During the winter season, do you ever wonder, how were our ancestors like without clothes? Probably not especially that humans, according to a 2011 study that proposes they first put on a piece of clothing after the "second-to-the-last Ice Age" some 170,000 years back, when nudity must have been something "cool for comfort."
The evidence came from apparently very unfashionable lice since scientists followed when there occurred an evolution of lice into clothing or body lice, as mentioned, roughly 170,000 years back. Therefore, lice have been with us, humans, since the first clothes of the world were made.
The research was published in Molecular biology and Evolution journal. It describes the manner DNA sequencing of parasites was utilized to compute when clothing lice first started to inherently diverge from human head lice.
According to the Florida Museum of Natural History associate curator, David Reed, they wanted to look for another process for "pinpointing when humans might have" initially begun to wear clothing.
Since body lice are so well-adjusted to clothing, Reed explained, "We know that they, or clothing lice, nearly surely did not exist" until the existence of clothing in humans.
After Losing Ape-Like Body Hair
Research findings show that our ancestors began wearing clothes long after the disappearance of their ape-like body hair.
According to a genetic skin coloration study, hair loss took place roughly one million years back, long before modern humans' emergence in Africa.
The same study indicates that our ancestors were possibly running around nude and comparatively hairless for quite some time at that time.
Reed explained it is interesting to think "humans were able to survive" in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years minus clothing and sans body hair, too, and that it was until they had clothing that modern humans were then moving out of the country into other parts of the globe.
The associate curator also said humans' success and progression as a species had been made possible in great part to their "controlled use of fair, the ability to use clothing, new hunting tactics and new stone mechanisms."
Furthermore, since our ancestors are believed to have moved out of Africa and into cooler temperatures and higher latitudes anywhere between 100,000 and 60,000 years back, the results specify the invention of clothing such long trips northward possible.
The Need to Keep Warm
To expand into Asia and Europe's cold hinterlands, there is a need for our ancestors to keep warm. The earliest possible evidence for clothing in ancestors is stone tools discovered at archeological sites such as Gran Dolina in the Spanish Atapuerca Mountains.
A study presents clearer evidence from the Netherlands, who lived as far back as roughly 400,000 years back: the musculature's pattern on Neanderthal arms proposes that they habitually carried out tasks including "hide preparation," among others.
Despite having bodies that were more adapted to cold than the present humans, a study conducted in 2012 approximated that Neanderthals may have needed to have their bodies covered up to 80 percent so they could survive extreme weathers.
In modern humans or Homo sapiens, clothing's adoption may have left its traces on what the study authors describe as "hangers-on."
Essentially, a study conducted in 2011 suggested that clothing lice started to genetically depart from human head lice tens of thousands of years ago, suggesting a date for when we humans began wearing clothes.
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