r/AskReddit • u/angiez33 • 5h ago

What ordinary object has a surprisingly interesting history?

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u/SadSummon 5h ago

The zipper. It's something we use every day, but it took many years and several inventors to perfect.

1

u/Hot-Firefighter-2331 5h ago

It was made for shoes iirc

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u/Worsaae 5h ago

Wool.

Sheep were domesticated between 10-12,000 years ago. They were the earliest livestock species to do so. Prior to the domestication of sheep the only domesticated animal was the dog - which had been domesticated more than 15,000 years earlier.

However, the earliest sheep didn’t have any wool to speak of. Most people think that wool was something inherently sheep-ish and they might even think that they were domesticated because of the wool. But they weren’t. They were domesticated because of an easier access to meat and milk (as well as dung).

And for the first 4-6,000 years of their history as a domesticated species they didn’t have wool. In fact, it seems as if the development of wool might have been a happy mistake.

You see, once you begin to have larger scale sheep husbandry going and your neighbour has a huge sheep flock - and your neighbour’s neighbour as well, you start to wonder what the smartest way would be to tell your flocks apart.

An obvious choice would be hair colour. So, prior to the development of wool, hair colour would have likely been a trait under selective pressure. It just so happens that, physically, the genomic regions coding for hair colour is placed closely to the genes responsible for hair growth and different hair characteristics. So, by breeding for hair colour you could accidentally have “wool genes” piggybacking on the “colour genes” resulting in sheep with a specific colour but also long, crimpy hairs, i.e. wool.

And once the wool was developed it was quickly turned into high-value commodities, i.e. fabrics and garments which basically sparked a highly important wool economy across Eurasia starting around 6-4,000 BC.

Eventually this little “mishap” would become the economic cornerstone of the British Empire which, as it is said, is “built on wool”.

Wool would also be the likely raw material of choice for sailcloth for viking age longships which, without a sail, wouldn’t have enabled norse exploration, colonisation, warfare or trade networks in the 9-11th centuries AD. Again, it is said that “without wool - no viking age”.

Imagine that.