Summer is usually shorts weather, but there’s some new research on pants that’s worth a look, especially when you know that the pants at the center of this work is from 3,000 years ago.

As Ars Technica reported recently, these pants were found on a man who was buried in western China between 1000 and 1200 BCE.

So they were made well before any of the modern technology and material that can make pants flexible, comfortable, sturdy and good-looking.

But what the researchers found was even without all those modern conveniences, these ancient pants got the job done.

The entire pair was made of wool, but different sections of the garment were made with different weaving techniques.

That gave the parts that needed to be flexible more flexibility, and it gave more strength to the the parts that needed to be strong and sturdy.

There’s even a waistband to keep the pants from falling!

Plus, the weaving techniques included ornate patterns and designs.

They were fashionable as well as functional.

All of this would have been important to the man who wore the pants.

Researchers believe he was a warrior, so he would have needed pants that freed him to do what warriors do, while maybe helping to protect him and possibly also reflecting his social status.

If nothing else, he would have needed them to be sturdy.

And if we’re still talking about them 3,000 years later, whoever made the pants definitely got that part right.

The South Carolina Peach Festival is getting underway in the community of Gaffney.

In 1978, participants baked the world’s largest peach pie.

In 1989, they broke a world record for most guitarists and vocalists performing “Louie, Louie.”

If you get lost on the way to the event, just look for the Peachoid.

That’s a one million gallon water tank that’s designed to look like an enormous peach.

The world’s oldest pants are a 3,000-year-old engineering marvel (Ars Technica)

South Carolina Peach Festival

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Photo by CJ Sorg via Flickr/Creative Commons