Seeking the Origins of Paleolithic Clothing

Participating in an archaeology experiment, a contemporary woman dons fur clothing similar to what Paleolithic people in colder climates might have worn.

Not long ago, I left my home in sunny Australia to join an archaeological dig in the Siberian mountains of eastern Russia. On the first morning, I awoke cold to my core, even in a well-padded sleeping bag. I crept near the campfire and held my hands so close that the gloves began to smolder. But I kept shivering. I was cold on the inside. As a medical doctor, I recognized the symptoms of mild hypothermia. Siberia is a region where people surely always needed warm apparel.

The origins of clothing is my special interest, a notoriously difficult topic because items of dress rarely last long. Trained in medicine and archaeology, I investigate the matter by combining what’s known about the thermal limits of human bodies and paleoenvironments. My brush with hypothermia, though embarrassing for someone with my expertise, reaffirmed my approach.

Standards of body cover vary across cultures. But many people would be mortified to be caught unclad in public. For folks in cold climates, insufficient clothing can be fatal, as I sensed in Siberia. Yet no other creatures don garments. Why our ancestors, alone in the entire animal kingdom, adopted clothes is one of those big questions that science has only recently begun to tackle. Though many gaps in the story remain, the emerging evidence suggests clothing really had two origins: first for biological needs, then cultural.

The Invisible Remnants of Early Clothes

Archaeologists who study the Paleolithic or Stone Age tend to ignore clothing. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, considering not a single shred has survived from this ice age era between roughly 2.6 million and 12,000 years ago. Archaeologists are reluctant to look for something they will never find. Stone Age clothing may be invisible to archaeology, but that does not mean Paleolithic clothing origins cannot be investigated scientifically.

For instance, fossils show humans inhabited ice age Eurasia when the frigid windchill reduced safe exposure times to an hour or two. Clearly, those people had adequate clothes. And, fortunately, tools used to make clothing, such as sewing needles, provide some tangible—albeit indirect—evidence.

The First Start of Paleolithic Clothes

Tracking these artifacts across time and space suggests Paleolithic clothing emerged as an adaptation to stay toasty—and complex clothes were needed to survive extreme temperatures and windchills. Hominins with hide scrapers occupied what is today northern China during a warm phase 800,000 years ago. Scraper-equipped hominins also appeared near London 400,000 years ago during a warm interglacial period. In both cases, simple clothes fit the climate conditions and the tools produced: These hominins probably donned cloak-like apparel to get them through the winters.

But after 400,000 years ago, hominins lingered in middle latitudes during colder glacial times—surely with complex clothes. Archaeologists find blade tools in the Caucasus from 300,000 years ago, and blades and awls were made in Southern Africa during a very cold phase 75,000 years ago. Northern China had blade tools from 40,000 years ago, bone awls from 35,000 years ago and eyed needles from 30,000 years ago. In Europe, eyed needles accompanied Homo sapiens toward the coldest part of the last glacial cycle, the last glacial maximum, around 22,000 years ago. Back in Siberia, eyed needles allowed our species to penetrate the frigid Northeastern corner of Eurasia, where even Neanderthals—who lacked eyed needles—never ventured during peak glacial times.

Ambiguous Artifacts for Early Clothes

However, it’s not always obvious that certain artifacts were used to make Paleolithic clothing. Take for instance, a 40,000-year-old item found at an abandoned gravel pit 12 miles south of Barcelona, Spain, in 2007. The four-inch-long tool consists of a flat piece of animal bone, probably a pelvic fragment from a wild horse or an auroch, the wild ancestor of domestic cattle. The bone slab bears 28 puncture marks, with one set of ten pecks spaced regularly in a line.

Over the years, archaeologists have found other similar, punctured artifacts. Generally, they’ve thought the marks were decorative patterns or an early kind of notation—to mark phases of the moon perhaps. But in a recent Science Advances paper, scientists proposed the artifact functioned as a board for punching holes through hide when ice age people made tailored garments. The need for snug clothes makes sense given the local climate at the time: cold and getting colder.

 

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Shambhu Kumar

Shambhu Kumar is a science communicator, making complex scientific topics accessible to all. His articles explore breakthroughs in various scientific disciplines, from space exploration to cutting-edge research.