We hairless humans have been wearing clothing for a long, long time, but exactly when is hard to tell — paintings, statues, or fabrics that give evidence of our garb only appear long after scientists think we started dressing. A paper published by Toups et al. in the journal _Molecular Biology and Evolution_ in 2011 aimed to put a sharper date on our sartorial inventions, and posited that we started putting clothes on sometime between 170,000 and 83,000 years ago.
Toups came up with that date range from an unexpected source: the evolution of human lice. Turns out that there are lice that live on human heads, and lice that suck the blood from our skin but actually live most of the time in our clothes. By estimating the rate of mutation in lice evolutionary history (this type of analysis uses an approach called “coalescent theory”), these scientists figured out that body and head lice split apart sometime in that period, and therefore, clothing must have been developed during this time.
Perhaps clothing enabled Homo sapiens to successfully migrate out of Africa and thrive in colder climes.
But making clothing isn’t the same as making fabric. The cave you see here is the Dzudzuana Cave in the Eurasian country of Georgia, and it was here that archaeologists discovered the earliest samples of woven fabric, fibers spun from flax. (Their paper was published in _Science_ in 2009). The microscopic picture shown here is our earliest sample, and it dates to 30,000 years ago.
Prehistoric clothing scholar Elizabeth Barber argues that textiles used for clothing probably developed less for practical reasons and more for social ones. Woven fabrics were fancier than animal pelts, and could be a clear distinction between the wealthier members of society and the rest. The fibers found in this cave had been deliberately dyed, in colors ranging from turquoise to gray, black, and pink.
Source(s): “Origin of clothing lice indicates early clothing use by anatomically modern humans in Africa,” Molecular Biology and Evolution _, Melissa A. Toups et al., 2011 January 28 (1): 29-32. “30,000-Year-Old Wild Wax Fibers,” _Science_, October 2009, Eliso Kvavadze et al. Vol 325. NPR “These vintage threads are 30,000 years old” September 10, 2009, Richard Harris. Images from the online NPR article.
