A new discovery has recently been reported on what's possibly the earliest evidence of clothing humans manufactured in a cave in Morocco 120,000 years ago.
It can be simply to take clothing, including their origin, for granted, as wearing an outfit at the beginning of the say is such an embedded part of what it means to be a human being on earth.
A ScienceAlert report said, one person who is not taking such a result for granted is Emily Hallett, an anthropologist from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany. She recently came out with study that outlined the Moroccan finding.
Hallett, along with a research team, had been examining several bone fragments discovered at Contrebandiers Cave, an important archeological area on Morocco's Atlantic coast.
Leather and Fur Possibly Used for Clothing
CNN reported, on the approximately 12,000 bone fragment discovered at the site, the team was able to determine over 60 bones of animals believed to have been formed by humans for to be used as tools.
Cut mark patterns on the bones matched with tools discovered at other archeological areas that had been used to process leather.
The anthropologist said, organic materials like leathers and fur are exceptionally unlikely to preserve in deposits this old, and thus, as archeologists, they are left with pieces of evidence that include tools, as well as the bones from animals that preserve skinning marks.
She also explained, these proofs can be put together and propose that humans used bone as tools to prepare leather and fur, possibly used for to make clothes.
It's worth noting though, she elaborated, that the evidence is not entirely conclusive. These said tools could have been used for the preparation of leather material for other purposes than clothes like storage devices, among others.
Skinning Carnivores for Clothing
Still, according to a similar Newsville Times,clothing like fur and leather would have been specifically beneficial to humans during this period. As ancient humans expanded out of Africa, they would have experienced new environments, and probably, climatically extreme environments.
Clothing, as well as other tools would have possibly helped in the dispersion of humans into new environs all over the world. For fur, ancient people at the Contrebandiers Cave were peeling carnivores.
In this cave, there are three different carnivore species with skinning marks on their bones. These include the wildcat, the golden jackal and the Rüppell's fox.
The cut marks on these carnivore bones are limited to places where incisions are made for the removal of fur, and there are no cut marks on the sites of the skeleton linked to the removal of meat. Meanwhile, for leather clothing, a number of bovid species were discovered at the area.
Origin of Clothing
Describing their study published in IScience, Hallett said " bones of hartebeest, aurochs and gazelle" were found in high richness in the cave. More so, these animals were eatin by humans as well, since there are cut marks linked to removal of meat on their bones.
She added she believes that given these tools' specialization, they are potentially part of a larger, older tradition. To add weight to this, genetic research of clothing lice by others proposed an origin for clothing in Africa of approximately 170,000 years ago.
These tools, Hallett explained, were most likely used for clothing, and it is interesting that both the archeological record and genetic evidence point to an olden origin, as mentioned, in Africa.
Related information about humans having manufactured clothing 120,000 years ago is shown on NewzTech20's YouTube video below:
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