The world's oldest pants are a 3,000-year-old engineering marvel:
With the help of an expert weaver, archaeologists have unraveled the design secrets behind the world's oldest pants. The 3,000-year-old wool trousers belonged to a man buried between 1000 and 1200 BCE in Western China. To make them, ancient weavers combined four different techniques to create a garment specially engineered for fighting on horseback, with flexibility in some places and sturdiness in others.
[...] Mounted herders and warriors needed their leg coverings to be flexible enough to let the wearer swing a leg across a horse without ripping the fabric or feeling constricted. At the same time, they needed some added reinforcement at crucial areas like the knees. It became, to some extent, a materials-science problem. Where do you want something elastic, and where do you want something strong? And how do you make fabric that will accomplish both?
For the makers of the world's oldest pants, produced in China around 3,000 years ago, the answer was apparently to use different weaving techniques to produce fabric with specific properties in certain areas, despite weaving the whole garment out of the same spun wool fiber.
The world's oldest-known pants were part of the burial outfit of a warrior now called Turfan Man. He wore the woven wool pants with a poncho that belted around the waist, ankle-high boots, and a wool headband adorned with seashells and bronze discs. The pants' basic design is strikingly similar to the pants most of us wear today, but closer inspection reveals the level of engineering that went into designing them.
Journal Reference:
Mayke Wagner, et. al., The invention of twill tapestry points to Central Asia: Archaeological record of multiple textile techniques used to make the woollen outfit of a ca. 3000-year-old horse rider from Turfan, China, Archaeological Research in Asia (DOI: 10.1016/j.ara.2021.100344)
(Score: 5, Touché) by PiMuNu on Wednesday April 06 2022, @10:43AM (2 children)
5k years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2022, @11:12AM
Bigfoot is q0,000 yests old and doesn't need pants.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2022, @06:30PM
This is just another Bullshit story from China, which they will use to declare that China invented clothes.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by pTamok on Wednesday April 06 2022, @11:46AM (10 children)
The impressive thing for me is that these trousers were made as a single piece of weaving - it's not several different types of material stitched together. I don't think that technique is used in modern trouser-making. I don't know if it is possible to program a modern loom to do the same, and even if you could, the end result might be rather expensive. Performed manually, it would be a significant investment in time and require significant skill. It's not as impressive, but probably cheaper in both time and skill to stitch stuff together.
I think that it is a shame that 'mass-customisation' has not taken off in the garment industry. There is basically a choice between expensive hand-made 'tailored/bespoke' clothes (which are way out of my price range), or mass produced stuff (often made by slave- or nearly-slave- labour) which is not fitted to individuals: you have to search for a good fit. Somehow, the idea of being able to order clothes made to your own specifications by automated means seems to be rare. There have been attempts, but they end up rather expensive for what you get. I have long arms, which means that coats tend to leave my wrists bare. Looks weird, and means I get wet wrists when cycling in the rain, but going full bespoke on a Gore-Tex jacket would be laughably expensive. Oh for someone to invent a good, cheap, robotic tailor.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday April 06 2022, @12:10PM (3 children)
It's quite weird that that segment of the market have not materialized or come about yet. Have your "tailor" or just some pad with lasers that rotate you around like some rotisserie chicken where you go and take measurements and then just have a printer or automatic weaver machine that creates it from the data input. Instead we are still stuck wearing generic sized clothing. It's sort of fine cause I like my clothes big and sort of baggy but in general it seems to be a missing market segment. Perhaps the issue isn't so much the machines but the measurement taking, people tend to be quite shit at doing that part -- I'm a size X, I have always been one, I was one last time (40 years ago ...), is your machine implying that I'm fat!?! etc.
As far as I know most clothing these days appear to be made of many different parts that gets cut out of a larger piece and then stitched or riveted together, like with jeans. I had a math professor that had some side project doing working on minimizing material usage (or to get the most pieces without any or as little waste as possible), apparently they saved a lot of money from his work.
They have sort of started to do it with glasses from what I could tell from the last time I updated mine. It was the usual eye test and then the data was inputted into a machine and about an hour later it had adjusted (milled or sanded or whatever) what I assume is some prefab lenses to my specifications. I have also seen adverts for custom shoes to be made by robots or machine. But so far not clothing.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday April 06 2022, @01:36PM (2 children)
Tailor-made wearables have begun to enter the mass market. You cited eyeglasses, which made me think of teeth, dentures, glass eyes, and other such items. Those are produced by companies now.
But I DIY lots of stuff with my 3D printer also. Most of the items are parts or tools or fixtures I need, but I have also dabbled in wearables. I printed a pair of high heels for my daughter to wear in a musical she starred in this winter. I have printed sandals for my son. I printed a watch band for my wife's fitbit.
Custom manufacturing, in other words, is already available to us hoi poloi. There is a little bit of a learning curve, but man is it satisfying to think of a project, design it in Blender, and print it out on my Prusa 3D printer. I highly recommend it to the fellow nerds of Soylent.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2022, @06:42PM (1 child)
As an artist and artisan, I can tell you that 3D printing will never work for wool clothes. :)
Seriously though, super cool that you printed shoes and 100% agree that it's extraordinarily satisfying to solve one's needs with one's own design, and having a 3D printer turn a design into reality is fun and easy. But materials choice matters so very much, and extruded plastic is, for me, a first- and last-resort material. Ie. I'll use it for prototyping, and if I must due to complexity, for final product, but the odds that the material is what I want in the best of all worlds are vanishingly small. The properties are so rarely what I want. Wool is warm and soft; wood is cheap, light, and strong for weight/grain; metal wears little and is strong; cotton stretches and absorbs; epoxy and clay can be worked with additive processes; and so on. Printed ABS is light and printable, and that's about it.
Even if I'm replacing a nylon gear in an existing mechanism, odds are I want to machine the replacement, because the ABS printed parts wear out so much faster on me, and original parts in need of replacing didn't fail to age, but to wear.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday April 07 2022, @02:55AM
Disney made a felting 3D printer, but it wasn't fantastic. I'd love to see a crochet printer, but that doesn't exist today. Finding and stabbing into the right loops is a challenging inventor problem.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday April 06 2022, @03:27PM (3 children)
>I don't know if it is possible to program a modern loom to do the same
Hmm - I recall some crazy Chinese(?) robotic loom that was made maybe a decade or so ago that could weave entire finished garments. They looked kind of like paper-doll clothes with big vertical seams sticking out where the two layers were woven together instead of sewn, and then cut free from the surrounding cloth.
At the time it struck me as a solution in search of a problem, but a system like that might well be able to change the kind of weave used in different sections of the individual layers, which would have real potential.
(Score: 3, Informative) by anubi on Thursday April 07 2022, @08:49AM (2 children)
Are you referring to this ?
https://www.shimaseiki.com/product/knit/ [shimaseiki.com]
I watched a really fascinating video where NHK TV (Japan) showcased it. I am really impressed. And remembered it.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday April 07 2022, @02:48PM (1 child)
Thank you, I LOVE it!
That's WAY better than what I'm half-remembering. From the sample pictures it looks like it's capable of both knitting complex, seamless garments in the round, and changing stitching on the fly. They even have some examples of industrial applications using plastic infused carbon fiber! This thing is definitely going on my list of enabling space-colony technologies - it should be able to fully automate most of the textile industry in a tiny footprint with near-zero material waste. Plus the industrial applications...
I'm 95% sure I'm remembering something else though - not that I care after seeing that! I recall it being much larger (like a wall they were standing in front of?), and a loom rather than a knitting machine. I clearly remember them having to cut garments out of the double-layers of interwoven cloth, with ridiculous wide seams sticking straight out.
I suppose it's possible that it got refined into yours after garment manufacturers got interested and provided feedback, but knitting machines have their own long history. If there's any connection I suspect it would be that they saw the weaving machine and realized their knitting machines could be developed into something much better. Knitting machines have long been capable of doing crazy things when operated by a sufficiently creative and obsessively detail-oriented user - making a fully programmable version probably wasn't actually that big of a change, and knitting is *way* more versatile than weaving - you're not getting lace or those crazy-stretchy bunched stitches on a loom.
I suppose the down side of a traditional knitting machine over a loom is the huge number of moving parts - but if you're talking a fully programmable loom it probably needs just as many, to far less effect.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday April 08 2022, @03:14AM
Glad you found it useful.
Fellow soylentils have shared numerous obscure and helpful links with me.
More than happy to give something useful back
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2022, @03:28PM
A jacquard-style loom could do this easily, and the modern electronically controlled ones could do it as a matter of course.
The weavers of the time almost certainly didn't have heddle looms, so this would have been an experienced weaver deciding what to do, yarn by yarn. The overhead involved would have been minor.
Stitching brings its own sets of challenges, they just happen to be friendlier to mass manufacture. Fabric isn't something that is very easy to work with purely by machine, so there's still a lot of automation work to do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2022, @08:09PM
It's not uncommon in knitting to do the entire thing instead of stitching parts together.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by HammeredGlass on Wednesday April 06 2022, @01:08PM
Xinjiang. Oh?!
"Twill, which makes the rest of the pants so flexible, probably originated in Northwestern Asia (people as far west as Austria were also using the technique by 3,200 years ago, although it’s possible that people in both places developed twill independently)."
But no!, China, China, China, China, China!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2022, @01:25PM (5 children)
So does this say that 3000 year old pants are higher tech than anything made today?
Given that we have better fibers, conputer modeling, and numerically controlled weaving, that seems astounding.
There should be some examples today for the same level of attention to detail. Perhaps:
Space suits.
Clothes for folks that have more money than sense.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday April 06 2022, @01:37PM (3 children)
If you're using a CNC machine to create your pants I'm guessing they won't be terribly comfortable to wear...
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2022, @02:24PM
Computer Numerically Controlled machining and weaving are somewhat different processes?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday April 06 2022, @08:54PM (1 child)
Perhaps he is sporting full platemail? You can never be to secure these days.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday April 07 2022, @12:32AM
Platemail! No way. It's dragon scale mail or nothing!
(Score: 3, Funny) by turgid on Wednesday April 06 2022, @05:09PM
Technotrousers, Gromit.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Touché) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday April 06 2022, @01:41PM (2 children)
Wool is a great, durable fiber and would stand up under the friction and abuse that a horseman's pants would experience. But, man, I can't help but think how scratchy and uncomfortable they would be on your junk.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2022, @03:19PM
This depends heavily on wool harvest and spinning techniques. If this wool were naturally shed it would be much softer because shed wool has softer, frayed ends rather than the sharp cut end where shearing terminates the fibre. Given the age of the fabric, it may have been gathered or even rooed from sheep that hadn't had shedding bred out of them.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Thursday April 07 2022, @05:49PM
The article says nothing about underwear. Anybody who could afford these pants could afford something to keep comfortable. You'd think there would be a loincloth or something under there to keep the boys from getting jostled, especially on horseback.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2022, @02:31PM
For those that prefer watching a video (about 45 minutes long) about the subject, instead of reading the paper…
The Invention of the Trousers [youtu.be]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2022, @05:35PM (3 children)
This pair of pants lasted 3,000 years but the crotch on my Levi jeans only lasts for one. Either Levi's used to last longer or my piener has gotten stronger!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2022, @07:35PM
I think the Jew Levi knows his pants wear out fast. All part of his master plan.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday April 07 2022, @03:34PM (1 child)
That seems to be a fairly common issue with most pants today, Levi Jeans or not. The crotch or inner thighs goes first and the entire rest of the pants are fine. Not to mention that Jeans appear to have become thinner and thinner. Somehow I don't think the old miners would have approved of these jeans of today. I have contemplated, and have tried, getting my jeans at a hardware store dedicated to professionals and such. They seem to last a bit longer, they are a lot thicker but they might not be as stylish. But the upside is they tend to have a lot more pockets (usually extra pockets on the legs and sides). But they will stand out as "work-pants". But if you are ok with that then those are somewhat better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 08 2022, @12:03AM
https://www.allamericanstore.us/prison-blues-double-knee-work-jeans/ [allamericanstore.us]
No, I don't work for/by/with/around the company. I'm just a customer. I can endorse the toughness. Citation: I'm a farmer.