6000-Year-Old Indigo Fabric Discovered in Peru Is the Secret Behind the 'Blue' in Your Blue Jeans

Blue jeans are a commodity that has become hard to miss in the modern world. Researchers have long known that this 'recent' development has roots in the centuries-old practice of indigo dyeing, Popular Science reported.

A 2016 study published in Science Advances traced the origins of this practice back to 6,000 years in Peru. Before this finding, experts thought that the oldest instance of cloth dyeing happened in Egypt.

The researchers associated with the study claim they have found Andean cotton fabric from Peru with some traces of indigo. Experts believe the development will change the way the history of clothing is perceived, PBS reported.

The discovery proves that cloth dyeing was not a Eurocentric development, as it was previously believed by the scientific community, and involved multiple cultures.

"This finding forces us to see the history of the ancient Americas is our history, too," Jeffrey C. Splitstoser, an anthropologist at George Washington University shared. 

The cloth was spotted in Huaca Prieta, a coastal settlement in the Chicama Valley of Peru. Archaeologist Junius Bird led excavations at the site in the 1940s. During the exploration, he found that textiles were popular at the settlement and collected some woven goods with blue shade from the site. At that time, he had no way to prove if the blue shade was indigo.

Splitstoser arrived at Huaca Prieta along with chemist, Jan Wouters of University College London. They put the fabric collected by Bird under the scanner and found indigotin, a plant-based indigoid dye.

This finding implies that the practice of indigo dyeing was older than previously thought, PBS reported.

"Discoveries like this one in Peru help us gain a better understanding of humanity’s evolving relationship with color – how civilizations have created, applied, and manipulated color in their environments," said Jennifer Cohlman Bracchi, reference librarian at the Smithsonian Design Museum. "This relationship should be considered just as insightful about a culture as studying their architecture, writings, and artifacts."

Researchers believe that indigo dyeing could go back even further than 6,000 years, Popular Science reported. They think that more studies in clothes dyeing are needed to understand how this practice that made Levi Strauss and Henry David Lee literal icons, came to be in human history.