Details of the study

The basic assumption is that the development of clothing began after the first humans evolved from ape-like ancestors and descended from the trees to walk upright. The evidence scientists use comes from a variety of primary sources, including skinned bones, sewing needles, awls, and lice. This is how researchers tried to understand what changes occurred in the history of the evolution of lice that could be associated with the loss of body hair in humans and the subsequent acquisition of clothing skills.

Lice are incredibly adapted to their habitat. For example, a species of lice that evolved to live on the human scalp cannot survive among pubic hair. But before our ancestors lost their fur, these lice probably roamed all over their bodies. Scientists examining DNA to reveal the evolutionary history of lice estimate that the two species of lice diverged about 3 million years ago. However, studies on human genetics show that We lost most of our fur about 1.2 million years ago.

Another species of lice has adapted to life on human clothing. These lice are versatile players that can live on a wide variety of fibers, feeding on average once a day.

Reid and his team calculated that head lice were anatomically modern by analyzing when they diverged from clothing lice. People began regularly wearing simple clothing around 170,000 years ago, during the penultimate ice age..

But there is evidence that hominins (a group that includes modern humans and our extinct close relatives) were. I wore the clothes much earlier. Markings on bear bones found at the Paleolithic site of Schöningen in Germany indicate that hominins, possibly Homo heidelbergensis, wore bear skins for warmth. about 300,000 years agoAccording to a study published in April 2023.

If you want to skin an animal, you will leave the most cut marks on the ribs, skull, and also the claws. This is exactly what we found in Schöningen. We started comparing it to other sites from around the same time period and there are cut marks on the turtles as well as their paws. It seems that during this period people were exploiting bears for their hides.
– says Ivo Verheijen, a PhD student at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

The presence of skins is not necessarily a sign of clothing. Our ancestors could use skins to build a shelter, for example. However, Verheijen says that people probably used these skins for warmth, as the temperature at that time was on average 2 degrees Celsius colder. “Humans had to be active to gather food from the surrounding landscape. So some form of clothing had to be necessary to survive.”says the scientist.

So, if there is evidence that clothes date back 300,000 years, and clothes lice only appeared 170,000 years ago, what happened in the meantime?

Because lice must feed on human skin regularly, evidence of lice can only show that humans were wearing clothes very regularly, scientists say. So, if a person wears clothes for one day and then does not use them for a week, lice cannot survive or reproduce.

Additionally, the lice species the researchers studied may not be the only lice species that exists or exists (but is extinct). There are probably other head lice that have parasitized clothing at various stages over the last millions of years.

Additionally, different groups of people have probably started and stopped wearing clothes many times throughout history.

For example, between 32,000 and 12,000 years ago, until the end of the last ice age, Tasmanian Indians retreated into caves, probably to protect themselves from the cold. However, archaeological findings also show that these things existed. Made clothing, including scrapers used to peel animal skins and bone awls used to make holes for sewing.

But then the weather got warmer and they stopped wearing clothes. Already 11,700 years ago and to this day these tools have completely disappeared from the archaeological record. Aborigines “elaborately decorated their bodies, dyed their hair, painted themselves, they had scars, so they did not need clothes.”

So when did the clothes appear?

We can therefore conclude that the first clothing began to appear around 300,000 years ago (although we have not found evidence of earlier), but it was worn sporadically for a period of time – probably only during cold periods of the year. . Wearing clothes only became permanent 170,000 years ago, and in the future people regularly protected their bodies with skin and fabrics.