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Where Was Knitting Invented?
Nobody really knows who the first people on earth to knit were. No one knows where they lived and what led to the practice. Cold weather is one of the possible probably reasons which led to knitting, but it is not a foregone conclusion. It could be that the first things humans knitted were used for carrying food or even utilised to hunt or ensnare prey. It is unlikely however, because most knittable fibre tend not to be strong.
Certainly there are regions of the world where the weather is such that any form of clothes-wearing would not have been necessary, even at night for our hardy ancestors. The tropics of West Africa for instance are rarely ever cold enough and presumably early humans in the region would have been resilient enough to withstand subtle changes in their climate. The chances of knitting having originated from the tropics is therefore very unlikely and the lack of historical evidence from the region supports this view. What history there is about knitting is mostly speculation arising from fragments in museums around the world.
Knitting is usually made of wool, silk and other fibres that normally decay over time so any history of the origins of knitting is primarily based on speculation. Even what you might see displayed around the museums of the world as knitting needles are often just sharpened sticks. What they were used for is not beyond any doubt known. Conclusions are often drawn from the circumstances surrounding where they were found and what other minute fibres were discovered on them and so on, but even that is not conclusive evidence. The sharpened sticks could have been used for a number of different tasks. Just because we cannot come up with anything we do in our modern lives which we can imagine those sticks being used for, does not mean there was not some other daily chore, for instance, which early humans had to do, which we have not yet discovered.
From a linguistic perspective, most evidence implies that knitting is a fairly recent invention though. Even in regions of the world where knitted garments such as cashmere sweaters and shawls have been going on for centuries, there are no ancients legends or gods associated with the practice, as there are of say, spinning and weaving. Arachne Nepthys, Ixzaluoh... these relate to some of the dozens of well-known legends about spinning and weaving. No such ancient tales exist about cashmere knitwear for instance. You might argue that the production of cashmere is pretty recent relative to other knittable fibres, but still, knitting seems to be a more recent practice.
Article submitted Friday, February 03, 2012 & read 12 times.
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