LINEN HAS HISTORY FOR ABOUT 10,000 YEARS BACK

What’s linen, then? Let’s start with the real basics — linen is a fabric used for all sorts of purposes, chiefly household items and high-end clothes. It’s made from the inner bark of the flax plant via a fairly strenuous process (more on that shortly), and is thought to have originated in Ancient Mesopotamia—the cradle of many modern civilizations—almost 10,000 (ten-thousand) years ago. TEN-THOUSAND YEARS AGO. Do you know what else they were inventing in Mesopotamia 10,000 years ago? The wheel, mathematics, astronomy, the planting of cereal crops to support growing populations, cursive writing… they weren’t messing about, the Mesopotamians. It took another 9,000 years or so for humankind to put the wheel and flax together to mechanize linen production but, listen, sometimes an idea just needs to sit in the collective consciousness for a while before it comes to fruition.

We should note that there have been reports of evidence of linen usage in a Georgian cave called Dzudzuana, which dates back 36,000 years. At the time of writing, however, this is yet to be confirmed. Imagine that, though. There were only around 50,000 humans living in the whole of Europe at the time, and Neanderthals' had only died out a few thousand years earlier. It boggles the mind that a presumably tiny population of people in a cave in Georgia could make such an advancement in textiles.