Humans spent most of prehistory without tailored clothes
Nudity means a human body without clothing. Estimates vary, yet anatomically modern people probably lived unclothed for roughly their first 90,000 years, having lost their body hair, until garments and modesty codes rewrote the default. Ancient Greece went the other way: its athletes stripped off to display freedom, privilege, and physical excellence.
Nudity is the state of a human being without clothing. Estimates differ, but for the first 90,000 years of prehistory anatomically modern humans went naked: they had lost their body hair, lived in hospitable climates, and had not yet developed the crafts to make clothes. The loss of fur itself is usually linked to the need to shed body heat. Adornment such as jewellery, paint, and tattoos arrived with behavioural modernity in the late Paleolithic, and some techniques later used for clothing may have begun as ways to decorate the body rather than conceal it.
When did dressing become a habit? A 2010 study in Molecular Biology and Evolution, dating the split between body lice and head lice, placed it between 170,000 and 83,000 years ago. Everyone lived as a hunter-gatherer until about 20,000 years ago, and in tropical Africa, Australia, the Americas, and Southeast Asia unclothed foraging continued until a few centuries ago. Everyday clothing is counted among the signs that the Neolithic was ending and civilization beginning, some seven to nine thousand years back.
From Mesopotamia to Egypt's Middle Kingdom, most men and women wore a single cloth around the lower body and went bare-chested and barefoot; full nakedness embarrassed people because it signalled low status and want, not because of sexual shame, and slaves might go naked. Ancient Greece prized male nudity more than any culture before or since, treating the naked body as a ritual costume linked to the beauty of the gods.
European colonialism exported Western ideas of modest dress, and globalization carries them further today; explorers' first impressions of Indigenous peoples often fixed on how little they wore. Most societies now require clothing in public, though some accept non-sexual nudity for recreation or celebration and value it in art, and the rules differ for men and women. Even the vocabulary is layered: nude came from Norman French and naked from Anglo-Saxon, with euphemisms such as 'birthday suit' and 'in the buff'.
Source: Nudity
