Thanks for this post, I saved it as comfort reading after a hard day.
On how anybody would invent knitting— I can kind of imagine grokking it if you started with something like finger weaving. (There are a couple of problems here, like starting with loops rather than a single long string, and the product is not obviously useful.)
I wonder how much we know about the history of cat’s cradle? The material is going to be hard to recognize in archeological sites, since it’s just a single loop and if it breaks somewhere it will just look like a string / piece of sinew. So I doubt we know much about how long ago people were first playing games with loops of string. But I could imagine the game and more practical fiber arts could have cross-pollinated.
Thanks for this post, I saved it as comfort reading after a hard day.
On how anybody would invent knitting—
I can kind of imagine grokking it if you started with something like finger weaving. (There are a couple of problems here, like starting with loops rather than a single long string, and the product is not obviously useful.)
I wonder how much we know about the history of cat’s cradle? The material is going to be hard to recognize in archeological sites, since it’s just a single loop and if it breaks somewhere it will just look like a string / piece of sinew. So I doubt we know much about how long ago people were first playing games with loops of string. But I could imagine the game and more practical fiber arts could have cross-pollinated.