String skirts! Actually, I went back to that part of the book and it's an even greater time depth than I remembered, going all the way back to 20K-year-old Paleolithic female figures who are shown wearing skirts made of string, their purpose unclear. (Decorative? Ceremonial? They don't seem like they would provide much warmth or modesty.) Similar skirts, which may be attached to a strap, apron, or wrap, are found throughout Europe for tens of thousands of years, depicted in art and recovered intact from bogs. In the modern world, women in several parts of the Balkans wear a very similar costume associated with weddings and sometimes childbearing - it wraps around the waist with a fringe that hangs down. The author theorizes that Aphrodite's girdle is basically meant to be something like this, not a belt per se but a wide belt with a long fringe that is meant to hang down, echoing string skirts from 20,000 years earlier.

It is one of those really neat but potentially spurious theories that sounds good but doesn't have an actual, unambiguous line of archeological/anthropological basis to back it up. So, like ... grain of salt, generally, on the entire book. But there is a ton of really interesting information in there that was completely new to me about early textile production and the development of it, from an anthropological perspective, which I found very fascinating.