How did our ancestors make leather

The oldest known piece of leather in the world was discovered in a cave in the Vayotz Dzor province of Armenia and is thought to be from around 3,500 BCE which would make it about 500 years older than the pyramids of Giza. Even though this is the oldest known piece of leather on earth, it definitely isn’t the first ever made because people would have been using leather to clothe themselves long before they began to farm fibers and spin threads.

(The oldest known piece of leather on earth, aged for 5,500 years)

The use of animal skins was necessary during the ice age and was the primary form of clothing up until the Bronze Age which started around 3,000 BCE, but it’s unknown exactly how well-made it was before we started to find artifacts that could be studied.

Leather is simply just cured animal hide, but there isn’t a set definition as to how it could be cured. There were various ways to do this but the four most common methods are listed below after the preparation stage.

The prep work

Before leather can be made using any method, it first has to get into a state where it can be turned into leather. An animal is killed and the hide is carefully cut off before being washed to remove any blood or dirt, then the scraping begins. The inside of the skin will have a layer of fat sticking to it which needs to be removed, to do this a knife or a sharp tool is scraped against the underside of the skin over and over until nothing remains but the actual hide.

The next stage is to put it on a stretching rack to stop it from shrinking as it dries, and after all the moisture has left the skin and it has stopped trying to shrink, it can then be made into leather.

(All fat and tissue had to be removed from the inside of the skin which was done by scraping, if any was left on it would rot and spoil the leather)

Tannin boiled leather

Tannin is a substance that can be found in many plants across nature but is found in the highest amounts in nuts and certain berries. Its job within the plant is to help preserve it and make the skins of fruit waterproof, but it’s very hard to extract in a relatively pure form from everything it’s in apart from one very common type of nut, the Acorn. If you take a load of acorns and slightly crush them so the inside is exposed before putting them into some water, after a few hours you will see the water start to turn a dark yellow color, this is all the tannins leaching out.

Acorns have a very high concentration of this substance which makes it a perfect choice for a source of tannin, which in turn allowed for large amounts of leather to be made. After the skin has been stretched and dried, it will be put into a large pot filled with boiling tannin water and then heated for an hour or so. The skin will then be dried again before being softened and made into something, with the tannins remaining within the leather to act as a preservative and stop it from rotting.

Dried, stretched and smoked

After the initial drying stage, the skin will be kept on the rack and a small but smoky fire will be lit close by to slowly smoke the skin as it is being stretched. This method produces a very stiff leather that smells of campfires, but the smoke acts as a preservative and stops the decomposition of the material. This method was most likely one of the earliest used as it’s the easiest and most straightforward, and even though it does technically produce leather, it won’t last anywhere near as long compared to the other methods.

(A pair of leather boots recovered during a dig which have been dated at 3,500 years old)

Fat or organ cured

Sometimes finding pure enough tannin to use wasn’t an option, especially in certain areas of the world, so they had to find other things they could use to cure their leather. The two most common things used as a replacement for tannins were fat and mashed brains. Fat does an excellent job of making things waterproof and works well as a preservative, with brains from the animal presumably working similarly. After the drying and stretching phase, the fat would be rubbed in a thin layer over the leather before being worked into it, and after it absorbed as much as it could and was the desired level of softness, the excess would be scraped off and it would be left to dry. This method would be more popular as a shelter covering as the fat would likely seep out and make the clothes greasy when it was warmed to body temperature.

Sap cured

Using the same method as with animal fat, but instead replacing it with some kind of tree sap. Various Inuit tribes use birch sap to rub on their animal skins while working them to make leather, which produces the flexible type with fur still on one side. Any kind of sap that has a high sugar content will work, but using this method alone won’t produce anything that will last for very long. Before it’s finished off with sap, the leather will most likely be smoked or boiled first to increase its strength and preservability.

(Leather is the number one choice for the Inuit tribes of the Arctic circle, due to it being warmer than any kind of fabric)

Urine Cured

The most common method of making leather was to boil the prepared animal skin in urine. The minerals in the urine helped to cure it to a state where it could be made into pretty much anything, including armor. This method has been used for thousands of years and was only abandoned about 100 years ago when more efficient chemical methods became available. There is a common saying in the UK of someone being “piss poor” which refers to the old custom of people selling their urine to leather makers. Due to the tiny amount of money someone would get for a week’s worth of urine, the only people who did this would be very poor, or poor enough to sell piss rather.

How did our ancestors make leather flexible enough to make clothes

If you use any of the methods above, the leather you end up with will be extremely tough and stiff, making it very difficult and uncomfortable to use as clothing material. At this stage, the only thing it would be good for is making shoe soles or perhaps as a tent covering, but in order to make it flexible enough to make into clothing it has to be softened. To do this there are various things you can add to it to help it soften, but the most common way was simply to work it for hours on end. It’s the same method as washing clothes by hand, where you take two handfuls and roughly rub them against each other, but when it comes to freshly made leather, this needs to be done for a very long time.