Importance of leather :
- Primitive man sought after wild animals for food; he removed the hides and skins from the dead animal carcass and used them like crude tents, attire and footwear.
- The most primitive record of the use of leather dates from the Palaeolithic period, cave paintings found in caves near Lerida in Spain depict the use of leather clothing.
- Quarry of palaeolithic sites has yielded bone tools used for scraping hides and skins to take away hair.
- The skins quickly putrefied and became useless, so a process of preservation was required.
- The earliest process was to stretch the hides and skins on the ground to dry, rubbing them with fats and animals brains while they dried.
- This had a restricted preserving and softening action. Primitive man found also that the smoke of wood fires could preserve hides and skins, as did treating them with an infusion of tannin-containing barks, leaves, twigs and fruits of certain trees and plants.
- It seems probable that man first found how to make leather when he found that animal skins left lying on a wet forest floor became tanned obviously by chemicals released by decaying leaves and vegetation
- Later on the use of earth salts containing alum as a tanning agent to manufacture soft white leather was discovered. The alum leathers could be dyed with obviously occurring dyestuffs in various plants.Features of Leathers >>
