it is human nature to weave strings of yarn, threads, or fibers together to make cloth and textiles
humans will see a soft cellulose plant material or downy animal coat and say is anyone going to twist that staple fibre in order to make a cohesive thread and then not wait for an answer
Seriously, spinning as a craft is ancient. Archaeologists recently discovered three-ply fiber that’s around 46,000 years old, blowing the previous “oldest fingers” out of the water by thousands of years.
But get this: It’s made from fucking TREE BARK. Can you imagine the dedication, foresight, and experimentation involved in figuring out how to harvest and spin that? On top of everything, it’s also lace weight. What the fuck, Neanderthals?
Article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/neanderthals-made-the-worlds-oldest-thread/
Also, big ole slow clap for the article writer.

it’s very cool that neanderthals managed to get yarn out of bark fiber, but i think you might be under the impression that all tree bark is like, oak, or sycamore, or something, and only exists in ‘thick chunk of wood’ or ‘flake of wood’ form. but there’s lots of bark like elm and cedar that peels away from the tree in long, tough strips, like so:

like, look at it. it’s string. it’s obviously string. you don’t actually have to be a genius to look at this and think ‘ah! string time :)’

i’ve picked up shed pieces of elm bark on a golf course, stripped and combed out the fiber with just my fingernails, and started hand-twisting good strong cordage right then and there as i walked. you don’t even have to soak it first, though i think if you want finer/softer cordage it helps to soak, beat, and comb the fibers.
the people of the pacific northwest, where there’s so many cedars, developed really wonderful textiles out of cedar bark fiber, pounding and soaking and combing it a bit like linen. i’ve never gotten to touch any, though i’d really like to.

here’s a whole page on all the different stems and barks that can be used for cordage! how cool is that?
so, not to denigrate the skill and intelligence of ancient people, but if you already know how to hand-spin grass and hair, then spinning bark is an extremely obvious and easy thing to do as soon as you encounter the right kind of bark.
Not terribly relevant to the question of spinning bark from cordage but @roach-works mentioned PNW weaving so I have to add this because it’s too cool not to share: some of the Native nations of the Pacific Northwest also kept wool dogs! As in dogs who were bred specifically for their coats, and they mixed the dog fur with cedar fiber to weave blankets and other textiles.
As with so many things related to indigenous knowledge, many tribes had oral histories of the wool dogs but because it was barely mentioned in European accounts (and the wool dog breed is extinct) it was “unconfirmed” until relatively recently, when microscopic analysis of extant blankets in museum collections showed that many of the blankets were woven from a mix of fibers that included dog fur!
The Dogs That Grew Wool
and the People Who Love Them
| Hakai Magazine
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.















