Part of the reason for this is that, as early hominids lost their body hair, they became more susceptible to weather changes. Then, as people moved into colder climates, the need for warmth and protection became even more important.
The earliest clothing was likely animal skins, which were supplemented by cloth of some sort by, at the latest, 4400 B.C., the date of the oldest known loom (a device for making cloth). Cloth was common throughout the classical world and elsewhere (especially China) by 2500 B.C., and had spread through virtually the entire civilized world by 1000 B.C. Also in use by this point was the spinner, a device used to combine relatively short fibers from animal hair or plants into long threads that could be used for weaving cloth. Early completely manual spinners were supplanted by spinning wheels, invented in India and brought to Europe in the Middle Ages. This made it possible to produce larger quantities of higher-quality yarn or thread than had previously been the case, although spinning wheels still required a person to operate each one.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, then, this was the textile industry: a worker sitting at a spinning wheel spun fibers into thread or yarn, which was taken to another worker sitting at a loom, weaving cloth.
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