When early humans evolved from ape-like ancestors, they came down from the trees, walked upright, and lost their fur. But without fur, our ancestors would have been exposed to the elements. They needed clothing for protection. So when did humans 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 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.

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 studying 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 type of louse has evolved to live on people’s clothing. These versatile lice can live on 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.

Investigating when head lice diverged from clothes lice, Reed 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 clothing much earlier. Traces on bear bones found at the Schöningen Paleolithic site in Germany suggest they may have. 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, the skull, the arms and legs. That’s exactly what we found at Schöningen,” Verheijen told Live Science. “We started comparing it to other sites from around the same time, and there are also cuts on the arms, legs and skulls. It looks like people were using bears for skinning at this time.”

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 form 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?

“So if someone wears clothes one day and doesn’t wear them for another week, the lice won’t survive,” Eden Gilligan, a retired researcher at the University of Sydney’s School of Human Sciences, told LiveScience.

At most, the species of clothes louse we studied may not be the only one that exists. “There are probably other large lice that have infested clothing at many stages over the last millions of years,” Gilligan said. Also, different human groups have 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, Aboriginal Tasmanians likely hid in caves to protect themselves from the cold, but the archaeological record also shows that they made clothing, including skin scrapers for scraping animal skins and bone awls for making holes for sewing.

But then the weather got warmer and they stopped wearing clothes.

“Skin Scrapers and Bone Awls from 12,000 Years Ago to Mid-Holocene [11 700 років тому до сьогодні] Gilligan said these tools have disappeared from the archaeological record. “They decorated their bodies elaborately, they dyed their hair, they painted themselves, they scarred themselves, so they didn’t need clothing,” he noted.

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.”

Gilligan, the first author of the study, said in a statement: “Eye-needle tools are an important development in prehistory because they document a shift in the function of clothing from utilitarian to social purposes.” said.