The needle with an eye

The story

A tiny object in an enormous cave

In the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia there is a long, cool cave called Denisova, named after a Russian hermit of the eighteenth century who found shelter in it. For over forty years archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk have been digging it layer by layer, and each layer is like a page of a book: the further down you go, the further back in time. In one of the ancient layers, the team led by the archaeologist Anatoly Derevianko pulled out a small, thin thing, about seven centimetres long, made from a bird bone. It had a sharp point and, at the other end, a little hole: an eye. It was a needle, and it was about 50,000 years old; the discovery was announced in 2016.

It may seem a small thing. But think what a needle is for: to join two pieces of skin with a thread, and to do it neatly and precisely. Without a needle, you can wrap skins around the body and tie them, like someone using a blanket. With a needle, you can cut and sew made-to-measure clothes that cling to the body without leaving gaps for the draught. For living in an icy climate, the difference is great.

How a needle was made

To make a bone needle you first had to choose the right bone: long, thin, strong, like that of a large bird. Then it was cleaned and smoothed with a rough stone, rubbing for a long time to get a tapered shape. The most delicate part was the eye: a hole was made with a flint point, turning it gently from both sides until the two holes met. One blow too many and the bone would break. It was the work of an expert craftsman.

The thread was made from animal tendons, or from twisted plant fibres. The skins, already scraped with stone tools and softened, were pierced with a small bone awl, then sewn. Of all this almost nothing remains, because clothes rot away. What survives are the needles, the awls, the scrapers with traces of use, and sometimes the beads that decorated the clothes.

Who used them?

The Denisova needle is among the oldest known, but it is not easy to say who made it. It was found in a layer where remains of the Denisovans have also been discovered, relatives of the Neanderthals and of sapiens, and for this reason some researchers think it was their work. But the layer is ancient, its precise dating is disputed and the link with a particular species is not proved. In the same cave a bracelet of polished, perforated stone, about 40,000 years old, was also found, and it attracts a great deal of attention.

Eyed needles become much more common after 40,000 years ago, in Europe, Siberia and Asia, among sapiens. With their help human beings pushed into icy territories. In north-eastern Siberia, at a site called Yana, beyond the Arctic Circle, mammoth hunters lived about 32,000 years ago, in a place where the winter is very long and the temperature falls far below zero. Without warm clothes it would have been impossible.

Clothes fit for princes?

We also know that clothes were not only for keeping warm. At Sungir, near Vladimir in Russia, graves about 34,000 years old were found with a man and two children buried with thousands of mammoth-ivory beads. The beads were arranged in rows, as if they had been sewn onto clothes. Making them took thousands of hours of work. Clothes, therefore, also said who you were, what group you belonged to, how important you were.

Clothing is another of the inventions that made it possible for our species to live where nature had not prepared us. We have no fur and no fat under the skin against the cold: we have a technology, and a bone needle is its simplest symbol.