When the first humans evolved from ape-like ancestors, they came down from the trees, started walking upright, and lost their fur. But without fur, our ancestors would have been exposed to the elements. They needed clothes for protection. So when did people start wearing clothes?
This is a difficult question because artifacts made of stone, bone, and other hard materials, as well as clothing, do not survive. Instead, scientists have to be creative. The evidence used to answer this question comes from a variety of primary sources, including bones with evidence of skin scrapings, sewing needles, awls, and bits.
“We were trying to understand what changes occurred in the evolutionary history of lice that might be associated with the loss of body hair and the subsequent acquisition of clothing by humans,” said David Reed, a biologist at the University of Florida.
Lice are incredibly specialized in where they live; for example, a species that grows into human head hair cannot survive in human pubic hair. But before our ancestors lost their fur, these lice were probably crawling all over their bodies. Scientists have studied DNA to uncover the evolutionary history of lice, estimating that the two species split about 3 million years ago. But studies of human genetics suggest that we lost our hair about 1.2 million years ago. Taken together, these studies suggest the interval between when our ancestors lost their fur.
Another species of lice has evolved to live on people’s clothing. These versatile lice can live in a variety of fibers.
“On average they’re fed once a day; they get a little bit fed up, which is unfortunate, and then they go back to their clothes, which is safe,” Reid said.
By investigating when head lice diverged from clothes lice, Reed and his team estimated that anatomically modern humans began regularly wearing simple clothing during the penultimate ice age, about 170,000 years ago.
But there is evidence that hominins (a group that includes modern humans and our close extinct relatives) wore clothes much earlier. Imprints on bear bones found at the Paleolithic site of Schöningen in Germany suggest they may have been hominins. Homo heidelbergensisAccording to research published by Ivo Verheijen, a doctoral student at the University of Tübingen in Germany, people wore bearskins to stay warm about 300,000 years ago. and colleagues in April 2023.
“If you want to skin an animal, the cut marks you leave behind are usually on the ribs, skull, arms and legs. That’s exactly what we found in Schöningen,” Verheijen told LiveScience. said. . “We started comparing it to other sites from around the same time period, and there are also cuts on the arms, legs and skulls. It seems like around this time people were using bears for their skins.”
Evidence of skinning does not necessarily mean evidence of clothing; hominins could use these skins to build a shelter, for example. But Verheijen said people probably used the skins for warmth at that time because the temperature was about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) colder.
“People had to be active to gather food from the land,” Verheijen added. “So some form of clothing must have been necessary to survive here.”
So, if there is evidence for the existence of clothes 300,000 years ago, and clothes lice evolved only 170,000 years ago, what happened in the meantime?
Eden Gilligan, a retired researcher at the University of Sydney’s School of Humanities, told Live Science. “So if someone wears clothes for one day and doesn’t wear them for another week, the lice won’t survive,” he said.
At best, the type of clothes lice we examined may not be the only type that exists. “There are probably other large lice that have invaded clothing at many stages over the last millions of years,” Gilligan said. Additionally, different groups of people probably started and stopped wearing clothes many times throughout history.
For example, between 32,000 and 12,000 years ago, before the end of the last ice age, Tasmanian Indians hid in caves, probably to protect themselves from the cold. But the archaeological record also shows they made clothing, including leather scrapers used to scrape animal skins and bone awls used to punch holes for sewing.
But then the weather got warmer and they stopped wearing clothes.
“Skin Scraping Tools and Bone Awls from 12,000 Years Ago to the Mid-Holocene [11 700 років тому до сьогодні] These tools have disappeared from the archaeological record, Gilligan said. He noted that “they carefully decorate their bodies, dye their hair, paint themselves, make scars, so they don’t need clothes.”
More elaborate garments, including those decorated with beads and shells and some form-fitting garments, probably emerged with the development of humans and other sharp tools. A 2024 study in the journal Science Advances found that the emergence of more complex, sewn garments, such as underwear, probably came about with the invention of eyed needles. The earliest known eyed needles date back 40,000 years and were found in Denisova Cave in Siberia, the authors write, marking a new era of “more sophisticated, efficient sewing.”
“Eyed needle tools are an important development in prehistory because they document a shift in the function of clothing from utilitarian to social purposes,” Gilligan, first author of the study, said in a statement.
Source: Port Altele
