The clothing department

Mark Twain quipped, "Clothes make the man.  Naked people have little or no influence on society."

Given the fact that most of us are clothed most of the time, it's easy to lose sight of how odd it is.  We're one of the only species that covers our bodies -- the only others I can think of offhand are hermit crabs and caddisfly larvae.  In the climate where I live, of course, a lot of it is necessity.  For nine months of the year, we get temperatures that would be pretty uncomfortable if we weren't dressed warmly; for six of those months, if I ran around naked I'd risk freezing off body parts I still occasionally have a use for.

Even when it's warm, though, just about all of us wear some kind of body covering, for the sake of adornment, propriety, or (usually) both.  It's a custom in just about every culture on Earth.

But how long has this been going on?  Its ubiquity speaks to its antiquity; something shared by almost everyone is probably either highly important, or else very old.  (Once again, probably both.)  When we picture our distant ancestors, we usually think of them in furs and skins:

Gary Larson's cavemen aside, when did humans first start wearing clothes?

Some new research on fossils in Germany suggests it might be a lot longer ago than we realized -- perhaps as much as 300,000 years.

Archaeologists studying bones of cave bears (Ursus speleus) near the town of Schöningen found knife marks on the phalanges, metacarpals, and metatarsals -- the bones of the paws.  When butchering an animal for meat, the paws are usually ignored; there is little meat there, so the effort just isn't worth it.  The archaeologists studying the site claim that this is evidence that the men and women who cut up the unfortunate bears whose remains are at the site were after something else -- fur.

"The study is significant because we know relatively little about how humans in the deep past were protecting themselves from the elements," said Ivo Verheijen of the University of Tübingen, co-author of the study, which appeared two weeks ago in The Journal of Human Evolution.  "From this early time period, there is only a handful of sites that show evidence of bear skinning, with Schöningen providing the most complete picture.  We found the cutmarks on elements of the hands/feet where very little meat or fat is present on the bones, which argues against the cutmarks originating from the butchering of the animal.  On the contrary, in these locations, the skin is much closer to the bones, which makes marking the bone inevitable when skinning an animal."

The skins could have been used as clothing, but also might have been bedding.  The earliest evidence of sewing -- eyed needles -- comes from about 45,000 years ago.

So the discovery in Germany doesn't cinch down our ancestors from 300,000 years ago as being clothes-wearers, but it does mean they were aware of the use of animal pelts for something.  And given how cold it was back then, it'd be surprising that they didn't go pretty quickly from "This is comfy to sleep on" to "I could stay a hell of a lot warmer if I draped this around myself."

One thing I've always wondered is how we've become the only animals that have any sense of modesty about certain body parts, which (after all) we all have in some fashion or another.  It's one of those things that seems perfectly reasonable until you start thinking about it.  Customs do vary from place to place, of course; when we were in Denmark in summer, we saw women sunbathing topless, and nobody batted an eyelash.  In America, that'd cause some serious freakouts, and probably arrests for indecent exposure, even though guys can run around shirtless all they want.  And as far as the parts farther down, just about all cultures have a taboo against exposing those.

It's odd.

In any case, wherever our sense of modesty comes from, it seems to be very, very old.  And given that behaviors don't fossilize, it's likely that we'll never know the full story.  But it looks like Gary Larson's visions of cave men and women wearing pelts might not be all that far off.

Although I doubt seriously whether they held spelling bees.

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Grave matters

Today we take a trip into the past with three new discoveries from the world of archaeology, sent my way by my eagle-eyed friend and fellow writer, Gil Miller.

The first one has to do with ancient fashion.  Have you ever wondered how our distant ancestors dressed?  Whether it was crudely stitched-together rags, as the peasantry are often depicted?  Leopard-skin affairs, like the Flintstones?  Or nothing but a brass jockstrap, like this guy?

Turns out it wasn't so different from what you and I are wearing.  (I'm assuming you're not naked except for a brass jockstrap.  If you are, I won't judge, but I also don't want to know about it.)  An analysis of the clothing worn by a 3,200 year old mummy recovered from China's Tarim Basin was wearing tightly-woven, intricately-made trousers, built to be durable and allow maneuverability -- a little like today's blue jeans.

The pants worn by "Turfan Man" [Image from M. Wagner et al./Archaeological Research in Asia, 2022]

The cloth is a tight twill weave -- something that was assumed to be invented much later -- and had a triangular crotch piece that seems to be designed to avoid unfortunate compression of the male naughty bits while riding horseback.  The decoration, including an interlocking "T" pattern on the bands around the knees, is very similar to patterns found used on pottery in the area, and as far away as Kazakhstan and Siberia.

From ancient Chinese fashion items, we travel halfway around the world for something a little more gruesome -- a burial in the Lambayeque region of Peru that seems to contain the skeleton of a surgeon, along with his surgical tools.

The burial has been dated to the Middle Period of the Sican Culture, which would have been somewhere between 900 and 1050 C. E., and was recovered from a mausoleum temple at the rich archaeological site of Las Ventanas.  The man was obviously of high standing; he was wearing a golden mask pigmented with cinnabar, a bronze pectoral, and a garment containing copper plates.  But most interesting was the bundle of tools he was buried with -- awls, needles, and several sizes and shapes of knives.  This, the researchers say, identifies him as a surgeon.

It's hard for me to fathom, but surgery was done fairly regularly back then -- up to and including brain surgery (called trepanning).  There was no such thing as general anesthesia, so it was done under local anesthesia at best, probably supplemented with any kind of sedative or painkilling drugs they had available.  Still, it was a horrible prospect.  But what is most astonishing is that a great many of the patients, even the ones who had holes drilled into their skulls, survived.  There have been many cases of skeletons found that show signs of surgery where the surgical cuts healed completely.

But still, the ordeal these poor folks went through is horrifying to think about, so let's move on to the third and final article, that comes to us from England.  An archaeologist named Ken Dark has led a team of researchers in studying 65 grave sites in the counties of Somerset and Cornwall that date back to a time of history I've always had a particular fascination for -- the Western European "Dark Ages," between the collapse of the Roman Empire as a centralized power in the fourth and fifth centuries C. E. and the reconsolidation of Europe under such leaders as Charlemagne and Alfred the Great, four hundred years later.

The "darkness" of the so-called Dark Ages isn't so much that it was lawless and anarchic (although some parts of it in some places probably were), but simply because we know next to nothing about it for sure.  There are virtually no contemporaneous records; about all we have, the best-known being Gildas's sixth-century De Excidio et Conquesto Britanniae, are accounts that contain legend mixed up with history so thoroughly it's impossible to tell which is which.  I bring up Gildas deliberately, because his is the only record of King Arthur written anywhere close to the time he (allegedly) lived, and the graves that Dark and his team are studying date from right around that pivotal time when Christianized Romano-Celtic Britain was being attacked and overrun by the pagan Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.

The burial practices of noble sixth-century Britons stands in stark contrast from Anglo-Saxon burials from the same period; the Britons, it's believed, scorned the ostentation and ornate decorations of pagan funerals, and by comparison even high-status individuals were buried without much pomp.  What sets these graves apart from those of commoners is that they were set apart from other graves, had a fenced enclosure, and were covered with a tumulus of stones that the early Celts called a ferta, which was a sign of high standing.

"The enclosed grave tradition comes straight out of late Roman burial practices," Dark said.  "And that's a good reason why we have them in Britain, but not in Ireland -- because Britain was part of the Roman empire, and Ireland wasn't...  We've got a load of burials that are all the same, and a tiny minority of those burials are marked out as being of higher status than the others.  When there are no other possible candidates, that seems to me to be a pretty good argument for these being the ‘lost' royal burials."

So that's today's news from the past -- ancient blue jeans, primitive surgery, and Dark Age noble burials.  Sorry for starting your day on a grave note.  But it's always fascinating to see not only how things have changed, but how similar our distant ancestors were to ourselves.  If we were to time travel back there, I'm sure there'd be a lot of surprises, but we might be more shocked at how much like us they were back then.  To borrow a line from Robert Burns, a person's a person for a' that and a' that.

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Ghost wardrobe

Debating endlessly over silly conjectures is nothing new.  The claim has been endlessly circulated that the medieval scholastics, for example, conducted learned arguments over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.   Whether they actually argued over the issue is itself the subject of debate; it seems like the earliest iteration of the idea for which we have written evidence is in The Reasons of the Christian Religion by seventeenth century Puritan theologian Richard Baxter, wherein he writes:

And Schibler with others, maketh the difference of extension to be this, that Angels can contract their whole substance into one part of space, and therefore have not Extra Partes.  Whereupon it is that the Schoolmen have questioned how many Angels may fit upon the point of a Needle?

Which I think we can agree is equally silly.  Given that no one has actually conducted a scientific examination of an angel, determining whether they have Extra Partes is kind of a waste of time.

Although you may recall that Alan Rickman as the Angel Metatron in Dogma made a significant point about angels not having genitalia.  Whether that's admissible as evidence, however, is dubious at best.

So there's a good bit of precedent for people wasting inordinate amounts of time arguing over questions that there's no way to settle.  Which is why I have to admit to rolling my eyes more than once over the article by Stephen Wagner, "Paranormal Phenomena Expert," called, "Why Are Ghosts Seen Wearing Clothes?"

I have to admit, however, that it was a question I'd never considered. If the soul survives, and some souls decide not to go on to their Eternal Reward but to hang around here on Earth to bother the living, you have to wonder why their clothes came along with them.   Clothes, I would imagine, have no souls themselves, so the idea that you're seeing the Undying Spirit of grandpa's seersucker jacket is kind of ridiculous.

Be that as it may, most ghosts are seen fully clothed.  There are exceptions; in 2011 a woman in Cleveland claims to have captured video of two naked ghosts having sex.  But I think we have to admit that such afterlife in flagrante delicto is pretty uncommon.

Wagner spoke with some ghost hunters, and turns out that there's a variety of explanations that have been offered for this.  Troy Taylor, of the American Ghost Society (did you know there was an American Ghost Society?  I didn't) said that ghosts are seen clothed because a haunting is the replaying of a deceased spirit's visualization of itself, and we usually don't picture ourselves in the nude.

On the other hand, Stacey Jones, who calls herself the "Ghost Cop," says that ghosts can project themselves any way they want to.  So what they're doing is creating an image of themselves that has the effect they're after, whether it is eliciting fear, pity, sympathy, or a desire for revenge.  Does that mean that Anne Boleyn, for example, could wander around the Tower of London wearing a bunny suit if she wanted to?  You'd think that she'd be mighty bored after nearly five centuries of stalking around with her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm, and would be ready for a change.

Ghost hunters Richard and Debbie Senate were even more terse about the whole thing.  It's a "gotcha question," they say.  But if pressed, they'd have to say that "Ghosts appear as wearing clothes because that's how they appear to us."  Which I think we can all agree is unimpeachable logic.

I find it pretty amusing that this is even a topic for debate.  Shouldn't we be more concerned about finding scientifically-sound evidence that ghosts exist, rather than fretting over whether we get to take our wardrobe with us into the next world?  As I've said more than once, I am completely agnostic about the afterlife; I simply don't know.  I find some stories of near-death experiences and hauntings intriguing, but I've never found anything that has made me come down on one or the other side of the debate with any kind of certainty.  I'll find out one way or the other at some point no matter what, and if I haven't figured it out before then, I'm content to wait.

So I suppose this falls into the "No Harm If It Amuses You" department.  But it does raise the question of what kind of clothes I want to bring with me if it turns out you do get to choose.  If I end up haunting somewhere nice and tropical -- certainly my preference -- all I'll need is a pair of swim trunks.  On the other hand, if I'm stuck here in upstate New York, which seems more likely, I want my winter jacket, wool scarf, hat, and gloves.

Unless my spirit getting stuck here in perpetuity, with no cold-weather gear, is because I've been sent to hell by the powers-that-be.  Which unfortunately also seems fairly likely.

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I'm always amazed by the resilience we humans can sometimes show.  Knocked down again and again, in circumstances that "adverse" doesn't even begin to describe, we rise above and move beyond, sometimes accomplishing great things despite catastrophic setbacks.

In Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Hidden Order of Life, journalist Lulu Miller looks at the life of David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist whose fascination with aquatic life led him to the discovery of a fifth of the species of fish known in his day.  But to say the man had bad luck is a ridiculous understatement.  He lost his collections, drawings, and notes repeatedly, first to lightning, then to fire, and finally and catastrophically to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which shattered just about every specimen bottle he had.

But Jordan refused to give up.  After the earthquake he set about rebuilding one more time, becoming the founding president of Stanford University and living and working until his death in 1931 at the age of eighty.  Miller's biography of Jordan looks at his scientific achievements and incredible tenacity -- but doesn't shy away from his darker side as an early proponent of eugenics, and the allegations that he might have been complicit in the coverup of a murder.

She paints a picture of a complex, fascinating man, and her vivid writing style brings him and the world he lived in to life.  If you are looking for a wonderful biography, give Why Fish Don't Exist a read.  You won't be able to put it down.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

What your clothing says about you

There's no woo-woo belief that is so silly that someone can't make it a whole lot sillier.

So, let's start with psychometry, the idea that people leave "psychic traces" on objects that they handle.  Supposedly, these traces are especially strong if the object was handled by someone in an elevated emotional state.  And the idea is that for psychically-sensitive people (whatever that means), those traces can be detected.

Okay, so not so different than the other kinds of psychic woo-woo -- clairvoyance, telepathy, precognitive dreams, and so forth.  But thanks to one of my sharp Critical Thinking students, we have the story of a woman named Roxanne Usleman, whose hobby is going to thrift stores so she can handle clothing and find out about the people who owned them.

Usleman is featured in a video (here), wherein she goes to Marmalade Vintage Clothing Store and leads the shop owner around making commentary.  Here is how she describes what she does:

[Clothes] communicate completely different than we do on the Earth, kind of a different language.  I work, like, as a translator, basically, as the information comes through I translate it into an Earth form, a three dimension form, where mortal beings can understand it...  When I was woke up in the middle of the night, the clothes are, like, speaking, and they have a history about them, a need to communicate something that happened.

 My own clothes don't seem to communicate anything much to me, except for occasionally the important messages "WASH ME" and "Don't you know how to use an iron?"  But maybe I just don't speak the "language."  Be that as it may, Usleman then goes on to feel up various pieces of clothing, and finds a dress about which she says the following:

Whoever had owned this before, when she had passed away this dress was near her when she had passed away.  So there's something she needs to talk about, it's as if the end of her life did not end in a positive way.  It was very sudden.  Whoever had gotten the dress after, and wore it, immediately gave it away because they didn't want the energy in it.

The shopkeeper then chimes in:

That is true.  I don't know who is the owner, but somebody bought this as a gift for my sister.  And she didn't ever wear it, she didn't want it, so she gave it to me.

And Usleman is just tickled pink about this, and squeaks, and says, "Ooh, so we have a verification!"

Because of course it couldn't be that the sister didn't like it because it's a butt-ugly dress.  No, it has to be the "energies."

Then Usleman says that last night she got a communiqué from a "Laura" and she wanders around the shop to find something that "Laura" owned.  And she finds yet another butt-ugly item, this time a bracelet shaped like a snake with red eyes, and says that this was once owned by "Laura."  Metal, Usleman explains, holds the "energy" of the first person who owned it even better than cloth does.  "Whoever buys this bracelet," Usleman says, "it will be unimaginable, the power.  It will bring them a lot of luck."

Fur, on the other hand, is more difficult, because "the animal is so strong in the fur that it's difficult to connect to the human."  Because of this, you don't pick a fur, the fur picks you.  If it's the wrong person for the fur, "the fur repels them, they'll pass right by it, they may not even see it."

What gets me about this, more than Usleman's dog-and-pony show (because that is pretty clearly all about publicity, and ultimately, money) is why anyone with an IQ that exceeds today's high temperature in Labrador would fall for it.  It's not, as the student who found it pointed out, like the clothing is going to speak up and say, "Um, excuse me.  Actually the woman who owned me was named Muriel, and she's still alive, and donated me to this shop because I am truly hideous."  Psychometry, especially of this sort, falls outside of the realm of the even potentially verifiable, given that clothing in second-hand shops doesn't usually come with a printed ownership history attached.

You really should, however, watch the video, which is under three minutes long.  Usleman's delivery is somewhere between hilarious and grating; she has a Valley-Girl-style flip upwards at the end of each sentence, as if she was asking a question when she's not?  You know?  And she also uses the word "like" a lot, which definitely adds to the overall effect.  Nevertheless, after doing a little research, I found out that she's apparently a hugely popular psychic, with a thriving business doing psychic readings (check out her website here).  On the flip side, however, she was one of the psychics whose predictions were analyzed by Stuart Robbins (see his report here), and he found, unsurprisingly, that "these 'professionals' are NOT capable of telling the future any better than you or I, and some of them are in fact far worse."

And yet, people still give her money for her "psychic abilities."  Which, frankly, baffles me.

So, that's today's contribution from the world of woo-woo.  I'd like to give a shout-out to the student who sent me Usleman's video; this young lady has a truly fine skeptical mind, of the kind that is a pleasure to teach.  As for me, it's time to go get ready for work.  My clothes are communicating with me.  Right now they're saying, "Hey!  You!  You can't just sit around in your bathrobe all day, messing about on the computer!  Get your lazy ass in gear!  But please take a shower before you put us on, okay?  Yeah.  Thanks."

Damn snarky clothes.  Maybe I'll switch to wearing fur, if I can find one that wants me.