The Super-Ancient Origins of Your Blue Jeans
Peruvians were creating distinctive indigo-blue cotton fabrics long before the pyramids were built.
For archaeologists in the far-off future, two-legged cotton garments dyed with indigo will be classified as one of the most common human adornments of the 20th and 21st centuries. In typical archaeological fashion, these "jeans" will be assigned various subcategories, such as "skinny" or "bootcut," and their geographic ubiquity will be held up as evidence for rapid globalization of trade and culture during the time period.
These future "jeanaeologists" will also point back to an intriguing report, published today in Science Advances, that shows that humans were already dyeing cotton with indigo at least 6,000 years ago.
This discovery came as a surprise to the researchers who analyzed eight fragments of cotton textiles excavated at Huaca Prieta, a site in
