Why Did Humans Start Wearing Clothes? – Transcript

00:00Imagine stepping out of your front door with nothing on. Your face would burn. Everyone would stare. You'd want to disappear. Now look at the rest of the animal world. A bear has fur. A bird has feathers. A snake has scales. A crab might stick a sponge on its back as a disguise. But no other animal gets dressed for the weather. Only us. So, when did we start getting dressed? And why?

00:25Here's the problem. The first clothes ever made have vanished. To find them, scientists had to follow three strange clues. A parasite, your own skin, and a pile of bone tools. And at the end, an even stranger question. Why does being seen without clothes feel so wrong?

00:44Stone lasts. A hand ax can sit in the ground for a million years. But clothes are made of soft things. Hide, fur, grass, bark. Bury them and bacteria and insects get to work. Give it a few centuries and they're gone. Nobody will ever dig up the first coat. So, scientists hunt for everything the clothes touched. And one of those things was alive. It was crawling in the seams.

01:10Lice. Humans carry two kinds. Head lice live in the hair on your head. They cling to it and feed on your scalp. Body lice are different. They don't really live on your body at all. They live in your clothes. They hide in the seams and fibers and only climb onto your skin to feed. So, body lice need clothes. No clothes, no body lice. Which means if you can date when body lice split from head lice, you roughly date the first

01:36clothes. And their DNA works like a clock. Count the differences and you can estimate how long they've been apart. In 2003, one team got about 107,000 years with a wide margin of error. In 2011, a later study landed in the same range. At least 83,000 years, possibly 170,000.

01:57Long before anyone planted a field, built a town, or wrote a single word, people were probably already getting dressed. If tiny clues like this make history click for you, subscribe to Relic Explains.

02:10But this raises a bigger mystery. Ask most people why we wear clothes and they'll say the cold. That's part of it, but it doesn't explain the timing because we lost our fur much, much earlier. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, have pale skin under dark hair. When our ancestors lost most of their body hair, their bare skin was exposed to the African sun. So, it turned dark. And one gene linked to dark

02:35skin suggests the change happened as far back as 1.2 million years ago. So, for roughly a million years, our ancestors walked around with almost no fur and very likely no clothes. How? Because bare skin was an advantage. We sweat more than almost any other mammal. On a hot day, sweat spreads over bare skin and cools us down. Our ancestors could keep tracking animals through the midday

03:00heat while furry animals had to rest. But there's a catch. Skin that sheds heat at noon keeps shedding it at midnight. Fine at noon, not fine on a cold, wet night. And definitely not fine when humans moved into colder lands and the climate swung into ice ages. Our bodies had solved one problem by creating another. So, clothes probably didn't arrive when we lost our fur. They arrived when the cold caught up with us.

03:26Most animals fix this the slow way. Over thousands of generations, they grow thicker fur. We did something else. We borrowed someone else's fur. And borrowed fur beats the real thing in one big way. It comes off. Midday sun? Throw it aside and sweat. Night falls? Wrap up. Wander into a colder valley? Add another skin. Imagine you're crossing dry scrub 100,000 years ago. The sun is burning your shoulders. Thorns are

03:53cutting your legs. Flies are landing on every scratch. Suddenly, a skin over your back and something wrapped around your feet matter a lot. And at night, that same skin becomes your blanket, your bag, part of the roof over your head. So, clothing probably wasn't invented for one reason. Like fire, it was a tool that let us carry a better world around with us.

04:15But a theory needs proof. Some of the oldest proof comes from a cave on the Atlantic coast of Morocco called Contrebandiers' Cave, Smugglers' Cave. In 2021, researchers described dozens of bone tools from it, around 90 to 120,000 years old.

04:33Their shapes and wear matched tools for scraping hides, cleaning them until the skin turns into soft leather. Then they looked at the animal bones. Sand foxes, golden jackals, wildcats. The cut marks on them matched skinning, not butchering for meat. These little animals didn't offer much to eat. People wanted their fur.

04:54So now we have a workshop. Still, nobody has found a single stitch of the clothes themselves, only the tools that made them, the bones they came from, and a louse. And the next clue is a tiny hole, the eye of a needle.

05:10Picture Europe in the Ice Age. Long winters, freezing wind. The people living there were Neanderthals. Neanderthals certainly used animal skins, but some researchers think their clothing was simple, skins draped over the shoulders like a cape.

05:26Warm enough, but the wind gets in at every gap. Then modern humans show up with something new, small bone needles with a hole at one end. The oldest are roughly 40 to 50,000 years old.

05:39A needle changes everything. Now you can cut pieces to shape and sew them together. Sleeves, leggings, hoods, layers that hug the body and trap warm air inside. Some scientists think this gave us a quiet edge when the coldest stretches hit, a cape against a tailored suit.

05:58It's debated. Neanderthals vanished for many reasons. Still, part of human history may have turned on a hole in a sliver of bone. So, were the Neanderthals simply underdressed? Or is that unfair to them?

06:12Remember the first coat nobody will ever find? This is the closest we get. Jump forward to about 5,300 years ago, high in the Alps, where a man died on a mountain pass. The ice kept his body until hikers found it in 1991.

06:28Scientists call him Ötzi. And this time, the clothes survived. A fur hat from a brown bear, a coat stitched from goat and sheep leather, shoes with bearskin soles stuffed with grass to keep his feet warm.

06:42By then, clothing wasn't a lucky invention anymore. It was a full technology. And here's where the story turns. Once everyone wore clothes, clothes started to talk. Shells sewn onto a cape, a color that took days to make, a fur only some people were allowed to wear. Clothes could say where you came from, which group you belonged to, how important you were.

07:06And with them came rules. What has to be covered? Where? In front of whom? Those rules have never been the same everywhere. In some places and centuries, very little covering was normal and nobody blinked.

07:20In others, the rules were strict and breaking them brought real shame. So, that burning feeling in your face when you imagine walking outside naked? Toddlers don't have it. Watch any 2-year-old escape from the bath.

07:33You learned it from people who learned it all the way back. Clothes began as a way to survive. They became a language. And now, none of us can stop speaking it. So, why did we start wearing clothes?

07:47We lost our fur, the cold caught up with us, and we learned to carry warmth around. Then, clothes became part of who we are. Now, a question for you. If you were dropped into the Ice Age tomorrow with one piece of modern clothing, what would you take? Tell me in the comments. So, what did ancient humans do when it was too cold to sleep? That's the next video. And if you want more stories like this, subscribe to Relic Explains.