It seems like style hasn’t changed all that much between the Stone Age and now. What’s thought to be the oldest purse was found in an excavation site in Germany. The front flap of the purse is studded with more than 100 dog teeth. Nowadays, we decorate shoes and purses with metal studs, but the Stone Age people clearly liked using something a little more…natural.
The leather purse itself disintegrated a long time ago, but archaeologists can tell that the dog teeth covered a purse because of the way they were placed and how the dirt surrounding them solidified. Using dog teeth as decoration wasn’t an uncommon practice. They were often used on hair clips, necklaces and sometimes even burial blankets.
Finding dog teeth on so many things is very exciting because it shows us that people in Stone Age had concepts like fashion and style. This gives us some insight as to how people thought back then and what they considered to be important. Hunting would have primarily been done for food and fur, so people to making the effort to kill animals for their teeth means that fashion was highly regarded. Some things never change!
To cover an entire front of a purse would have taken an awful lot of teeth. It makes one suspect that what was been carried around was something very valuable. What do you think?