Earliest Human Use Of Clothing & Bedding

[ramonmercado]

Study of lice DNA shows humans first wore clothes 170,000 years ago
January 6th, 2011 in Biology / Evolution
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-lic ... years.html

In this photo taken Nov. 4, 2010, University of Florida researcher David Reed is lead investigator on a five-year study following the evolution of lice that found modern humans first began wearing clothes about 170,000 years ago, a technology which enabled them to successfully migrate out of Africa.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new University of Florida study following the evolution of lice shows modern humans started wearing clothes about 170,000 years ago, a technology which enabled them to successfully migrate out of Africa.

Principal investigator David Reed, associate curator of mammals at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus, studies lice in modern humans to better understand human evolution and migration patterns. His latest five-year study used DNA sequencing to calculate when clothing lice first began to diverge genetically from human head lice.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study is available online and appears in this month's print edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution.

"We wanted to find another method for pinpointing when humans might have first started wearing clothing," Reed said. "Because they are so well adapted to clothing, we know that body lice or clothing lice almost certainly didn't exist until clothing came about in humans."

The data shows modern humans started wearing clothes about 70,000 years before migrating into colder climates and higher latitudes, which began about 100,000 years ago. This date would be virtually impossible to determine using archaeological data because early clothing would not survive in archaeological sites.

The study also shows humans started wearing clothes well after they lost body hair, which genetic skin-coloration research pinpoints at about 1 million years ago, meaning humans spent a considerable amount of time without body hair and without clothing, Reed said.

"It's interesting to think humans were able to survive in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years without clothing and without body hair, and that it wasn't until they had clothing that modern humans were then moving out of Africa into other parts of the world," Reed said.

Lice are studied because unlike most other parasites, they are stranded on lineages of hosts over long periods of evolutionary time. The relationship allows scientists to learn about evolutionary changes in the host based on changes in the parasite.

Applying unique data sets from lice to human evolution has only developed within the last 20 years, and provides information that could be used in medicine, evolutionary biology, ecology or any number of fields, Reed said.

"It gives the opportunity to study host-switching and invading new hosts — behaviors seen in emerging infectious diseases that affect humans," Reed said.

A study of clothing lice in 2003 led by Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, estimated humans first began wearing clothes about 107,000 years ago. But the UF research includes new data and calculation methods better suited for the question.

"The new result from this lice study is an unexpectedly early date for clothing, much older than the earliest solid archaeological evidence, but it makes sense," said Ian Gilligan, lecturer in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at The Australian National University. "It means modern humans probably started wearing clothes on a regular basis to keep warm when they were first exposed to Ice Age conditions."

The last Ice Age occurred about 120,000 years ago, but the study's date suggests humans started wearing clothes in the preceding Ice Age 180,000 years ago, according to temperature estimates from ice core studies, Gilligan said. Modern humans first appeared about 200,000 years ago.

Because archaic hominins did not leave descendants of clothing lice for sampling, the study does not explore the possibility archaic hominins outside of Africa were clothed in some fashion 800,000 years ago. But while archaic humans were able to survive for many generations outside Africa, only modern humans persisted there until the present.

"The things that may have made us much more successful in that endeavor hundreds of thousands of years later were technologies like the controlled use of fire, the ability to use clothing, new hunting strategies and new stone tools," Reed said.

Provided by University of Florida

 

[ramonmercado]

And it looks as if humans first used bedding 200,000 years ago.

World’s oldest camp bedding found in South African cave
By Cathleen O’GradyAug. 13, 2020 , 2:15 PM

Border Cave is a deep gash in a cliff face, high in the Lebombo Mountains of South Africa. Sheltered from the elements, the spot has yielded bones, tools, and preserved plant material that paint a detailed picture of the lives of human inhabitants for more than 200,000 years. Now, there’s a new sketch emerging: Plant remains point to evidence that the cave’s occupants used grass bedding about 200,000 years ago. Researchers speculate that the cave’s occupants laid their bedding on ash to repel insects.

The preserved bedding will join the ranks of other “incredible discoveries” from the African archaeological record, says Javier Baena Preysler, an archaeologist at the Autonomous University of Madrid who was not involved in the research. But other researchers point to uncertainty in the dates and note that absent a time machine, scientists have to speculate about exactly how ancient people used the piled-up grasses and ash.

Lyn Wadley, an archaeologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, made the discovery when excavating Border Cave with her team. One morning, she noticed white flecks in the brown earth of the sediment as she was digging. “I looked up at these with a magnifying glass and realized that these were plant traces,” she says. ...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/world-s-oldest-camp-bedding-found-south-african-cave

 

[EnolaGaia]

Archaeologists have discovered bone tools apparently used for preparing hides and fur for clothing production, dating back as far as circa 120,000 years ago.

Evidence of Fur and Leather Clothing, Among World’s Oldest, Found in Moroccan Cave

Humans likely sported clothes made of jackal, fox and wildcat skins some 120,000 years ago

Fur is a controversial fashion statement these days. But stepping out in a wildcat cape or jackal wrap was de rigueur for Pleistocene humans, according to the recent discovery of a 120,000-year-old leather and fur production site that contains some of the oldest archaeological evidence for human clothing.

Homo sapiens at the site first made and wore clothes around the onset of an Ice Age which may suggest that, even in relatively mild Morocco, clothes were adopted as a way to keep warm. But the invention of animal-based apparel also corresponds with the appearance of personal adornments, like shell beads, which hints that prehistoric clothing, like today’s styles, could have been about style as well as functionality. ...

Emily Hallett ... was examining bones to see which animals Pleistocene humans ate, and how they butchered them, in Contrebandiers Cave on Morocco’s Atlantic Coast.

...Hallett found bones she wasn’t expecting: dozens of tools carefully shaped, smoothed and polished into implements ideal for scraping hides clean to make leather, and scraping pelts to produce furs. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scie...rlds-oldest-found-in-moroccan-cave-180978689/

 

[EnolaGaia]

Deeper analyses of woven fabrics excavated at Çatalhöyük have revealed they were neither linen nor wool as previously believed.

What Was Ancient Clothing Like? See One of the Oldest Pieces of Cloth in the World

What did people make clothes from in the Neolithic? Çatalhöyük, the world’s largest known Stone Age settlement, gives us answers after 60 years of debate. ...

Experts have been discussing what kind of clothes people wore in Çatalhöyük since 1962, when they found the first pieces of cloth here.

Some specialists believed that people made their clothes from wool. Others thought they made them out of linen instead. So who’s right? After almost 60 years, we now know the answer.

“Neither,” Bender Jørgensen and her colleagues say. ...

One of the world’s leading archaeologists, Professor Ian Hodder at Stanford University, undertook new excavations between 1993 and 2017. They yielded large amounts of new data and have provided us with a whole new understanding of the site.

The finds made by Hodder and colleagues unearthed several pieces of cloth that later turned out to be between 8500 and 8700 years old. ...

“In the past, researchers largely neglected the possibility that the fabric fibers could be anything other than wool or linen, but lately another material has received more attention,” Bender Jørgensen says. ...

“Bast fibers were used for thousands of years to make rope, thread, and in turn also yarn and cloth,” says Bender Jørgensen.

A fiber sample from a basket turned out to be made of grass, but several of the textiles are clearly made of bast fiber from oak trees. They are also the oldest preserved woven fabrics in the world.

Bast fiber is found between the bark and the wood in trees such as willow, oak or linden. ...

The experts’ conclusions also align with another striking point: No large quantities of flaxseed have been found in the region. People in Çatalhöyük do not seem to have cultivated flax. ...

As it turns out, people in this area did not import linen from elsewhere, as many researchers have previously thought, but used the resources they had plentiful access to.

FULL STORY: https://scitechdaily.com/what-was-a...e-of-the-oldest-pieces-of-cloth-in-the-world/

 

[EnolaGaia]

Here are the bibliographic details and abstract from the published research report.

---

Rast-Eicher, A., Karg, S., & Bender Jørgensen, L. (2021).
The use of local fibres for textiles at Neolithic Çatalhöyük.
Antiquity, 95(383), 1129-1144.
doi:10.15184/aqy.2021.89

Abstract
Woven textiles from Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia are among the earliest-known examples of weaving in the Near East and Europe. Studies of material excavated in the 1960s identified the fibres as flax. New scanning electron microscope analysis, however, shows these fibres—and others from more recent excavations at the site—to be made from locally sourced oak bast. This result is consistent with the near absence of flax seeds at Çatalhöyük, and suggests there was no need for the importation of fibres from elsewhere; it also questions the date at which domesticated flax was first used for fibres. These findings shed new light on early textile production in the Neolithic, suggesting that tree bast played a more significant role than previously recognised.

SOURCE: https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...c-catalhoyuk/294D8367B55E0A752ACC1825035840FC

 

[escargot]

My generation were raised on the Fred Flintstone image of early clothing, with people wearing only animal skins.
It seems a huge leap from that to growing or finding and harvesting plants to process into fibres to weave and sew with.

 

[Floyd]

My generation were raised on the Fred Flintstone image of early clothing, with people wearing only animal skins.
It seems a huge leap from that to growing or finding and harvesting plants to process into fibres to weave and sew with.

Yes, and it doesn't seem like an easy job to do now, let alone back then.

 

[Xanatic*]

I'd imagine the wearing of blankets might have been an intermediate, such as done by some native americans.

 

[ramonmercado]

Earliest bearskin clothes traced back 300,000 years.

Archaeologists in Germany have uncovered some of the earliest evidence of the use of clothing, with newly discovered cut marks on a cave bear paw suggesting the prehistoric animals were skinned for their fur some 300,000 years ago.

The discovery in Schöningen, northern Germany, is exciting because – despite the depictions of cave men and women draped in furs in popular culture – very little is truly known about how early humans clothed their bodies and survived harsh winters.

Fur, leather and other organic materials typically don’t preserve beyond 100,000 years, meaning that direct evidence of prehistoric clothing is scant.

“The study is significant because we know relatively little about how humans in the deep past were protecting themselves from the elements. From this early time period, there is only a handful of sites that show evidence of bear skinning, with Schöningen providing the most complete picture,” said study author Ivo Verheijen, a doctoral student at Tübingen University in Germany.

Cave bears were large animals, about the size of a polar bear, that went extinct about 25,000 years ago. The cave bear’s coat, which has long outer hairs that form an airy protective layer and short, dense hairs that provide good insulation, was suitable for making simple clothing or bedding, according to the study published in the Journal Of Human Evolution on December 23.

The clothing probably consisted of skins that were wrapped around the body without elaborate tailoring. The eyed needles needed to sew more intricate designs didn’t emerge in the archaeological record until about 45,000 years ago. ...

.https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/05/europe/bear-skins-prehistoric-clothing-scn/index.html

 

[ramonmercado]

Longer before eyed needles there was ...

An animal bone fragment full of human-made pits hints at how prehistoric people in Western Europe may have crafted clothing.

The nearly 40,000-year-old artifact probably served as a punch board for leatherwork, researchers report April 12 in Science Advances. They suggest that the bone fragment rested beneath animal hide while an artisan pricked holes in the material, possibly for seams. If so, it’s the earliest-known tool of its kind and predates eyed needles in the region by about 15,000 years.

Found at an archaeological site south of Barcelona, the roughly 11-centimeter-long bone fragment contains 28 punctures scattered across one flat side, with 10 of them aligned and fairly evenly spaced.

The marks don’t seem to have been a notation system or decoration, given that some holes are hard to see and the bone fragment wasn’t otherwise shaped, says archaeologist Luc Doyon of the University of Bordeaux in France. He thought leatherwork could have made the marks. But it wasn’t until he visited a cobbler shop and saw one of the artisan’s tools that the hypothesis solidified, guiding Doyon’s next steps.

He and colleagues attempted to re-create the artifact’s holes by puncturing cattle rib bones with tools including sharpened flint, horns and antlers. Piercing leather atop bone with a burin — a pointed stone chisel — by tapping it with a hammerlike tool created pits that resemble those on the bone fragment.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/prehistoric-method-clothes-bone-leather

 

[escargot]

This is a little later on, but remember the mysterious dodecahedrons?
Quoting myself here -

The Roman dodecahedron
(youTube link)

Over 100 of these artefacts have been found across Northern Europe and, dating from around 200 AD, people must have been using them for something useful for there to have been so many made. I wanted to see what they might have been used for so I got one made with a 3D printer and, well watch to see what they can do

They can be used for knitting seamless fingers in all sizes for gloves.

Another demonstration.

I'm convinced.

 

[Timble2]

The Romans wore socks with toes their sandals, you could probably knit those on the dodecahedron too. (I expect warms socks would have been appreciated if you were stationed in North Britannia, patrolling Hadrian's wall).

 

[Mythopoeika]

A knitting tool? That does seem to be quite believable.