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Podcast Transcript

I would say that there is a very good chance that almost everyone listening to the sound of my voice right now is wearing something made of cloth. 

Cloth, textiles, and fabrics go back a very long way, but despite their ancient origins, not every culture had them. 

Yet, where they existed, they were often some of the most valuable commodities, and they were, in some fashion, used by everyone from rich to poor. 

Learn more about cloth, textiles, and fabrics, their origin, and how they’ve changed throughout history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. 

I’m going to have to start this episode by defining some terms because the words cloth, textile, and fabric are usually used interchangeably, but they actually mean different things. 

The reason why there is so much confusion is because there is so much overlap between the categories. If you were to identify any piece of cloth you use in your daily life, it is probably both a fabric and a textile, which is why we use them interchangeably. 

A textile is usually defined as any product that is woven or knitted.

The dictionary definition of a fabric is a cloth made by weaving or knitting

…and the definition of cloth is a fabric or material formed by weaving, knitting, pressing, or felting.

You will notice that the definitions are rather circular. 

Here is a good way to think of it, although some might disagree with how I’m defining it. 

Not all textiles are fabrics. The best example that you are familiar with is carpet. Carpets are woven materials, but they are not fabrics. You wouldn’t go to a fabric store to buy a carpet or use a carpet to make clothing. 

All fabrics are textiles, and all fabrics I can think of are cloth. Fabrics can be thought of as woven or knitted cloth. 

However, not all cloth are fabrics, although the vast majority of them are. The best example of a cloth that isn’t a fabric would be felt, which is not woven or knitted. 

With that nit-picky stuff out of the way, for the rest of this episode, I’m going to be talking about the overlap of all three of those things. Woven materials that are used in clothing. I’m explicitly not talking about leather or animal skins.

That would be for an entirely separate episode. 

The origin of cloth starts out with fibers. A fiber is defined as anything significantly longer than it is wide.

There are plant fibers, animal fibers, and synthetic fibers. 

Determining the origin of the use of fibers and cloth is difficult because both animal and plant fibers are organic and don’t preserve very well over long periods of time. 

Estimates for when humans began to weave cloth from fibers have an extremely wide range, but the standard estimate places it about 30,000 to 50,000 years ago. 

We don’t have any samples of cloth or clothing dating that far back, but there are reasons for that estimate. 

A sewing needle has been found in a Denisovan cave in Siberia, which has been dated back 50,000 years. A possible 60,000 years old needle has been found in South Africa, but it is broken, so it can’t be positively identified as such.

A 40,000-year-old piece of bone was found in Spain that has regular indentations. While there have been many theories as to what it was for, one of the simplest theories is that it was a punch board for sewing. 

Dyed flax fibers have been found in the Republic of Georgia and date back 34,000 years. They are only fibers and not part of a full piece of cloth, but it shows that dying was used in conjunction with fibers tens of thousands of years before the advent of agriculture.

There is a 25,000-year-old figurine that has been found in Southern France that shows a person wearing a skirt, and there are many other figurines that show people wearing articles of clothing. 

So, while there isn’t any direct evidence of cloth from pre-history, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence, far beyond what I’ve mentioned here. 

Moreover, the use of fibers seems to have been something that was independently discovered all over the world. There are 12,000-year-old fibers and textile fragments found in a cave in Peru, indicating that it was also in the New World.

The oldest known garment that is clearly identifiable as a garment is the Tarkhan dress. It is a 5000-year-old blouse or shirt that was found in a tomb. 

The primary material used for cloth in Egypt was flax, not cotton, as most people would expect, given the popularity of Egyptian cotton today.  Woven flax is known as linen. 

Wool and other animal fibers were also used for making cloth in some parts of the world. However, the evidence suggests that wool cloth came thousands of years after the adoption of plant fibers. 

Sheep were only domesticated about 10,000 years ago, and the early sheep weren’t wooly or hairy. Over time, there was a process of selectively breeding sheep for wool. 

The oldest known wool cloth dates back about 3500 years, but it is likely that it goes back much earlier. One of the big limiting factors in the adoption of wool was the difficulty in collecting it. This was eventually solved with the invention of shears during the Iron Age. 

Cotton originally came from India—the earliest evidence of cotton as a material for cloth dates back about 7,500 years ago. 

However, cotton wasn’t only grown in the old world. There were different varieties of cotton that were found in the New World as well as in Peru. When the Spanish arrived in Peru, they found people who were wearing cotton clothes and using cotton for the creation of fish nets. 

I should, of course, also note the use of silk in China. I’ve previously done an entire episode on silk, but silk fibers come from silkworms, and silk became one of the most valued products in the ancient world. 

One of the first challenges was getting fibers into something useful in the form of thread or yarn. The first tool used for the making thread was known as a drop spindle. 

A drop spindle consists of a shaft with a circular whorl attached near one end to provide momentum and maintain the spindle’s rotational speed. The spinner attaches fibers to a hook or notch at the top of the spindle and spins it to twist the fibers together, gradually winding the newly formed yarn onto the shaft as more fibers are spun. 

The spinning motion of the drop spindle was eventually improved with the spinning wheel, which was a much larger wheel that allowed for the faster creation of a more uniform quality of thread.

Once you have thread, no matter if it is flax, wool, cotton, or silk, what makes that thread into cloth or fabric is the act of weaving. 

Weaving was probably one of the most difficult and time consuming things that ancient people did. Every piece of cloth had to be woven one strand at a time. It was a laborious process that, depending on the size and complexit of the cloth being made, could take weeks or even months. 

The time that went into weaving one of on the reasons why even the simplest garments were prized and almost never thrown away. 

The earliest weaving tool was known as the warp-weighted loom. 

The warp-weighted loom, one of the simplest weaving methods, dates back to at least the Neolithic period and probably predates that by many thousand years. 

The loom consists of a simple, upright, wooden rectangular frame. The top horizontal beam is called the “warp beam,” while the vertical posts support the structure.

Warp threads are the vertical threads attached to the warp beam at the top. They hang down freely and are kept taut by weights attached at the bottom. 

The stone or clay weights, called loom weights, are tied to the ends of the warp threads. These weights keep the warp threads under tension and allow them to hang straight.

A rod or stick known as a shed rod is inserted inside the warp threads to separate it into two layers, creating an opening through which the weft, or horizontal thread, can pass.

The weft thread is then usually passed through the warp threads using what is known as a shuttle. If the warp threads are in place, moving the shuttle through can be done relatively quickly. 

After passing the weft thread through the shed, a beater is then used to push it tightly into place against the previous rows of weaving. This compacts the fabric and ensures evenness.

Just rinse and repeat this process several hundred or thousand times, and the end result will be a piece of woven textile. 

Ancient weaving systems might have been a bit different from place to place, but the basics of weaving a thread in and out of other threads, the warp and the weft, have been the basis of weaving to the present day. 

While the warp-weighted loom was the earliest known loom, and it is still used in parts of the world today, it was hardly the end of loom technology. 

The horizontal ground loom was one of the earliest technical advancements in weaving. It involves a frame laid on the ground or slightly elevated, where the warp threads are stretched horizontally. It was easier to manage tension and allowed for larger pieces of fabric.

The Vertical Loom looked similar to the warp-weighted loom but more advanced. It includes vertical frames and improved mechanisms for controlling warp tension. It allowed for more stability and the ability to produce larger and more complex textiles.

One of the biggest advancements in weaving technology was the drawloom.  

The drawloom probably originated in ancient China during the Tang Dynasty around the 6th or 7th century. 

A drawloom allows for the creation of complex patterns by enabling the weaver to lift specific groups of warp threads during the weaving process. 

A drawloom had foot petals, which allowed the weaver to lift specific warp threads without using their hands.

The technology spread along the Silk Road, reaching the Middle East and eventually Europe by the early Middle Ages. In medieval Europe, particularly in Italy and France, the drawloom became essential for producing intricate silk fabrics. Its use persisted until the 18th century when more automated looms largely supplanted it.

This is not the end of the story of cloth and weaving by a long shot. The spinning wheel and the drawloom were close to the state of the art at the dawn of the industrial revolution in the 18th century. 

A great deal of the Industrial Revolution and the development of steam-powered machines involved running looms to speed up the process of making cloth. 

In addition to improved weaving techniques, new synthetic fibers were eventually developed to make new fabrics. This included everything from nylon to kevlar, and textiles and woven fabrics found their way into almost every part of our world. 

The industrialization of textile production will be a story for another episode. 

Cloth and weaving have been one of the fundamental technologies that humans used since before the rise of agriculture. Not only have we been creating cloth and weaving for as long as history has been recorded, but it has also been a constant in most civilizations around the world, no matter how separated they were. 

That might make the shirt on your back seem just a little more special.