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July 31, 2007

Cave men with Blankets?

Dr. BlueEyedGirl (self described "blanket lover") asked last night "how ancient is the human desire to sleep covered by blankets?" Because animal skins require treatment (tanning) to last a long time, my argument was that required some modicum of human society, placing it at say the paleolithic era, though I think I said stone age. Checking Wikipedia this morning I discovered that tanning dates to about 2500 BCE, which is much later. "Weaving leaves" was her theory of early blanket-hood, and flax weaving dates to 3600 BCE. That said, evidence of clothing dates from 30,000 BCE, at least if you can infer that from the existence of sewing needles, which is solidly within the time period we discussed. So blankets probably date from around the same time, in the form of "...fur, leather, leaves or grass, draped, wrapped or tied about the body for protection from the elements".

But I was reading something else this morning that made me think that it was far more ancient that I had supposed. Consider the following quote from the article Swingers from a recent issue of The New Yorker:

Bonobos sleep on their backs--“maybe holding to a branch with just one foot, and the rest of the body looking very relaxed,” Hohmann had said, adding that “nest-building is the only thing that sets great apes aside from all other primates." (He speculates that the REM-rich sleep that nests allow may have contributed to the evolution of big brains.)

That puts the idea of taking pleasure in snugging up with a safe and warm place to sleep and having an active desire to construct a habitat to do the same, is something that all great apes share. That would make it something like 16 million years old.

Posted by OneEyedMan at July 31, 2007 11:00 AM

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