When did clothing originate?

Searching for the origins of Paleolithic clothing

Not long ago, I left my home in sunny Australia to join an archaeological dig in the Siberian mountains of eastern Russia. The first morning, I woke up cold to the core, even in a well-padded sleeping bag. I crept close to the fire and held my hands so close that the gloves caught fire. But I kept shaking. I was cold inside.

As a doctor, I recognized the symptoms of mild hypothermia.

Siberia is a region where people surely always needed warm clothes. The origins of clothing are of particular interest to me, a notoriously difficult topic because items of clothing rarely last very long. Trained in medicine and archaeology, investigate the matter combining what is known about the thermal limits of human bodies and paleoenvironments. My brush with hypothermia, while embarrassing for someone with my experience, reaffirmed my focus.

Body coverage standards vary across cultures. But many people would be mortified if caught naked in public. For people in cold climates, insufficient clothing can be fatal, as I felt in Siberia. However, no other creature puts on clothes. Why our ancestors, unique in the entire animal kingdom, adopted clothing is one of those big questions that science has recently begun to address.

Although many gaps remain in the story, emerging evidence suggests that clothing actually had two origins: first through biological and then cultural necessity.

The invisible remains of early clothing

Archaeologists studying the Paleolithic or Stone Age tend to ignore clothes. This is perhaps not surprising, considering that not a single fragment has survived from this ice age era between roughly 2.6 million and 12,000 years ago. Archaeologists are reluctant to look for something they will never find.

Stone Age clothing may be invisible to archaeology, but that doesn’t mean the origins of Paleolithic clothing can’t be scientifically investigated. For example, fossils show that humans inhabited Eurasia in the ice age when frigid wind chills reduced safe exposure times to one to two hours. Clearly, those people had suitable clothing. And luckily, the tools used to make clothes, such as sewing needlesprovide some tangible, albeit indirect, evidence.

It is also useful to distinguish between simple and complex clothing. Simple clothing hangs loose, such as capes, cloaks, or loincloths. They can be warm, for example a draped fur cape, but simple clothing is prone to wind penetration. Intricate clothing hugs the body comfortably, usually with separate sleeves or pants. Also, complex clothing can be multi-layered.

Archaeologists can detect simple and complex clothing in the Paleolithic record because they involve different technologies. Fur-scraping tools indicate the existence of simple clothing, and many fur-scrapers emerge at archaeological sites in mid-latitudes from a million years onwards. However, hominids equipped with scrapers disappear from mid-latitudes during glacial periods, reflecting the limited insulating value of simple garments.

Complex clothing required more complex technologies. To shape animal skins, people used dedicated cutting tools called blades. They also punched holes in the skins to sew the cut segments together. The basic tool for piercing skin is called an awl, a thin, pointed artifact often made from an elongated animal bone, such as a thin forearm bone or rib. Later, Paleolithic humans invented a more sophisticated sewing tool: the eyed needle.

The first beginning of Paleolithic clothing.

Tracking these artifacts through time and space suggests that Paleolithic clothing arose as an adaptation to keep warm, and complex clothing was needed to survive extreme temperatures and chills.

Skin-scraping hominids occupied what is now northern China during a warm phase 800,000 years ago, as evidenced by the Famous Peking Man Fossils near Beijing. Scraper-equipped hominids also appeared near London 400,000 years ago during a warm interglacial period when tropical mammals such as hippos roamed the banks of the River Thames. In both cases, the simple clothing was adjusted to the climatic conditions and the tools produced: these hominids likely dressed in cloak-like clothing to get through the winters.

But after 400,000 years ago, hominins remained in the mid-latitudes during colder ice ages.surely with complex clothes. Archaeologists find bladed tools in the Caucasus from 300,000 years ago, and blades and awls were made in southern Africa during a very cold phase 75,000 years ago. North China had blade tools from 40,000 years ago, bone awls from 35,000 years ago, and needles with eyes. 30,000 years ago. In Europe, eyed needles accompanied A wise man towards the coldest part of the last glacial cycle, the last glacial maximum, about 22,000 years ago.

Back in Siberia, the eyed needles allowed our species to penetrate the cold. Northeast corner of Eurasiawhere even Neanderthals, lacking eyed needles, never ventured during the maximum ice ages.

Ambiguous artifacts for early clothing

However, it is not always obvious that certain artifacts were used to make Paleolithic clothing. Take, for example, a 40,000-year-old object found in an abandoned gravel quarry 12 miles south of Barcelona, ​​Spain, in 2007. The four-inch-long tool consists of a flat piece of animal bone, probably a pelvic fragment from a wild horse or aurochs, the wild ancestor of domestic cattle. The bone slab has 28 puncture marks, with a set of ten punctures spaced regularly in a line.

Over the years, archaeologists have found other similar perforated artifacts. They have generally thought that the markings were decorative patterns or an early type of notation, perhaps to mark the phases of the moon.

But in a recent Progress of science paper, the scientists proposed that the artifact functioned as a board to poke holes through skin when ice age people made custom garments. The need for comfortable clothing makes sense given the local climate at the time: cold and getting colder.

To test their idea, the researchers conducted experiments with volunteers who tried to duplicate the punctures using ice age crafting techniques. After a few failed attempts with various tools, the participants arrived at a successful method: using a pointed stone implement called a dihedral burin, they pierced rabbit skins and leather that rested on a cow’s rib. The action produced regular punctures in the rib that were microscopically indistinguishable from those of the Spanish artifact.

If this interpretation is correct, pegboard predates eyed needles in Western Europe by some 15,000 years. Rather than signify the first tailoring, those back-eye needles may reflect finer stitching to make the extra layers needed as the last glacial maximum approached: the first undergarment.

Origins of Paleolithic Clothing, continued

But clothing did not end with the ice age. The garments were given a purpose beyond the biologically necessary insulation.

People have long adorned their bodies with paints and tattoos. Groups from colder climates lost this form of expression when they had to cover up to keep warm. So it is likely that they transferred ornamentation to clothing, using it to signal aspects of their identities, such as gender, clan, or profession.

The decoration may have even motivated Paleolithic tailors. One of the authors of the Progress of science article, archaeologist Francesco d’Errico, showed in previous investigations how new artifacts recovered from the ice age likely had social and psychological significance. He cites pierced seashells from about 100,000 years ago and later accounts that they could have been sewn onto clothing.

A fantastic example comes from the antiquity of 34,000 years. sunghir site near Moscow, Russia. There, more than 13,000 beads carved in mammoth ivory covered skeletons of an adolescent, a child and an adult male. He how the beads are placed in an orderly arrangement suggests that they were sewn into tight-fitting garments.

Once the new decorative function of clothing took hold, the desire to wear clothing was decoupled from the weather. Rather than temperature, social and psychological factors inspired humans to take cover.

Thanks to research on past climates and the survival of clothing technologies like the Spanish find, the origins of Paleolithic clothing are no longer invisible.

This history was originally posted on sapiensAn anthropology journal.

Ian Gilligan He is an Honorary Associate of the School of Humanities at the University of Sydney in Australia. His interdisciplinary research examines the origins of clothing and the psychological and philosophical implications of wearing clothing. She graduated in medicine (MB, BS) and prehistoric archeology (M.Phil.) from the University of Sydney and obtained her PhD in paleoanthropology from the Australian National University. Gilligan is the author of the books. Another Tasmanian Paradox: Clothing and Thermal Adaptations in Aboriginal Australia and Climate, clothing and agriculture in prehistory: linking evidence, causes and effects. The latter received the PROSA Award 2020 for the best book on archeology and ancient history.

Recommended videos