I turned the heel on the first of the "Gentleman's Simple Winter Socks" last night.

And I got to thinking about it - I'm always amazed by the fact that for hundreds of years, knitters - many of them illiterate, many of them without instruction manuals - managed to do this. It's tricky and I still don't quite have a clear picture in my mind how it works. And I wonder who was the first person to come up with turning the heel, and how they did it?

Although, I think it's more likely that it's something that arose many times independently, as different knitters in different countries figured out their own ways of making a knitted piece "turn a corner."

I wonder if anyone's ever tried to do a phylogeny of knitting techniques, to figure out the pattern of cultural evolution? I suspect studying cultural evolution is in some ways more complex than studying natural evolution - because in natural evolution, there's not a cross-species transmission of traits (save for a few cases in bacteria) and transmission is down familial lines, whereas in cultural evolution, there's the possibility for different groups that are in contact to swap "traits" (ways of doing things, words, surface design motifs). (You also don't have DNA to play with when you're looking at the evolution of, say, pottery).

Thinking in an evolutionary context, I would guess the sock heel turn is a trait that arose independently a number of times (ummm...paraphyletic? Is that the right word?). Or possibly like convergent evolution, where in organisms faced with the same selection pressures, similar traits develop (marine mammals and fish - both have streamlining). Knitters faced with similar problems came up with solutions for it, and those solutions look slightly different.

Of course, there'd have to be a big evolutionary split between eastern-style socknitting (toe-up, with an "afterthought" heel, like Turkish socks) and western-European-style (cuff-down, very different shape from the Eastern style, usually a turned heel of some sort but sometimes an hourglass or "peasant" heel). (And it seems to me that there's maybe more adaptive radiation - more different "sock species" in Western European knitting, but I could be wrong - it could be that the Eastern sock styles are not as heavily studied).

I suspect there's also some convergent evolution when it comes to surface design - like "lice" patterns - it's a simple way to catch the non-dominant color so it doesn't make big loops on the inside, and it's something that I think would be fairly "obvious" even if people hadn't seen it. Or maybe it's something that develops because there's that evolutionary constraint: you don't want "toe catchers" on the inside of a garment.

I also wonder about the more complex designs: eight-pointed stars are found in both Turkish and Scandinavian knitting. Is it the result of old, old trade routes going north from the Anatolian region? Or is it that the human eye simply finds symmetrical designs like that pleasing and so many cultures develop it? Or is it the "ghost" of an old, old religion that no longer exists but that once unified a larger group of people than religions do now?

(This is what comes of reading "Trends in Ecology and Evolution" while one knits, and then finishing off the evening looking at "Knitting in the Old Way")