Clothing does not survive in the same way that artifacts made of stone, bone, and other hard materials survive; so scientists need to get creative to answer this question. 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 do not survive as much as clothing. Instead, scientists must be creative. The evidence used to answer this question comes from a variety of primary sources, including bones, sewing needles, awls, and lice, which contain evidence of skin scrapings.

“We were trying to understand what changes had occurred in the evolutionary history of lice that might be associated with the loss of body hair in humans and the subsequent acquisition of clothing by humans,” said David Reed, a biologist at the University of Florida. Live. Science.

Lice are incredibly specialized in where they live; For example, a species that evolves into human head hair cannot survive among human pubic hair. But before our ancestors lost their fur, these lice probably roamed all over their bodies. By examining DNA to reveal the evolutionary history of lice, scientists estimate that the two species diverged about 3 million years ago. However, research on human genetics shows that we lost our hair approximately 1.2 million years ago. Taken together, these studies show the range over which 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 feed once a day; they gorge themselves, which is unfortunate, and then they get back into their clothes, which is safe,” Reid said.

By investigating when head lice diverged from clothes lice, Reid and his team estimated that anatomically modern humans 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 close extinct relatives) wore clothes much earlier. Imprints on bear bones found at the Schöningen Paleolithic site 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 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 sort of clothing must be 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 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 probably hid in caves 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 do not need clothes.”