The needle and sewn clothing: humanity’s weapon against the cold

Somewhere in every home there is a small box holding needles and thread. When a button comes off or a seam comes undone, this tiny tool is what people reach for. But few people know that the eyed needle is one of humanity’s oldest and most useful inventions. The oldest known examples so far have been found in Siberia and China, and are said to be between 45,000 and 40,000 years old.

When did people start wearing clothes?

The biggest problem in the history of clothing is that skin, leather and fibres rot away in the soil. So scientists found an unusual route: lice. Head lice and clothing lice are separate kinds, and clothing lice could only have come into being once humans began to wear clothes.

In 2011, Melissa Toups and her colleagues, writing in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, estimated from genetic calculations that clothing lice split from head lice at least 83,000 years ago, and possibly 170,000 years ago. According to them, the use of clothing probably began in Africa with modern humans. Earlier estimates ranged from 40,000 to 3 million years.

The awl: before the needle

The awl came before the needle. It was a pointed tool of bone or stone used to pierce holes in skin. According to the Human Origins Program of the Smithsonian Institution in the United States, awls were probably invented in Africa and then carried by humans to colder regions, where they were used to make holes in clothing. The institution’s collection includes bone awls from Blombos Cave in South Africa, which are about 77,000 years old.

Once a hole was made, a thin strip of leather or an animal sinew could be passed through it to join two pieces together. But this method was slow, and the clothing made this way was loose-fitting.

The invention of the eyed needle

In 2018, the archaeologist Francesco d’Errico and his colleagues published a large survey of bone needles in the Journal of Human Evolution. They collected data on needles from 355 layers at 271 sites. According to them, the bone needle is an original Eurasian invention that appeared between 45,000 and 40,000 years ago.

Interestingly, the earliest needles from Siberia and China differ in size, so researchers think they may have been invented separately in the two regions. The needles of Eastern Europe were either a separate invention or a spread of the Siberian and Caucasian tradition. In Western Europe, needles appear much later, in the period experts call the Solutrean.

In China, strong, round needles 35,000 to 25,000 years old were followed 26,000 to 23,000 years ago by small, flat needles. The Smithsonian collection holds bone needles from Xiaogushan in China’s Liaoning province, which are 30,000 to 23,000 years old. According to the institution, people used such bone and ivory needles to sew warm, close-fitting clothes.

Where did thread come from?

A needle also needs thread. Animal sinews and leather strips were available, but the evidence for plant fibres is also very old. In 2009, Eliso Kvavadze and colleagues published in the journal Science the discovery of wild flax fibres from Dzudzuana Cave in the foothills of the Caucasus in Georgia. The cave was occupied on and off in periods around 32,000 to 26,000 years ago and later. Spun, dyed and knotted fibres were commonly found there. According to the researchers, they may have been used to make cords, weave baskets or sew clothes.

Not just the cold, but identity too

Why was the needle invented? The researcher Ian Gilligan and colleagues wrote in 2024 in the journal Science Advances that close-fitting clothing could also be made with awls, so the delicate eyed needle points to the need for some finer work. In their view there were two possible reasons. One is that people began to wear clothes in layers, and underwear came into being. The other is that decoration moved from the body to the clothing, and beads and ornaments began to be sewn onto clothes. In this way clothing became not just protection from the cold but also an expression of identity and social standing.

Today the needle of the electric sewing machines in factories works on the same principle: a pointed shaft with an eye through which the thread passes. Handicrafts and embroidery in our region also descend from this ancient skill. The story of cotton, whose thread took this skill to a new stage, will come later in this series.