After descending from the tree and standing upright, human ancestors lost their fur, necessitating something to protect their bodies from the elements. However, light and soft objects suitable for this purpose quickly disintegrate and are destroyed. Therefore, it is very difficult to determine when and in what form a person began to dress.
Archaeologists do not give up, of course, and draw conclusions from indirect evidence. This sign could be a needle or prick, skinning marks on the bone, or lice.
We tried to understand what evolutionary changes lice went through as a result of humans losing their hair and wearing clothes
David Reed, a biologist at the University of Florida who has researched these parasites in humans, told Live Science.
Lice like to specialize: while our ancestors were covered in hair, they were everywhere on the body, so later on, what lived on hair did not live on fur. Based on DNA analysis, the paths of the two species diverged 3 million years ago. Based on genetic data, humans became naked 1.2 million years ago, and this process appears to have continued for more than a million years.
Meanwhile, there is the clothes louse. As their name suggests, they have chosen human clothing as their habitat and can cling to a range of different fabrics and materials. Clothes lice became an independent species about 170,000 years ago, during the penultimate Ice Age. People of this era wore them regularly clothesBut the beginnings go back to an earlier time.
Pick up the bear
Bones found at a Paleolithic site in Schöningen, Germany, indicate the presence of A Homo heidelbergensis Already 300 thousand years ago he made himself a bear fur.
When an animal is skinned, the cuts are along the ribs, skull, front and back legs. We compared them to bones found at other sites from the same period, and there were also cut marks on the skull, foot and foot. All of this indicates that the skins of killed bears were already being used in this era
– noted Ivo Verhegen, a doctoral student at the University of Tübingen, who together with colleagues published a scientific article on prehistoric bear skins in April 2023.
At the time, the average global temperature was two degrees colder, and fur must have somehow served to warm them up. The bearskin was not necessarily made of pike, it may have been used as a tent cover and a rug, although according to Verheijen, some kind of clothing was certainly needed, because hunting and obtaining food required a lot of movement.
But if Neanderthals lived in fur coats for 300,000 years, why did clothing lice appear only 170,000 years ago? The difference is probably due to the habit of dressing. Oh man if the weather permits
Unworn clothing, on the other hand, is not a habitable environment for clothing lice.
During the last Ice Age, Aboriginal Australians retreated to caves, where they found their skin-piercing tools dating back more than ten thousand years – but when the weather turned good, they simply continued without clothing.
Another thing became clear from this: that people demand fashion even without clothes. This problem was solved by the indigenous people by skin decoration, scars and dyes applied to their hair and skin.
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