Let me Vent about Media Depictions of Stone Age people
So, to once more start with a completely random vent here: I hate how media depicts Stone Age people. Because it is just so fundamentally misinformed about how humans work and what we do. And I hate it so much.
Because, well... I ask you to imagine some Neolithic or even earlier humans. What do you imagine?
Do you imagine people with unkempt hair, who mostly communicate in grunts, and wear barely treated animal pelts over their shoulders instead of clothes, yet still live in a somewhat nuclear family unit where the dad and maybe the older brother is hunting, while the women are staying in the cave or something?
Because if you do, you have been dooped by media depictions. And it is not your fault. Because frankly, even within scientific literature we see these depictions again and again DESPITE KNOWING that it is not true.
If you look at pop culture you have stuff like the Flintstones and the Croods. And mind you, I generally really liked the Croods as a movie. But... oh, the tropes in there are... ugh.
And if you look at museums, and text books, and what not, you will still see stone age depictions that look something like this.
Sure, at least those have some sort of tribe, which is at least some advancement over the Stone Age Nuclear family, but I am still so annoyed with a bunch of it.
Because, first these are white people, most of those people would not have been white, especially not people who lived in areas where it would have been enough to just wear a random piece of leather around your hip as clothing. Secondly, well, isn't it funny how these stone age people are all wearing clothes that keep them covered just in a way that aligns with modern day standards (keeping the genitals and the female breasts covered - the latter we know was simply never a concern for most people on this planet until after 1500). And thirdly... Why does nobody believe that neolithic people had not discovered fiberworks? Because... like, we have not a whole lot found of that (because clothing generally just does not survive 10 000 years), but we have found needles, and pieces that were fairly likely used to work fibers - as well as some fiberwork that survived in clay. Moreover, we also know that the people who were wearing animal pelts, did not just wear them over their shoulders or around their hips, but usually actually had those cut onto form and stitched together like actual clothes.
For example, we have these pieces of Clay from which we know that there were weaved textiles.
The left one is a piece of fired clay found in Dolní Věstonice that shows fiber impressions. The side predates the Neolithic. The second is from an excavation side in Kisnytsia.
Then we have this, what looks like some biological images, but is actually flax fibers that have been treated and were likely used in the creation of clothing 30 000 years ago. Some of them were likely even dyed!
And it was not even just a homo sapiens thing. We have this bit of cord at a Neanderthal side, which also needs understanding of fiberwork to create. So, yeah, even Neanderthals had fiberwork.
And then we also have some of the female figures that you probably have seen before. And the way they are created make it very likely that the knotted things on their hip and head are actually a cap and a skirt of sorts. So clothes that was specifically made.
So, it is very likely that even when the people were wearing leathers and furs, it would have looked not like in the pictures above, where it is just roughly draped leathers, but actually something tailored like this or this.
And I know this seems like a weird topic to vent about, but there is actually a reason why I talk about this. And that is because the entire thing about textiles is related to the propaganda inherent to depiction of Neolithic and earlier people.
Neolithic people are depicted as living in nuclear families, to show that the nuclear family is a biologically natural unit for humans to live in, rather than a thing that was invented in the US of the 1950s to get people to buy more home appliances.
At the same time Neolithic and earlier people are shown grunting and wearing barely treated furs to hammer home of the idea that humans have progressed so far and that progression is somehow linear, and with this also framing colonialism as a good thing. Something that brings the colonized people ahead in this development. Which it is also not.
And lastly this is related to another issue that exists in anthropology and has only gotten better since the 2000s: the invisibility of women.
Because here is the thing: we know that a good chunk of human societies - especially unsettled societies - were fairly egalitarian in regards to gender/sex. Though there is some evidence that often a lot of knowledge was more generally transmitted among women. There is a good chance that the fire and the wheel were invented by women, not men. And this is weirdly enough linked to textile work.
Because for a long, long while it seems that textile work has played a central role in the gathering and transmission of women.
While the roles were not as firmly gendered as you imagine today - we have found burials of men with tools related to textile work, just as we have burials of women hunters and warriors - there seems in several early societies have been a relation between knowledge and fiber work.
I mean, technically you very likely know this subconsciously. Because you know old mythology, in which very, very often a goddess associated with textile work is also associated with wisdom and knowledge.
So, yes. This is all connected.
If you want to know more about this, Olga Soffer has written a lot on this. She is a former fashion industry insider turned anthropologist, who has done a lot of research on this exact topic. A lot of the stuff above is based on her research.
But yeah, generally speaking it is quite frustrating to me, that somehow Horizon Zero Dawn - the post-apocalyptic "stone age people hunting robot dinosaurs game - somehow has one of the more realistic depictions of early human fashion.
