This article was original published by Acculation on another site.
Is there a utilitarian purpose to fashion? Fashion is economically very important in the media and advertising industries for reasons not well understood, at least to the average tech engineer. In the smartphone and wearables area, the two fields are increasingly colliding. Is there an ancient link between technology and fashion? Humans love technology, but we were also very dependent on it very early on. Was fashion initially a way of identifying humans visually over long distances? Was it, in the sense, an early form of technology?
Tech and Fashion: Ancient History?
Our ancestors have been using tools for well over a million years. For most of that time, however, they had brains about half the size that we do currently. Anatomically modern humans that resembled us physically (and had our size brains) first appeared around 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
Here’s where it gets murky. There’s disagreement about when “behaviorally modern” humans first appeared. Some say that anatomically modern humans were “behaviorally modern” when they first appears 200,000 or so years ago, it just took hundreds of thousands of years for modern culture to evolve. Others, citing the explosion of technology in Upper Paleolithic beginning around 50,000 years ago to argue that there was some great quantum leap, perhaps genetic, around that time. Up to that point, we had been sharing the globe with some of our distant cousins such as the Neanderthal, but suddenly, in Upper Paleolithic, we developed advanced new technologies such as clothing, glue, art, perhaps advanced language, and, yes, early fashion. Neanderthal and Peking Man stop appearing the fossil record. (Genetic evidence indicated we inter-breeded with the Neanderthal, and traces of their DNA remain in our blood today, but it was our genes that dominated that interaction.)
The exact nature of that likely genetic breakthrough, if there even was a breakthrough. But all the evidence and thinking points to the fact that relates to art, fashion, and symbolism. The story of how we arrived at that conclusion is an interesting one. Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, separated from us by about 7 million years of evolution. We’ve had some success teaching chimps and other animals the signs for small numbers, but, despite great efforts, we haven’t been to teach even the smartest chimps how count above, say, five or six. They do this by learning each number independently. A human child, of course, can be taught to count to infinity by pointing out that each new number is simply one more than the previous number, and that number, abstractly, is always one more than some other number. This then, is the idea that Noam Chomsky (in his less controversial role as an MIT linguistics professor) is perhaps most famous for: one innovation in human language over animal language is “infinite recursion” of ideas.
Let’s put another way. Animals, such as chimps, dolphins, parrots, and some pets can understand that words (or a sign language symbol) can represent objects and actions in the real world. The big innovation in human language is that a word can represent not just a real world object or action, but a group of words, which, in turn, can each represent more groups of words or concepts. The word “six”, for example, represents “five” and “one” together. So here we get into abstract symbolism. And in Upper Paleolithic you begin to see both fashion and cave paintings (chimps also have a hard time grasping the point of finger painting, but of course children do not.)
What does fashion represent, then? It thought these beads, trinkets, clothing, stylized weapons, and face paint helped identify us to each other at a distance. There is evidence that our Upper Paleolithic ancestors had already developed complex trade relation over long distances. So, one idea is that fashion was necessary to help us identify ourselves to members of other, distant tribes that were friendly but did not speak our language. Probably a better explanation is that we were already dependent on very complicated weaponry and technology in rocky, 3D environment that required us to be able to easily identify each other from far away.
Humans and Technology: an Old Story
This, then, is the ancient link between technology and fashion. Humans love technology, but we were also very dependent on it very early on. We evolved in an extremely harsh environment. We probably were responding evolutionary to rapid climate change. Certainly the weather in “cradle of man” at the time was a desert environment involving very hot days and frigid nights, which forced us to develop fine woven clothing as one of the major inventions of the Upper Paleolithic. Our weaponry also became very complex. In addition to very complicated, coordinated hunts in which we as a group simply outran other animals, we used complex projectile weapons like spears. We were ferocious hunters, capable of dropping large cats, wooly mammoths, and other huge animals from 100 paces or more with poisoned-tips arrows. (In general, when going against a jaguar or a wooly mammoth over rocky terrain, even with a poisoned-tipped arrow, you really want to organize a posse in case you miss: hence complex, abstract language and fashion.) And, of course, the language helped facilitate the construction of that advanced weaponry and visual identifiers that, in turn, made ever increasing sophistication of language more important and more biologically selected for.
Brain tissue is expensive
Brain tissue is expensive tissue, with significant energy requirements. (The brain only runs on a few fuels, such as glucose, and relies on metabolic support from the liver and other organs for the rest.) [Editor’s update: This is topic we would return to many times in larger articles on human evolution and artificial intelligence.] In an adult, the brain might only 3% of bodyweight, but in some newborns it can be 30-50% of body weight. When you then factor in other requirements (such as a supportive liver), you quickly realize we humans really are brains on legs, and that nature has pushed our brain size close to its limit. This suggests our ancestors had an extremely tough time 200,000 and even 50,000 years ago back in Africa, requiring on their intelligence to rapidly adapt to a very harsh, rapidly changing climate, unpredictable food supplies, and disease. And the archeological evidence suggests that n the Upper Paleolithic our species fell in love with technology, which we began to see as the solution to every new challenge Mother Nature threw in our path.
So what does this mean in the modern context? Fashion, style, and technology appear to be deeply-rooted in our genetic and cultural makeup as a species. Having the latest spear, the latest iPhone, the latest fashion, or wearing our clothing and accessories in an easily recognizable, individualistic way, is not just about being “cool.” For our ancestors it was a matter of basic survival, and it’s now part of our DNA.