spinning and weaving are very old.

twine (a heavy, coarse material made by hand spinning (often just rub twisting it on one's leg) is the simples of spun fibers.

with time and practice, the material got finer.. and you end up with cord, and finally yarn. (and eventually thread)

Textile (fabric)are the 'original' technology. (a word now used to mean almost everything but textiles! (remember this from the fabric and fabricate (the idea of building!) thread?

as for knitting, i regular knit 2 socks (on 2 needles (seamlessly!) and some thing as simple of as socks (except for the heel or toe (which get shaped) are 'mindless knitting', i don't have to look at the work to do it.
(last year, when i was teaching knitting, i taught a blind woman to knit.. just the simplest of stuff, but she learned to knit!)

but knitting is no where near the oldest of the textile arts. weaving is far older. (pre-historic!) we know this because we have 'loom weights' (donut shaped stones, weighting between 3 and 10 pounds. most museums have a collection, but the curators, in 'acts' of purity never show looms, because no scrap of fabric nor any pieces of looms have survived. Nor do they show early man wearing woven cloth. Bog men, and bodies like the one of the man found frozen in alps some years ago are incredible, because they often preserve small scraps of woven cloth --different types of looms are used for different weaves (or were) so even small scraps of cloth give some understanding to the type loom it was made on)

i suspect in ancient times, some clever person realized a loosely 'woven' mesh would be good for catch fish (the same way a spider catches flies.

twine was often made by men, so its would be expected that men were the first weaves. (as the scots song "the work of weavers' always declares! (but women seemed to have created/learned basket weaving on their own, so there were no doubt, cross polination of ideas about what to do with twine, string, cords, yarns and threads!


my other obsession