lpetrich
Contributor
Our species has many oddities, and one of them is clothing. Only a few species use anything that is structurally and functionally like human clothing.
As broader context, note that nearly every organism has a well-defined surface layer. Every virus, every cell, and nearly every multicellular organism with differentiated cells. Some organisms grow loose outer structures, like bark and shells and scales and hairs and feathers. Mammalian hair goes back as far as the late Permian (coprolites), while feathers go back to the Jurassic (Archaeopteryx, a pigeon-sized feathered birdlike dinosaur).
Back to clothing.
Hermit crab (Paguroidea) - hermit crabs live inside of seashells that they find.
Caddisfly (Trichoptera) - some caddisfly larvae (some 30 families in Integripalpia) make cases for themselves, tubes that they live inside of.
When our ancestors started making clothes for themselves is a difficult problem, but one clue is from when head lice and clothing lice diverged.
Origin of Clothing Lice Indicates Early Clothing Use by Anatomically Modern Humans in Africa - PMC
Over the last half millennium, European explorers discovered numerous people who still used Paleolithic or Neolithic technology ("primitive people"). In warm climates, Paleolithic-tech people tended to wear very little clothing, and that's likely how the first members of our present species dressed. But making clothing enabled living in very cold climates, even with Paleolithic technology. That clothing was made from animal skins, something that we still do today: fur coats and leather.
With Neolithic-level technology came evidence of looms in several places: loom weights. Looms are for making cloth by weaving, and we soon ended up making a *lot* of it. So in warm climates, we wear more clothing than our Paleolithic ancestors did, sometimes much more, and something that we have been doing for several centuries in several places. The first fibers for weaving were stems of flax plants and the like, going back to the Paleolithic, and in the Neolithic and later, additional fibers were added, like cotton (seed parachute) and wool (sheep hair), fibers that require spinning to make threads. Also added was silk, threads made by caterpillars for their cocoons, and over the last century, plastic. Also over the last century was plastic-sheet clothing like surgical gloves and fake leather.
So why did we start wearing lots of clothing where we seemingly didn't need to?
Some clothing has obvious purposes of protection, like warm clothing for cold weather, and also footwear. The oldest known footwear is sandals found in Fort Rock Cave in Oregon, dating back to 8000 - 7000 BCE. Their makers had Paleolithic-level technology, so footwear likely goes back a long way. Animal-skin shoes and boots also likely go back very far.
Modesty is another reason. We don't like to reveal our genitals. But one does not need much clothing for that.
Aside from all that, it's hard to say. Do we like the feel of clothing against our skin?
As broader context, note that nearly every organism has a well-defined surface layer. Every virus, every cell, and nearly every multicellular organism with differentiated cells. Some organisms grow loose outer structures, like bark and shells and scales and hairs and feathers. Mammalian hair goes back as far as the late Permian (coprolites), while feathers go back to the Jurassic (Archaeopteryx, a pigeon-sized feathered birdlike dinosaur).
Back to clothing.
Hermit crab (Paguroidea) - hermit crabs live inside of seashells that they find.
Caddisfly (Trichoptera) - some caddisfly larvae (some 30 families in Integripalpia) make cases for themselves, tubes that they live inside of.
When our ancestors started making clothes for themselves is a difficult problem, but one clue is from when head lice and clothing lice diverged.
Origin of Clothing Lice Indicates Early Clothing Use by Anatomically Modern Humans in Africa - PMC
That article mentionsClothing use is an important modern behavior that contributed to the successful expansion of humans into higher latitudes and cold climates. Previous research suggests that clothing use originated anywhere between 40,000 and 3 Ma, though there is little direct archaeological, fossil, or genetic evidence to support more specific estimates. Since clothing lice evolved from head louse ancestors once humans adopted clothing, dating the emergence of clothing lice may provide more specific estimates of the origin of clothing use. Here, we use a Bayesian coalescent modeling approach to estimate that clothing lice diverged from head louse ancestors at least by 83,000 and possibly as early as 170,000 years ago. Our analysis suggests that the use of clothing likely originated with anatomically modern humans in Africa and reinforces a broad trend of modern human developments in Africa during the Middle to Late Pleistocene.
- Estimated time for loss of body hair ~ 1.2 Mya
- First evidence for hide scrapers ~ 780 kya
- Median head-clothing louse divergence ~ 170 kya
- First evidence for tailored clothing ~ 40 kya
During the latter part of the Middle Pleistocene (e.g., 83–170 Ka), archaic hominins lived in cold climates in Eurasia, whereas H. sapiens was still in Africa. Whether these archaic hominins had clothing is unknown because they left no clothing louse descendents that we can sample among living humans. All modern clothing lice are confined to a single mitochondrial clade that shows a contemporaneous population expansion with modern humans ∼100 Ka (Reed et al. 2004, 2007). Therefore, we are left to conclude that regular clothing use must have occurred in H. sapiens at least by 83 Ka and possibly as early as 170 Ka. Whether archaic hominins used clothing cannot be assessed from these lice and may require the collection of lice from archaic human remains, which is unlikely.
Over the last half millennium, European explorers discovered numerous people who still used Paleolithic or Neolithic technology ("primitive people"). In warm climates, Paleolithic-tech people tended to wear very little clothing, and that's likely how the first members of our present species dressed. But making clothing enabled living in very cold climates, even with Paleolithic technology. That clothing was made from animal skins, something that we still do today: fur coats and leather.
With Neolithic-level technology came evidence of looms in several places: loom weights. Looms are for making cloth by weaving, and we soon ended up making a *lot* of it. So in warm climates, we wear more clothing than our Paleolithic ancestors did, sometimes much more, and something that we have been doing for several centuries in several places. The first fibers for weaving were stems of flax plants and the like, going back to the Paleolithic, and in the Neolithic and later, additional fibers were added, like cotton (seed parachute) and wool (sheep hair), fibers that require spinning to make threads. Also added was silk, threads made by caterpillars for their cocoons, and over the last century, plastic. Also over the last century was plastic-sheet clothing like surgical gloves and fake leather.
So why did we start wearing lots of clothing where we seemingly didn't need to?
Some clothing has obvious purposes of protection, like warm clothing for cold weather, and also footwear. The oldest known footwear is sandals found in Fort Rock Cave in Oregon, dating back to 8000 - 7000 BCE. Their makers had Paleolithic-level technology, so footwear likely goes back a long way. Animal-skin shoes and boots also likely go back very far.
Modesty is another reason. We don't like to reveal our genitals. But one does not need much clothing for that.
Aside from all that, it's hard to say. Do we like the feel of clothing against our skin?