Archaeologists in Germany have discovered some of the earliest signs of clothing use, with cut marks on a cave bear paw indicating that prehistoric animals were skinned for their fur 300,000 years ago.
The find in Schöningen, northern Germany, is exciting because, despite common portrayals of cavemen and women draped in furs, very little is known about how early people covered themselves and survived harsh winters.
Fur, leather, and other organic materials rarely survive past 100,000 years, so direct evidence of prehistoric clothing is limited.
“The study is significant because we know relatively little about how humans in the deep past were protecting themselves from the elements. From this early time period, there is only a handful of sites that show evidence of bear skinning, with Schöningen providing the most complete picture,” said study author Ivo Verheijen, a doctoral student at Tübingen University in Germany.
Cave bears were enormous mammals, around the size of polar bears, that became extinct some 25,000 years ago. According to a study published in the Journal Of Human Evolution on December 23, the cave bear’s coat, which includes long outside hairs that form an airy protective layer and short, dense hairs that give effective insulation, was appropriate for producing rudimentary clothes or bedding.
The clothing was very certainly made of bear skins wrapped around the body
The clothing was most likely made of skins that were wrapped around the body without any sophisticated tailoring. Eyed needles, which were required to stitch more complicated motifs, did not appear in the archaeological record until around 45,000 years ago.
“We found the cutmarks on elements of the hands/feet where very little meat or fat is present on the bones, which argues against the cutmarks originating from the butchering of the animal,” Verheijen explained via email.
“On the contrary, in these locations, the skin is much closer to the bones, which makes marking the bone inevitable when skinning an animal.”
The Schoeningen site in Germany is well renowned for the discovery of the oldest known wooden weapons – nine throwing spears, a thrusting lance, and two throwing sticks – used to kill game 300,000 years ago.
Clothing lice evolved from their human head louse predecessors at least 83,000 years ago
It’s difficult to say when people first started wearing clothes. Clothing lice evolved from their human head louse predecessors at least 83,000 years ago and potentially as early as 170,000 years ago, implying that humans were wearing clothes before large migrations out of Africa.
Humans were manufacturing animal skins 90,000 to 120,000 years ago, according to bone tools discovered in what is now Morocco.
“We have discovered numerous remains of other animals with cutmarks in Schöningen such as horses and aurochs, with cutmarks related to skinning. Nonetheless, the highly insulating properties of bear skins, together with the fact that the hides are more flexible when treated properly, makes bear skins much more suitable for clothing than other large herbivores,” Verheijen said.
Verheijen noted that the climate at the site 300,000 years ago was “more or less similar to nowadays,” with average temperatures 2 degrees warmer to 2 degrees colder than today.
