From hides to looms: The history of clothes and fabrics

For a species that lacks the protective fur of our primate cousins, clothing was a biological imperative. The transition from hairless hominids to a globally dominant civilization is woven directly into the history of clothes and its textiles. 

From scraped hides in Ice Age caves to cotton fields feeding global trade. Getting dressed became one of our most powerful technologies. It is a story of survival that eventually became a story of status, economy, and global power.

The first registers of clothes

Evidence of the very first garments is notoriously difficult to find. Unlike stone tools or pottery, leather and fur are biodegradable, vanishing into the soil long before archaeologists can recover them. So archaeologists look for indirect fingerprints: the tools used to make them. 

At sites like Gran Dolina in Spain and Schöningen in Germany, stone tools from 780,000–400,000 years ago show patterns consistent with cutting and scraping hides, suggesting early humans were already processing skins into coverings. Neanderthals show similar signs: their arm muscles and specialized tools indicate repeated hide working. Likely to make capes or wrapped garments for harsh winters.

More concrete traces come later. In Morocco’s Contrebandiers and other North African caves, bone tools with rounded tips match those still used today to scrape and soften leather, alongside animal bones with skinning cut marks. These finds, some around 120,000 years old, point to early Homo sapiens wearing fur and leather. Both to stay warm and to decorate themselves with beads and adornments.

The true revolution came around 50,000 years ago with the invention of the bone needle and the awl. Found in sites like the Denisova Cave in Siberia, these tools suggest that humans were tailoring the skins. By punching holes and threading sinew through leather, our ancestors created “fitted” clothing.

Genetics offers another startling register. Studies of the human body louse, which evolved from head lice specifically to live in the folds of clothing. Suggesting that we have been wearing garments for at least 70,000 to 170,000 years. Long before we built permanent shelters. 

First threads: from hides to fibers

Shifting from animal skins to plant fibers was a long, messy transition. Traces of twisted or knotted flax fibers from caves in Georgia, dated over 30,000 years ago. Hint that hunter‑gatherers already knew how to twist plant fibers into cords or primitive textiles. Later, figurines from the southern Levant, 11,700–10,500 years old, show carved depictions of clothing. Suggesting woven or wrapped garments had entered daily life.

Still, for most of prehistory, leather and fur dominated because they matched a mobile lifestyle. Plant-based textiles required something new: time in one place, fields and a surplus of labor for sowing, harvesting, retting, spinning and weaving. As communities began to settle in early farming villages, fibers from flax, rush, reeds and other plants turned from occasional cordage into the raw material for cloth.

The earliest surviving woven examples are modest scraps that nonetheless mark a turning point. Linen fragments from Neolithic sites in Egypt around 5500–5000 BCE show fine, systematic weaving that demanded tools like looms and spindles and a deep understanding of plants. These tiny pieces are the archaeological equivalent of a software “hello world”: simple on the surface, but signaling a new technological stack underneath.

Flax, hemp and cotton: taming plants for cloth

Three plants would quietly dominate early clothing: flax, hemp and cotton.

• Flax thrives in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, and evidence of its cultivation appears as early as 8000 BCE. Egyptians turned flax into linen, producing light, breathable cloth that suited the Nile’s climate and became tightly linked to ritual purity, burial and social rank. Even in Neolithic Egypt, linen production was already integrated into farming and household economies.​
• Hemp, hardy and versatile, spread from Central and East Asia across to the Near East. Archaeological finds of hemp textiles dating to around 8000 BCE in regions of modern Iraq and ancient Mesopotamia show that people were already spinning its fiber into woven cloth. By the first millennium BCE, Greek writers praised hemp garments for their linen-like quality, while peoples from Asia to Egypt used the plant widely for textiles, rope, and sails.
• Cotton emerged as a textile superstar in the Indus Valley and India. By the 3rd–2nd millennium BCE, Harappan cities were cultivating cotton and likely dyeing fabrics with plants like indigo. Greek historians later marveled at Indian cotton as a “wool” more beautiful than sheep fleece, and Alexander’s soldiers quickly adopted cotton garments for comfort in hot climates.​
  

Each plant demanded its own toolkit: retting pits to separate fiber from stem, spindles for spinning, looms for weaving, and eventually tools for bleaching and dyeing. The invention and refinement of these technologies transformed scattered local plants into standardized fabrics, which enabled communities to store, trade, and tax their resources.

The agricultural engine: dressing the masses

The invention of clothes reached a tipping point when farming transitioned from a means of feeding a family to a means of fueling a society. The domestication of fiber crops allowed for the first “mass production” of clothing materials.

In the Nile Delta, the massive scale of flax farming clothed the thousands of workers who built the pyramids. In the Indus Valley, the standardized production of cotton textiles allowed for the growth of some of the world’s first planned cities, like Mohenjo-Daro. Farming meant that clothing was no longer tied to the luck of the hunt. It could be planned, harvested, and stored.

This surplus of fiber led to the invention of the spindle and the loom. The loom, in particular, is one of the most influential machines ever created. It allowed for the weaving of wide bolts of fabric, which meant clothes could be draped, folded, and pleated. This technological leap birthed the distinctive silhouettes of the ancient world, the Greek chiton, the Roman toga, and the Chinese hanfu.

Trade routes and the fabric of empires

Once humans mastered the production of textiles, clothes became the world’s first global currency. Because fabric was lightweight, durable, and highly valued, it was the perfect trade good.

The Silk Road is the most famous example of this. While the name highlights silk, a protein fiber discovered by the Chinese around 2700 BCE, the route was actually a massive exchange of all textile technologies. Cotton traveled from India to the Mediterranean; wool from the Central Asian steppes moved into China.

Control over textile production and trade routes defined the wealth of empires. The Romans spent a fortune on Chinese silk, leading to a “trade deficit” that worried their senators. In the medieval era, the wool trade between England and Flanders was so vital that it funded wars and built cathedrals. Textiles were the oil of the ancient and medieval worlds; they were the commodity that everyone needed and for which they would travel thousands of miles.

The impact of clothes on civilization

Technologically, the requirements of textile production, spinning, weaving, and dyeing, pushed the boundaries of chemistry and mechanics. The first computers were arguably the looms of the ancient world, using a binary system (warp and weft) to create complex patterns. The demand for faster production eventually sparked the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, with the spinning jenny and the power loom forever changing the relationship between humans and labor.

Socially, clothes allowed us to build hierarchies. In a world of skins, everyone looked relatively similar. In a world of refined textiles, you could tell a person’s rank, profession, and origin from a hundred paces. Purple dyes from the Murex snail in Phoenicia were so expensive that they were reserved for royalty, creating the concept of royal purple.

Perhaps most importantly, clothing enabled the human diaspora. Without the ability to refine nature’s resources into specialized gear, we would have remained a tropical species huddled near the equator. Clothing was the technology that allowed us to settle the Himalayas, the Arctic, and eventually, through pressurized suits, the vacuum of space.