Imagine what it must’ve been like for your ancestors, walking across a moss-covered forest floor.Surely, at one point, one of them looked down and thought, “Plushy!” and decided to take some of that stuff home for the Cave Sweet Cave. Now imagine their dismay when the moss dried up and “Oooooh! Plushy!” became, “Ugh, scratchy!”Bummer.Surely, our distant kin put soft animal skins down to walk on, lounge on, spill stuff on, and to brag to the neighbors about, but the first verifiable human-made rugs were crafted by nomadic people in the Mesopotamian region some 5,000 years ago. Those early rugs were woven from reeds or grasses or both, and were thought to have been used as a warmer, drier place to sleep on the ground, mattresses being awkward to carry.A couple thousand years later, the Egyptians were aces at weaving animal fibers into colorful rugs that were primarily used in graves or religious rituals, or as good, thick blankets. By 2500 B.C., the talent to weave had spread north to wh...