Clothes, when you think about it, are kind of weird. Like, we’re the only species to wear clothes, unless you count shells in. However, shells are used for defensive purposes, just like a suit of armor, but clothes don’t make us invincible. Some clothes protect us from the cold and from getting wet, so they replicate fur in a way. Since humans are by ourselves weak and not particularly suited to extreme temperatures, clothes are just our way of adapting to the world, except for one thing. It is most likely that we did not make the first clothes, and that Homo sapiens walked around naked for a good 100,000 years.
We’ve been around for 200,000 years and most of that was spent in East and South Africa (not the country, the region), which is not a particularly hospitable place to wear clothes made of leather and furs (we would have shrivelled up like a raisin in the heat), so it is likely that for the most part we were naked. Now that doesn’t mean we didn’t know how to sew or weave, but we just didn’t find it necessary to wear clothes. Needles made of bone have been found in countless sites, and ancient humans were expert fishers, so nets were definitely a no-go.
Around 70,000 years, scientists believe something clicked in the heads of Homo sapiens, some genetic mutation appeared that made Homo sapiens into a thinking machine. While Neanderthals and Denisovans, our closest relatives, had similar technological and linguistic capabilities and were stronger than us and had better hearing and smell, we now had an advantage over them: concepts that stretched beyond the real world, like gods, spirits, demons, or in our modern-day world: stocks, companies, and cryptocurrency, as well as the intrinsic value of money. These are things the majority of the 8 billion humans on Earth agree upon, but they are not physically real. Concepts like this would have been foreign and laughable to the Neanderthal, but humans could bond in large numbers over things like this, which led to larger social groups.
Back to clothes. Around this time, Mount Toba erupted, creating a volcanic winter and causing temperatures to spike downwards again. This led to a near-extinction, in which the number of humans all over the world is believed to have been just 10,000 from 1 million, which might have led to the Cognitive Revolution. During this time, Africa became dry and inhospitable, so humans were compelled to move out and find new hunting grounds, in which they ran into the Neanderthals in the Middle East.
The Neanderthals and Denisovans, subspecies of Homo sapiens and our closest relatives, lived in one of the coldest environments ever. And just like us, they didn’t have the shaggy fur of a musk ox to brave it out. So, it is inevitable that they must have had sewn clothing and not just some furs draped around. We know that they had knowledge of making yarn from corded fibers and they wove baskets, and they had awls, so they almost certainly wore fur suits. While our ancestors, the ancient Homo sapiens sapiens, wore scraps of hide to cover their genitals or to serve as protection against the harsh winds of the desert, Neanderthals were dressed up pretty similar to what the Inuit tribes of Alaska and the Chukchi of Siberia wear today.
Around 60,000 years humans made contact with Neanderthals and made their way into Europe and Asia. It was during this time that they took up wearing clothing made of fur and hide. After the Ice Age ended, many people still wore leather in colder places, while the groups that settled down and domesticated animals like sheep and goats found out how to make wool. Around 6,000 years ago, people in Egypt and India found out how to make linen and cotton from plant fibers. Thus different styles of clothes were worn throughout the ancient world, and fast forward a few millenium later and now you have spandex and nylon and polyester. Though the last three might not be that beneficial or fashionable.
In today’s society clothes are a necessity, but up until very recently they were just extras to be used if it was really cold. It really shows that a lot of the things we find important can change in the near future and that they weren’t important in the recent past.
Anay Ganesh 