2024-04-17 08:17:34
So when did people start wearing clothes?
This is a tricky question because clothing does not survive in the same way that artifacts made of stone, bone, and other hard materials do. Therefore, scientists have to take creative steps. Evidence to answer this question comes from several key sources, including bones with skin wear marks, sewing needles and awls—and lice.
“We were trying to understand what changes occurred in the evolutionary history of lice that might be related to the loss of body hair in humans and then to the use of human clothing,” says David Reed, a biologist at the University of Florida.
Lice are incredibly specialized for their habitats. For example, a species that evolved to live in human hair would not survive among human pubic hair. But before our ancestors lost their fur, those lice probably roamed all over their bodies. So by examining the DNA to reveal the evolutionary history of lice, the researchers estimate that these two types broke up about 3 million years ago. years. However, a study of human genetics shows that body hair we lost about 1.2 million ago. years. Taken together, these studies suggest that our ancestors lost their fur.
Other types of lice have evolved to live in human clothing. These lice are more versatile, able to live on various fibers.
“They feed on average once a day – they suck blood – and then they retreat back into their clothes where they are safe,” says Reed.
By examining when head lice diverged from clothing lice, the scientist and his team estimate 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—the group that includes modern humans and our closely related extinct relatives—were wearing clothes much earlier. In the Palaeolithic site of Schöningen in Germany marks found on bear bones showthat hominins – perhaps A man from Heidelberg — wore bearskin to keep warm around 300,000 years ago, 2023 suggests. in April, Dr. of the University of Tübingen (Germany). Research published by Ivo Verheijen and his colleagues.
“If you want to skin an animal, the most cut marks are on the ribs, front and back of the skull. This is exactly what we found in Schöningen, says Dr. I. Verheijen. – We have started to compare with other sites of more or less the same period, which also have cut marks on the forelimbs and hindlimbs and skulls. So it seems that people were skinning bears around this time.”
However, skin piercing evidence is not necessarily clothing evidence. Hominins could have used these skins, for example, to build a shelter. But since the average temperature at the time was about 2 degrees Celsius lower, people likely used these skins to keep warm, Verheijen says.
“People had to be active to gather food across the landscape,” he says. “So some kind of clothing must have been necessary to survive here.”
But if there is evidence of clothing 300,000 years ago, and clothes lice only evolved 170,000 years ago – what happened between these events?
Evidence for clothes lice “can only be appreciated when people wore clothes very regularly because lice need to feed on human skin regularly,” says Ian Gilligan, an honorary fellow at the University of Sydney’s School of Humanities. “So if a person wears a garment one day and doesn’t use it the next week, the lice will not survive.”
What’s more, the line of clothes lice studied by the scientists may not be the only one that existed. “There were probably other lice that infested clothing at many stages over the last, you know, million years,” Gilligan says.
Also, different groups of people 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 – Tasmanian Aboriginal people retreated to caves to protect themselves from the cold. However, archeological finds also show that they sewed clothes, as well as making tools for skinning animals and bone awls to make holes for sewing.
But later the weather warmed up and they too stopped wearing clothes.
“Skin Scraping Tools and Bone Awls from 12,000 Years to the Mid-Holocene.” [nuo 11 700 metų iki dabar] – these tools simply disappeared from the archaeological record,” says I. Gilligan. He notes that people “decorated their bodies carefully, dyed their hair, painted themselves, used scarification, so they didn’t need clothes.”
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2024-04-17 08:17:34