History, Through the Eye of a Needle

Food, clothing and shelter, we all know, are the necessities for survival. At Thanksgiving we tend to focus on the first. But those of us preparing the bird might well pause as we truss to consider the tremendous importance of the tool in our hands. We should give thanks for the needle, the possession of which allows us to take this stitch in time.

The invention of the needle was a technological breakthrough. Clothing, real fitted tops with sleeves and bottoms with pants, enabled our paleolithic ancestors to live in relative comfort between 35,000 and 12,000 years ago, an epoch when glaciers covered much of northern Europe. Archeologists in the last few decades have salvaged enough remnants of that ancient civilization to provide us with tantalizing hints of what life must have been like in that unrecorded period of time we call prehistory.

We know from the geological record that even during the Ice Age, life in what is today Spain, France and the Ukraine was nothing like life in contemporary Siberia. The days were more uniform in length as days are in the temperate zones, and the land was rich in a variety of trees, bushes and animals that included great woolly mammoths and deer similar to species alive today. We know this from fossils uncovered near ancient cobble hearths as well as from the majestic paintings these people left on ceilings and walls in caves throughout southern France and Spain.

In some of these caves they left artifacts as well--tools, jewelry, engravings and sculptures. Recently French archeologists have discovered hearths and artifacts from the same epoch in open land. This is evidence of a widespread civilization whose people lived in some kind of houses or tents. The caves were not their homes but apparently sites for special rituals.

Treasures of Ice Age technology, including a flute-like musical instrument, fish-hooks, harpoons, spear-throwers and needles, are on exhibit now at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The simple needles, naked of fine engravings like those that decorate the spear-throwers, are fine examples of a highly developed craft. Carved in ivory and bone, their tiny eyes were carefully bored through by a fine-pointed flint drill. The needles prove that the comic-strip image of cavemen draped in skins is woefully wrong. It would have been impossible to chase deer or mammoth through icy winds if one hand had to be free to hold down flapping skins. Human beings could not have survived the glacial climate of ancient Europe so casually dressed.

In the catalogue to the exhibition, “Dark Caves, Bright Visions,” guest curator Randall White describes a burial site from the same epoch on the Russian plain. The corpse had been buried with two dozen bracelets carved from mammoth tusks. Rows of mammoth tusk beads decorated the front of its clothes, which included a shirt that slipped over the head, and trousers that were stitched to leather footwear in a single piece.

The first needles we know of appeared in southwestern France about 20,000 years ago. We do not know if they were invented by a man or a woman or which people in the community did the sewing. But we can be assured that needles revolutionized their lives.

Nothing has yet surpassed them. As centuries passed, sewing grew to include decorative stitchery and embroidery as well as the necessary job of holding cloth together.

The needle, once invented, was used on more than cloth. As far back as ancient Egypt, surgeons used needle and thread to sew up human flesh. And lastly, of course, is the culinary artist who trusses the poultry that for many Americans, symbolizes comfort and holiday cheer.