When I speculated that the wheel might be the first breakthrough technology, my friend and ex-colleague, Arun Prabhu, counter-proposed fire. Although it predates the wheel by a long way, I’m not sure that the harnessing of fire constitutes “technology”. I’ll come back to that question on another occasion.A good candidate for “first” must be tailored clothing. The earliest thus far discovered dates from around 23,000BC – some eighteen millennia before the first wheel. The finds (in Russia and Siberia) consist of shirts, trousers and hats, all made from animal skins. Of course, they were made in order to protect against the cold.
Often one innovation depends on another, and the threadable bone needle, which appeared at around the same time, enabled the animal skins to be sewn together and shaped according to the intended wearer – tailored, in fact.
The first textile-based clothing appeared 16,000 years later, in the 7th millennium BC. They were found in Turkey and were made from linen. Around 5,000BC, flax was used in Egypt. Cotton as a textile only arrived in the first century AD.
It has been proposed recently by Ian Gilligan of the Australian National University in Canberra that Neanderthal man may well have become extinct simply because of their lack of tailored clothes, as temperatures fell in the Ice Age. They finally disappeared at around the time that tailored clothing was being used by Homo sapiens.
The earliest breakthrough technology? Unless you know otherwise…
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