The invention of sewing
Ghrubru had always wished that the skins she used as blankets were larger, and when Khracha went hunting, she always reminded him to take great care when skinning his quarry to make sure he carved out the largest piece possible. Although people did not have words yet, they managed to convey what they thought to those they were close to by a kind of telepathy. The longer people spent with each other, the more easily they communicated. As we know, once they began to use words, this ability weakened.
I think you do this on purpose to annoy me, she communicated to him. Khracha knew she meant he cut the skin into smaller pieces than she liked, but thought that she might have been joking. Imagine how difficult the task is, he messaged to her, when you only have small flint stones.
The problem with small skins is that you covered yourselves with five or six pieces and in the night they slipped away, fell off, leaving large parts of the body uncovered.
Now it is well-known that when someone is trying to find a new idea, if and when it comes, it does not usually do so a piece at a time. I mean you don’t get half the idea in the morning and then the missing half comes to you in the afternoon. Ghrubru had done no more than wish to find larger blankets. She did not formulate the wish that two smaller pieces could somehow be fixed together to produce a larger piece. In the past, when facing a certain need for something new and tangible, you knew the limitations and lived without it, until one day, possibly, whilst you’re embarked on something completely unrelated, an idea hits you whole, and you have solved your problem. For example when she wished she had something to keep in milk for the children, she wracked her brain for weeks with not one single idea, then in the middle of the night she shook Khracha violently and sent him the image of a coconut. He had not taken too kindly to being rudely awakened and pushed her away violently. In those days even loving couples often resorted to violence when they were frustrated by something. In the morning he had picked a coconut which had fallen in the night, and with flints, he worked all morning to remove the husk. Then he and Ghrubru taking turns, managed to saw the shell in two, at its equator. The coconut water was shared by the two kids. The inside was devoured by the family, and at the end of the day Ghrubru had her first bowl.
In the same manner, Ghrubru kept thinking about larger skins, then one day after the couple, who often hunted together, had come home with a large boar, she kept being drawn to the long hairs of the quadruped. In the night she had a clear idea of what she was going to do.
She carefully chose some of the longest single hairs there were. They were strong and malleable. She took the ends between her thumb and index finger in each hand and pulled, and was pleased when she noticed that the strand was quite strong. What to do next came to her instantly. She went outside and fetched some small sticks no longer than the length of her arm. She took a whole hour polishing one and sharpening its ends.
Unfortunately, after all this work, she found that the skin had become dry and tough, making it impossible to pierce holes into it. It was Khracha who found the idea of heating the end of the stick until it became red hot. It worked, but they needed one stick per hole and it was a very slow process. It took them the whole afternoon to make five holes in each skin, through which the boar hair could be threaded, but that was the first time anybody managed to get two skins tied to each other.
They had invented the needle and sewing.
