While there has been much fuss—and much fuss about the fuss—over an Armani jacket that Hillary Clinton recently wore, she was donning another piece of clothing that same day with far more historical importance for women: pants.

The silence on that point speaks to a revolution that has been centuries in the making, one worth recalling as the appearances and clothing of women continue to be policed like a recently robbed convenience store. (Case in point: the London woman who was sent home from her job in May for refusing to wear high heels.) The story begins where it ends, with a culture in which women wearing pants was the norm.

Nomadic tribes roaming the European Steppe about 3,000 years ago were the first to domesticate horses, and they invented the first two-legged garments that eventually became the pants we know today, scholars say. In grave excavations, hundreds of men and women from these tribes have been found buried with weapons and both wearing the same type of clothes, some of which were preserved in permafrost.