When did early humans first start wearing clothes? Follow the lousy lice

Clothing is more than just fabric and fashion — our clothes tell stories about who we are as humans, where we’ve been, and how we’ve adapted over time.

But when did our human ancestors first decide that we needed to cover up and wear clothes?

This question has puzzled scientists for years. David Reed, associate curator of mammals at the Florida Museum of Natural History, has been digging into this mystery by studying an unlikely source: lice.

Reed’s work focuses on these tiny parasites that have been our unwelcome companions for thousands of years.

“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.”

Lousy clues hidden in our hair

By examining the DNA of modern human lice, Reed and his team have calculated that we started wearing clothes about 170,000 years ago.

This was a significant technological leap that allowed our ancestors to migrate out of Africa into colder climates.

“It’s just interesting to think that humans were able to survive in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years without clothing and without body hair,” Reed noted.

“And that it wasn’t until they had clothing that modern humans were then moving out of Africa into other parts of the world.”

This research, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), suggests that there was a substantial period when humans roamed the African continent without the warmth of body hair or the protection of garments.

Lice, humans, and the first clothes

Lice are more than just a nuisance; they’re evolutionary markers. Unlike many parasites, lice stick closely to their hosts over long periods.

This host-parasite relationship allows scientists like Reed to trace changes in human history based on changes in lice populations.

“We use these lice as a marker, if you will, as a marker of their host’s evolutionary history,” he explained.

Interestingly, the study shows that we began wearing clothes around 70,000 years before venturing into colder regions — a move that started about 100,000 years ago.

This gap implies that clothing wasn’t just a response to colder climates but perhaps a development that had other social or practical motivations.

Early humans got cold, too

Back in 2003, geneticist Mark Stoneking from the Max Planck Institute estimated that clothing use began around 107,000 years ago.

Reed’s study, however, includes new data and refined calculation methods, offering a different perspective.

“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,” noted Ian Gilligan, a lecturer at The Australian National University.

The timing of clothing’s emergence seems to align with the harsh conditions of the Ice Ages.

The Last Ice Age occurred about 120,000 years ago, but Gilligan suggests that humans started bundling up during the preceding Ice Age, around 180,000 years ago.

With modern humans appearing about 200,000 years ago, this period was crucial for developing technologies that would ensure our survival.

First humans needed clothes to survive

Clothing wasn’t the only advancement that helped our ancestors thrive. Reed pointed out that other innovations played a role.

“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,” he said.

One of the challenges in studying ancient clothing is the lack of physical evidence. Early garments wouldn’t have survived millennia buried in the earth.

Direct evidence like eyed needles only appeared about 40,000 years ago, and tools suitable for scraping animal hides date back to about 780,000 years ago.

Reed’s lice research fills in the gaps, offering a biological clue where archaeological evidence is scarce.

Lice aren’t often seen as heroes

Collecting lice samples from around the world, including places like homeless shelters and health clinics, was essential for the study’s success.

These parasites provide a unique dataset that can be applied across various fields, from medicine to ecology.

“It gives the opportunity to study host-switching and invading new hosts, which has everything to do with diseases that do the same thing, like emerging infectious diseases that affect humans,” Reed explained.

“From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s interesting to learn about the evolutionary histories of a mammal and its parasite that are so intertwined, so interconnected over vast, long time scales. They just generate such interesting evolutionary questions,” he continued.

Why does any of this matter?

To sum it all up, by examining lice, Reed and his team found clues about when our early human ancestors first decided to wear clothes.

This was a pivotal moment in Earth history that allowed humans to migrate around the globe and adapt to new environments and extreme weather.

If our distant relatives hadn’t figured out how to create and wear clothes roughly 170,000 years ago, chances are the species would not have survived, and we wouldn’t be here today reading this article.

This fun but important research highlights the fact that humans have always been resourceful, even the very first ones.

The incremental survival steps they took during the Last Ice Age led to the complex societies we have today. Whether that’s a good thing, or a bad thing, will be left open for discussion on another day.

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Study co-authors were Melissa Toups, previously with UF and now at Indiana University, Andrew Kitchen, formerly with UF and presently at The Pennsylvania State University, and Jessica Light of Texas A&M University. The researchers completed the five-year project with the help of Reed’s NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award, which is granted to researchers who exemplify the teacher-researcher role.

The full study was published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

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