Where Clothing Wasn't

When we analyze prehistoric man's trajectory from basic to complex behaviors and lifestyles, we must take into account a wide variety of different cultural factors. Technology, domestication, creative expression, subsistence and social organization are perhaps among the more prominent of these, but a common issue is that, despite whatever amount of data we have that tells us about early societies, it's difficult to determine which came first for any one particular group. Agriculturalization is a frequent benchmark for modernity, but even as far as a few centuries ago many cultures did not follow this route at all.

What, then, would lead early humans into the laborious and enslaving practice of pastoral living in the first place?

There are heaps upon heaps of different, and quite often directly conflicting, hypotheses concerning the matter. For example, plant domestication and cultivation is sometimes attributed to things like food scarcity, where other times a food abundance is cited as a chief motivator. It is known that many sites arrived at agriculture independently, and at similar times, which even further complicates such determinations.

Depicted here is a sample of a Native population from Tasmania, who along with several other independent groups manifest a compelling correlation between clothing and farming.

 Source: http://www.duckdigital.net/FOD/images/photos1933/P6-25.gif

The image, from a journal published in 1933, portrays a number of people among whom, as in all the other photographs from the collection, clothing is deemed optional, and where it is worn it is more decorative than functional.

In the accounts of many early Western ethnographers, we can observe a rather consistent, peculiar attention placed upon the regular, habituated nudity of Australian aboriginals. It was exotic and very alien, as far as European colonials were concerned. After all, most cultures that had been in contact with the West showed clothing as something very commonplace. Native Australians, along with Andaman Islanders, are two almost unique cases where clothes never caught on. And why would they? It's been known to get cold occasionally [in the Australian outback], but not far past the threshold where the human body can't make mild adjustments. It seems these places just have climates well suited for nudity. 

So the idea is that comfortable temperature ranges precluded the opportunity for apparel to establish itself past the point of perpetuation. Archaeologist Ian Gillian presents a sort of guideline using units of clo. Clo essentially counts layers of clothing needed to protect the human body from overexposure (due to temperatures, wind, etc.).

Using this system, Gillian found that there was only one stretch of time during which early Australians would require regular dress. Thus, looking for (historically) colder environments, he studied the comparably cooler regions of southern Australia and Tasmania for his research. In the Late Pleistocene, Tasmanian populations would have been experiencing their own cooling period.

This map presents a number of excavation sites as well as the approximate geography and landscape approximately 18,000 ca. before present.

a. basalt plain, grassland
b. very open woodlands, grasslands, heaths
c. alpine open herbfield and steppes, including glaciated areas
d. open eucalypt forest and woodland
e. tall eucalypt forest
f. dense closed forest
Source: http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/chapter52/8-Tasmania-ancient/archaeology.htm

This represents cold at its extreme, with much of the region consisting of glaciated stretches. It is in places fielding such harsh conditions that sites indicating an increase in awls and blade technology, as well as gratuitous hunting and skinning of Bennet's wallaby, have been discovered. Because mega-fauna had by this time been over-hunted, the fur coats of the wallaby would be the next logical choice, assuming an intent to skin and wear the pelts. The pelt procured would be modest in size and would require sewing to tailor it to the human figure, hence a shift to more complex tools. Living in this region would necessitate more clo, and [by the evidence collected at these sites] it seems that some of the early culture and technology was possibly lead by this requirement.

Bennett's wallaby
Source: http://www.goodacres.org/2008_11_01_archive.html

Although this environment was harsh, it was relatively brief. As soon as it disappeared, Gillian reports, there was a concomitant regression in stone and bone technology, a foregoing of likely sowing paraphernalia, and, consequently, a disappearance of what were likely clothes.

But how does this relate to agriculture? There is a lot of evidence from sites in Eurasia for the domestication of non-edible plants. Wild, edible plant breeds tend to be small and require lots of processing with little payoff. Non-edible plants like hemp, ramie, and paper mulberry are cultivated very early and have multiple potential uses, such as cordage and--what is quite important to the present discussion--clothes (Gillian). Considering the cooler temperatures of many sites outside of Africa, clothes might have been a more propitious incentive for domesticating plants. This could also be an incentive to produce smaller, more delicate, and more complex technologies (as was fleetingly seen in the Tasmanian archaeological record).

Thus, for some populations, agriculture might have been a byproduct of an interest in self-clothing. We might guess as much: some cultures were clothed and had domesticated animals, but did so without agriculture, suggesting  the former may precede--and indeed necessitate--the latter (Gillian). Also, many cultures without habitual clothing tend to have no proclivity towards agriculture at all, a point which further evidences this reasoning.

Regardless of the ultimate veracity of the claims, it is a compelling idea that certainly deserves further investigation and research.


Sources:
Ian Gilligan
    2007 Clothing and modem human behaviour: prehistoric Tasmania as a case study. Archaeol. Oceania 42:     102-111

Ian Gilligan
    1990 Clothing and Farming Origins: The Indo-Pacific Evidence
    World Archaeology:1-10