When did clothing originate?

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.

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.

It’s also helpful to distinguish between simple and complex clothing. Simple clothes hang loose, such as capes, cloaks or loincloths. They can be warm—a drapey fur cloak, for instance—but simple clothes are prone to wind penetration. Complex clothes hug the body snuggly, usually with separate sleeves or pantlegs. Also, complex clothes may have multiple layers.

Archaeologists can detect simple and complex clothes in the Paleolithic record because they entail different technologies. Tools to scrape hides indicate the existence of simple clothes, and plenty of hide-scrapers surface at archaeological sites in middle latitudes from a million years ago onward. However, scraper-equipped hominins disappear from middle latitudes during glacial periods, reflecting the limited insulation value of simple garments.

Complex clothes necessitated more complex technologies. To shape animal hides, people used dedicated cutting tools called blades. They also pierced holes in the hides to sew the cut segments together. The basic hide-piercing tool is called an awl, a slender pointed artifact often made from an elongated animal bone, such as a thin forearm bone or a rib. Later, Paleolithic humans invented a more sophisticated sewing tool: the eyed needle.

Smithsonian