Early Synthetic Polymers Polymers have been around longer than we have. In fact, polymers are as old as life itself, as all life on earth is based on three types of polymers, namely DNA, RNA, and proteins. But this report is about some of the earliest synthetic polymers, that is, polymers made by humans, specifically, the cellulose derivatives. The very first synthetic polymer was of course leather, a modified natural polymer, an artificially crosslinked form of the proteins found in animal skins. Leather tanning was discovered thousands of years ago, but I'm going to talk about some synthetic polymers that came a bit later. Thes