Why Did Humans Start Wearing Clothes?

Humans are the only animals that get dressed because we lost our fur. Our ancestors traded hair for sweat glands to keep cool on hot savannas, and that left bare skin exposed to cold nights. Body-lice DNA suggests people were wearing clothes regularly by roughly 83,000–170,000 years ago, and 90,000–120,000-year-old hide-scraping bone tools from Morocco's Contrebandiers Cave back that up. Eyed bone needles (about 40,000–50,000 years ago) made tailored, fitted clothing possible, which helped modern humans survive the Ice Age. Ötzi the Iceman, who died about 5,300 years ago, wore leather from at least five animal species. Later, woven cloth turned clothing into a language of status and identity, and modesty became something we learn. Keywords: origin of clothing, body lice, human evolution, fur loss, Contrebandiers Cave, bone needles, Neanderthals, Ötzi the Iceman, prehistoric clothing, history of fashion, modesty Chapters: 0:00 Intro 0:20 The only dressed animal 1:05 Losing our fur 1:45 Dark skin 2:13 Cold nights 2:36 The missing evidence 2:56 What lice reveal 3:39 Contrebandiers Cave 4:28 Simple clothing 4:45 Neanderthal capes 5:24 The eyed needle 5:46 Tailored clothing 6:12 Ötzi the Iceman 7:12 Weaving cloth 7:35 Clothes as language 7:56 Modesty 8:17 Learned shame 8:41 Your 170,000-year-old outfit Sources: - Rogers, Iltis & Wooding (2004), MC1R and the time since loss of human body hair, Current Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1086/381006 - Jablonski (2010), "The Naked Truth", Scientific American. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0210-42 - Toups et al. (2011), Origin of clothing lice, Molecular Biology and Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msq234 - Hallett et al. (2021), Worked bone assemblage at Contrebandiers Cave, iScience. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2021.102988 - Collard et al. (2016), Clothing use by Neanderthals vs early modern humans, J. Anthropological Archaeology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2016.07.010 - Soressi et al. (2013), Ne