Sunday, June 1, 2014

The World's Oldest Pants

Excavated from a nomad tomb in China's Tarim Basin, dating to around 1300 to 1000 BCE. Actually two pairs of pants have been found, each made of three pieces of wool cloth:
The two trouser-wearing men entombed at Yanghai were roughly 40 years old and had probably been warriors as well as herders, the investigators say. One man was buried with a decorated leather bridle, a wooden horse bit, a battle-ax and a leather bracer for arm protection. Among objects placed with the other body were a whip, a decorated horse tail, a bow sheath and a bow. . . .

"This new paper definitely supports the idea that trousers were invented for horse riding by mobile pastoralists, and that trousers were brought to the Tarim Basin by horse-riding peoples," remarks linguist and China authority Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania.

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