How do we know when humans started to use clothing made from fabric? How did scientists determine this important change in our history? That’s a great story, even though a bit gross. We have found out a lot about human clothing history from tiny blood-sucking insects called “body lice” or “Pediculus corporis”. Disgusting, isn’t it? But sometimes, the most unpleasant things can give you the most useful and wonderful knowledge.
Many scientists work hard to find out new facts about human history – in our field of work, it’s historians, archaeologists, fashion historians, and even geneticists. One of those people who made a significant and important discovery is Mark Stoneking, a geneticist from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Why a geneticist has made a discovery nobody couldn’t before him? Because when talking about clothes, garments are made from fabric, which is a rather fragile material. It can’t survive for millennia, it simply disintegrates. So, we rarely can see clothing items older than 1-2 thousand years. Even those garments archaeologists find on mummified bodies from swamps or permafrost aren’t that old compared to human history. Even Ötzi, the Iceman’s clothing is only about 6,000 years old.
You can read about the oldest known pieces of clothing made from the fabric here: The world’s oldest clothing. Ancient garments right from the tombs.
And, obviously, there are no written sources from those faraway times.
So, archaeologists and historians have no means for now as to how to determine the “moment” when humans made the first garment from cloth to protect their bodies from weather conditions. What we knew till Mark Stoneking’s discovery is that there are imprints of woven cloth on clay that date back 27,000 years and needles have been found that date back 40,000 years. But other than that, there was no evidence of people wearing clothes. And that’s when a geneticist and his work came in handy.
How did Mark Stoneking make his discovery?
In fall of 1999, Mark Stoneking’s son brought from school a note from the teacher that one of his classmates got lice. There was also written in this note that lice can’t survive without the human body longer than 24 hours. The geneticist immediately started thinking about how lice are spread throughout the world and what the conditions had to be for this species to survive for millennia. And he started studying lice.
What did scientists know about body lice? That they diverged from the head lice at some time in our history, that they can’t survive for long without a warm body, and that they don’t live directly on the host, rather they lay their eggs on fibers of clothing and only come into contact with the host whenever they need to feed. Obviously, they appeared roughly at the same time when people started to wear clothing woven from fibers. So, Mark Stoneking realized that he could determine a more or less exact date of this change in human lifestyle.
This scientist and his colleagues made a row of tests and discoveries. They gathered samples of head lice and body lice from people of 12 countries from different corners of the world and tested them. They found out that lice originate from Africa (same as human genes originate from this continent) because African lice are more genetically diverse than others. Also, head lice are more diverse than body lice, which means that they are the older group.
Body louse, male)). Photo from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
And – the most life-changing discovery – they found out how long ago the body lice appeared, which means that clothes were invented somewhere around that time. Knowing how fast the variations in DNA accumulate, Mark Stoneking and his colleagues say that this species appeared about 72,000 years ago, give or take a few thousand. We know that humans started to leave Africa and populate other parts of the world approximately in the same period. It looks like these migrations led to inventing clothing, which is logical.
This genetic method of getting info is one of the most scientific and accurate for now, as many archaeological assumptions regarding our history are just that – assumptions. We can’t absolutely know for sure what happened millennia ago based only on items we get from under the ground. Besides, most modern tests, like radiocarbon dating and similar, can’t give us absolutely accurate dating. That’s why Mark Stoneking’s discovery is so important and big.
So, answering the question, “When did people start to wear clothes woven from fibers?”, we can say that, according to human lice genes, it happened appr. 72,000 years ago. Wow, really!
