Unraveling the Evolution of Clothing: From Survival to Innovation
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In the aftermath of the last ice age, global warming prompted people in many areas to replace their animal hides with textile. Need for the material to make textile from could have been what triggered one of the greatest changes in the life of humanity: not food but clothing might have led to the agricultural revolution. The development of clothing led to innovations with many repercussions beyond survival in cold climates. A need for portable insulation from the cold in the Palaeolithic prompted major technological innovations. These include stone toolkits for working animal hides and, subsequently, bone tools such as pointed awls and needles to make tailored garments. Equipped with effective protection from wind chill, our ancestors could penetrate into the frigid Arctic Circle, further north than comparatively better cold-adapted Neanderthals had managed to venture.
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Early hominins in Africa began to use fire between 1 and 2 million years ago, well before the advent of Homo sapiens. Most probably, to keep wild animals away at night and to soften meat. Not to keep warm. Our species, therefore, has used fire since its first appearance but invented clothing somewhere down the line. Although both could help keep warm, fire could do so indoors only. Out in the open, foraging or hunting or traveling, only clothes could protect prehistoric Homo sapiens from cold, especially from wind chill of the ice age. Moreover, fitted clothing helps more in cold weather than do simple wrap around ones. They also learned to increase its effectiveness by adding layers. What we don’t know is when.
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Clothes perish rapidly and rarely survive beyond a single millennium. Among the notable exceptions are a pair of 3,000-year-old trousers worn by nomadic horse-riders in Central Asia, and a 5,000-year-old linen tunic from ancient Egypt. We have only a few precious cloth fragments from the early Neolithic, in Peru and Turkey. Just a few twisted flax fibres – used perhaps to make strings or thread – has been found at a 34,000-year-old site in Georgia. However, eyed needles made of animal bone are indirect evidence for the existence of fitted clothing. The oldest – made 50,000 years ago – have been found in the Denisova cave.
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Scientific efforts to date the origins of clothing have recently received an unexpected boost from the study of clothing lice, or body lice. These blood-sucking insects inhabit clothes and they evolved from head lice when people began to use clothes on a regular basis. Research teams in Germany and the United States analysed the genomes of head and clothing lice to estimate when the clothing parasites split from the head ones. The German team, led by Mark Stoneking at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, came up with a date of 100,000 years ago, early in the last ice age. The US team led by David Reed at the University of Florida reported two dates: one around 80,000 years ago, and another as early as 170,000 years ago, during the ice age before the last.
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However, the genetic analysis of modern clothing lice can inform us only about clothes worn routinely in some human populations up until the present day. Earlier hominins or Homo sapiens themselves could have adopted clothes in colder climate, acquiring clothing lice in the process, and then discarded clothes during warm phases, without leaving any genetic trace in modern-day lice.
