Originally published at: Humans first got dressed 300,000 years ago, according to new discovery | Boing Boing
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ok… i’ll play the useful idiot, (“hah! ‘play’”); cut marks on a bear bone: clothes. cut marks on antelope bones about 3 million years previous: (mere) butchery. (“Well, no ancient humans ever ate cave bears. quite the reverse. besides, the sleeves fit better, y’see.” ok… so they hunted them only for their fur? [scratches large prefrontal lobe])
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It’s not just the presence of cut marks, but where they are - i.e. in places where there’s no meat to remove, but where you’d have to cut to remove the skin. (And of course, this obviously isn’t the earliest time when people were skinning animals, just the earliest we have unambiguous evidence for it. But I’d imagine also butchering an animal for meat would potentially make ambiguous evidence it was also skinned…)
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So, are we all likely descendants of furries?
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Probably not the “first” since virtually all human societies had some kind of traditional attire by the time they were first documented, including human societies that had no previous known contact with humans who colonized Europe.
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New Discovery: Humans First Laundered Clothes 200,000 Years Ago.
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Yeah- apes were furry, we are “a bunch of hairless apes”… Who have actually invented some pretty incredible things!
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300,000 years. Sort of feels that way while yelling at the closed bedroom door: “Aren’t you dressed yet?!”
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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.
Sans eyed needles, couldn’t they have simply made cuts into the furs and tied sections together using animal sinew for better coverage? Leggings with something like straps, for instance, would have been very simple to achieve.
(Science Daily excerpt) The spears and other artifacts as well as animal remains found at the site demonstrate that their users were highly skilled craftsmen and hunters, well adapted to their environment – with a capacity for abstract thought and complex planning comparable to our own.
(NatGeo excerpt) Half-million-year-old weapons suggest human mind grew sharper earlier. To fasten a handle to a blade—a technique called hafting—a prehistoric hunter likely would have had to procure a stone blade, a wooden shaft, twine woven from plants or animal sinew, and glue made from tree resin.
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Other artifacts found included several rough hewn “VIP Room” passes for what is believed to be the first topless bar.
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Evidence still pending for fig-based clothing…
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Yeah, but that was only 6500 years ago. /s
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I’m trying to imagine winter in Germany with a bear-skin blanket just wrapped around you, since per the article they didn’t have needles to tailor sleeves. I’m wondering how you make that work, just lash it on? Sounds awfully drafty.
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First dressed human, twirling: “Well, what do you think?”
Another human: “You’re going out in that?”
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Earlier attempts to wear cave bears, without killing and skinning them, were less successful.
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I would take that part with a grain of salt. Modern humans have a tendency to underestimate the resourcefulness of our ancestors, whether the question is “how could they have moved around giant blocks of stone without modern construction equipment?” or “how could they have strung pieces of animal hide together if they didn’t have eyed needles (as far as we know)?”
The gaps in our knowledge of these people and their technology grossly outweigh what we do know. When I visited Effigy Mounds National Monument a few years ago the rangers made a point of noting that the recreations of the indigenous mound-builders’ appearance and dress was almost entirely guesswork because the leather and fiber remains of their possessions had all decayed centuries ago, so it was a bit like trying to recreate a wardrobe based on nothing but buttons and zippers. And in that case archaeologists were dealing with remains that were less than a thousand years old, created by a culture whose descendants still lived in the area at the time of European colonization!
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This study of louse differentiation is an interesting way of inferring when we lost our body hair and started wearing clothes:
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Can they really be ‘simple’ clothes if you’ve got to kill a damn cave bear to get them? Cos those sound like fairly complex clothes to obtain to me.
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