Part of my decision to create this blog was driven by a desire to explore the history of costuming. What is it about dressing up as someone or something different that fascinates us so much? When did clothing transform from mere functionality to a medium for expressing our creativity and identity?
It turns out we have been wearing clothes for a very long time! Researchers think that humans started wearing clothes about 83,000 years ago and 170,000 years ago. The difficulty in determining an accurate date is that, unlike bones and fossils, clothes degrade quickly, so the way they pinpointed it was by analysing when head lice moved to be clothing lice. Ick.
This means that clothing was most likely already adopted by modern humans in Africa during the Middle to Late Pleistocene eras before they migrated to colder climates, where they would have needed the added warmth.
Determining when humans first used clothing as costumes is more complex, but the earliest uses were probably in shamanistic rituals—such as religious-social ceremonies like ancestor cults and magical rites related to healing and divination.
I would guess that masks, using feathers, bones and animal skins, were the first styles of costumes, and there is a school of thought that some Palaeolithic cave art may be representations of “disguised” humans, (such as the sorcerer of Trois-Frères or the homme-bison of Gabillou).
Pottery figurines crafted during the Neolithic period offer more clues. Made about 26,000 years ago, these are shown as having clothing and perhaps costumes, while animals and even horned heads combined to human bodies and limbs could represent masked humans.
The next stage that furthered clothing and costume development was the introduction of fine stone knives for cutting skins into pieces, and the eyed needle for sewing. As every sewer knows, you can’t have fitted clothes without cutting the material to shape.
Needles have to be one of humanity’s greatest inventions and we had the concept at least 61,000 years ago, which is the age of the oldest discovered needle. Considering the wheel was only developed about 10,000 years ago, underscores how old clothing technology is.
About 9000 years ago, solid evidence of costume-wearing emerged from an archaeological site in the Judean Desert called the Nahal Hemar cave. Along with a trove of objects, archaeologists found six limestone masks, thought to be about 7000 to 9000 years old, placing them in the Neolithic period, or New Stone Age.
This is when humans were transitioning from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to settled farming communities.
The thing I love about this discovery is that they also found evidence of the use of glue, made from collagen, most likely from animal skins. It warms my heart that there is a direct line from the costume-maker of today, sitting in their lounge with a hot glue gun working on their costume, to a Neolithic human 9000 years ago in ancient Judea painting and glueing their mask. I wonder if they also burnt their fingers?
Costumiers are indeed part of an ancient tradition!
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