaks and shelters far predate either of these, the earliest hide working may have been for that purpose.I don't see anything in your link (very interesting, BTW) that claims to be the earliest evidence of hide working.

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Well, if we didn't have an evolutionary advantage such as our brain power, we would probably have stuck it up too. You are forgetting the human factor. It's like asking why aren't we going around raping every female we could find just so we could plant our seeds? Well, we can think.

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Actually I think the human factor is rather overrated. Both geese and orca's pair-bond for life monogamously, so human mating patterns don't look that odd to me by comparison to other animals. Different animals have different strategies.But part of what I was getting at was the suggestion that it is becuase we can think that clothes are used. Clothes are massive social symbols; sumptuary laws have been one of the prime means of constructing class and caste dominance. Cloth was a status symbol of governmental significance in the bronze ages of both Mesopatamia and the Peruvian Andes that I know of for certain, and almost certainly more widely.I do think that the basic discovery of the technique occurred becuase of an opportunistic adapatation of our external environment. But I don;t think that in fact is actually an answer to the question "why do we were clothes" - that answer I suspect is specifically social and political.Anyway I have only recently discovered the complexities of this issue recently myself, and find it increwasingly fascinating. It seems that textile production may be quite a significant technical development with a major impact on subsequent social order.

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Eyes and noses don't work too well when you cover them up; were it not for that I suspect these burkas would lack even the gauzy bit over the face.

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Well yes, granted. I don't discount the practical limits to covering the ports. But you see the burka is very much a socially constructed device rather than one that is opportunistically adopted out of need, and yes I agree if they could get away with it it would be totally solid.When I lived in Bayswater I would occasionally see wealthy Arabic women with very ornate face coverings, made out of a metal mask with a suspended silk veil such that only the eyes were visible, but mouth and nose were not (I think) impeded.

Yes, the site I provide a link to makes no claim that the scrapers analysed were the oldest examples ever found of hide scrapers. However, the oldest hide scraper I have been able to find a reference to online was "somewhat older than 100,000 BP."What I guess I am asking you for is proof of some sort that clothing, or even scraped hide shelters, existed at such an early date as 1.6 billion BP as you stated in your previous post. I find that a startling claim in that no evidence seems to exist to support clothing by species other than Neanderthals and CroMagnons.I am assuming that clothing initially consisted of hides. I may be way off base in that supposition. But, assuming the first clothing was hides, then we should be looking to the hide scrapers as evidence of the manufacture of clothing. That's why I supplied the link that I did, because it was the only link I found where someone actually analysed the residue from scrapers to prove what it was that was scraped.Again, if you have evidence that hide scraping indeed was practiced 1.6 billion years BP, that would be startling and valuable information.Regards, AbshalomThis message has been edited by Abshalom, 01-05-2005 12:30 AM

Lam, you say, "... perhaps walking upright made it necessary to display the sex organ all the time, and to some societies this became somewhat of an intimidation."While I wish I could actually intimidate someone with my genitalia, I actually would find it more intimidating to walk about totally naked and upright on a daily basis due to potential damage that might occur to my privates were I to live in a primitive environment where natural or manmade projectiles and blunt instruments might be aimed at my underbelly!After all, most animals' genetalia is located in more anatomically protected position that us upright schlong-swingers. So, I can recognize the apparent need or desire for loin cloths and penis sheaths by primitive men ... particularly those imposing penis sheaths.