THE HISTORY OF MERINO WOOLWool has been used in clothing for millennia: from primitive man first clothing himself in the woolly skins of wild sheep -through the civilisation of Babylonia where people first distinguished wool sheep from food sheep - through Roman times when there were definite signs of selective breeding for a superior fleece - and through to the ascendancy of wool during the Middle Ages in Europe. By the late eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution began a movement which took the textile industry from the home into the workshop and factory.