Prehistory is the period before recorded history.
It is the period that begins with the appearance of the
human being, about five million years ago, and finishes with
the invention of writing, about 6,000 years ago.
It is a long period divided into three stages:
the Paleolithic Age,
the Neolithic Age and
the Metal Age.
The Paleolithic Age began with our first ancestors and
finished about 10,000 years ago. During that period, human
beings used tools made of stone and lived on hunting and
gathering.
In the Neolithic Age, which began about 10,000 years ago,
human beings lived in villages. Human communities
cultivated the land and raised cattle. Agriculture and cattle
raising gave rise to a productive economy.
STONE AGE (ART)
Metal Age period began about 7000 years ago, when human
beings started to make objects out of metals.
Prehistoric art was developed by humans from the Stone
Age (Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic), periods when
the first demonstrations that can be considered art by humans,
appear.
During the Paleolithic , man practiced hunting and lived
in caves, where cave painting was developed.
After a transitional period, Mesolithic, in the Neolithic period,
when man became engaged in agriculture, with societies
becoming increasingly complex and religion gaining
importance, the production of handicrafts commenced.
Finally, in the Bronze Age, the first historic civilizations arises.
Paleolithic art produced from about 32,000 to 11,000 years ago,
during the Stone Age.
It composed of the-
Lower Paleolithic,
Middle Paleolithic, and
Upper Paleolithic
It includes both portable pieces and cave art.
The portable art was found in much of Europe, Northern
Africa, and Siberia, takes the form of small figurines or
decorated objects
They were carved out of bone, antler, or stone
cave art takes the form of paintings, drawings, and
engravings on cave walls.
They decorated their caves walls with paintings and made
sculptures. Among these sculptures venus forms were
exceptional.
The most famous paintings are in the caves of altamire, in
spain, and Lascaux, in France.
Cave paintings-
NEOLITHIC ART
•Human beings discovered agriculture and cattle raising
•They realized that hunting wild animals and gathering fruits and
plants were not the only way of getting food.
•They learnt to cultivate plants and domesticate animals. When
human beings knew how to produce their own food their lives
changed.
This process is so important that we call it revolution.
The first plants they cultivated were cereals: wheat in the
Middle East and Europe, rice in Asia and corn in America. The
first domesticated animals were horses, dogs: goats, sheep and
oxen.
Tribes needed to live near arable land to cultivate cereals. They
stopped moving from place to place to find food and
became stable. They built villages, usually situated next to
rivers
•Art is an excellent testimony of the way human beings in the
Neolithic Age lived.
•The human figure becomes more important in the cave
paintings and artists began to paint scenes: groups of people
hunting, harvesting vegetables or dancing.
•Figures were very schematic.
STONE AGE
(FASHION AND COSTUMES)
Significant Costume-Specific Inventions of the Stone
Age
•draped animal hide clothing
•washing of garments
•dyes, bleaching, tanning of hides
•Shoes
•the needle, awl
•Spinning
•hand weaving
•woven plant-fiber cloth
Main Features of Stone Age Clothing
Lower Paleolithic- no evidence of clothing
Middle Paleolithic- draped animal hides, sometimes bound
with sinew
Upper Paleolithic- animal hides punched with awls and sewn
with sinew and bone needles
Mesolithic- animal hides punched with awls and then sewn
with sinew and bone needles
Neolithic- animal hides punched with awls and sewn with
sinew and bone needles, first appearance of woven plant fiber
textiles
There is no direct evidence, such as clothing remnants, tools
or artifacts to prove the existence of these things during lower
Paleolithic
It is only through the study of implements left behind and the
places early humans lived and worked that we know about what
they did or did not wear.
Early materials from which clothing was made are perishable
and could not survive long, leaving us with no record of design
or placement of these earliest garments.
The oldest direct evidence of the use of shoes
Upper Paleolithic clothing was most often made of
tanned animal hides, punched with a stone or bone awl
and then sewn together with a bone needle.
Historians believed that they also knew how to make woven
clothing from grass, especially those in warmer climates.
They were known to wear jewelry made of shells, animal
teeth, flowers, feathers & bone.
They also used dyes made from minerals and plants to paint
or tattoo their bodies.
Mesolithic societies continued to craft sewn clothing from the
tanned hides of animals, probably a little more deftly than
their predecessors. No evidence of textiles from this period
exist in Europe.
Costumes in Neolithic was similar to costumes we have now.
Tops were squarish and bag-like with holes for the head and
arms.
sleeves were roughly rectangular and were sewn into simple
arm holes.
Trousers were not yet invented. Early humans either wore
skirt-like garments such as long tunics and dresses or wore a
tunic with leggings and a loincloth.
A loincloth was most commonly tucked into a belt at the
waist. Leggings were simply hides wrapped around the legs and
held in place with sewn stitches
Shoes were more complex by the Neolithic and could provide
excellent protection to wearers
Below are the examples of the jewelry of that period
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