We were all naked until 170,000 years ago
We were all naked until 170,000 years ago
Clothing first appeared 170,000 years ago. That's what University of Florida researchers have deduced from an unlikely source - the annoying clothing louse. David Reed, associate curator of mammals at the Florida Museum of Natural History, the University of Florida campus, worked with colleagues worldwide for five years to sequence the DNA of clothing lice to determine when they first began to diverge from the harmless but cringe-inducing head louse. The study, in this month's print edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution, finds that the one louse species began to diverge into two about 170,000 years ago, 70,000 years before humans started migrating to colder climates, which began about 100,000 years ago.
Because clothing doesn't last for 170,000 years, looking at lice was the best way to deduce this. Interestingly, humans seem to have started wearing clothes well after they lost body hair, which genetic skin-coloration research puts at about 1 million years ago. That means that people spent a good long while wandering around without protective and warming body hair and without clothing, says Reed. It wasn't until they had clothing that modern humans were then moving out of Africa into other parts of the world," Reed said.
A previous study of clothing lice in 2003 by geneticists at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, estimated humans first began wearing clothes about 107,000 years ago. But the Florida researchers think their data and calculation methods are more precise. This means modern humans probably started wearing clothes on a regular basis to keep warm when they were first exposed to Ice Age conditions, Ian Gilligan, lecturer in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at The Australian National University said in a release. While the last Ice Age occurred about 120,000 years ago, from the study results humans probably began wearing clothes in the one before it, 180,000 years ago.
Clothes were invented to keep you warm!! It wasn't until man invented religions that used clothing to cover up your exposure and it would have been used as an indicator that you were the 'enlightened' clothed person.
In more modern times there have been many tribes who go naked as there was no need to keep warm - until some missionary tells them its wrong!!
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