Lice genetics suggest humans started wearing clothes up to 170,000 years ago
Early clothes rotted away long ago, so scientists turned to an unlikely witness: the body louse, which dies within hours unless it can shelter in fabric. Counting the genetic mutations separating it from the head louse suggests people were dressing somewhere between 83,000 and 170,000 years ago.
Wearing clothes is a uniquely human habit, and anthropologists think skins and plant material were first adapted to keep off cold, heat and rain, especially as people moved into new climates. Because those materials decay, direct evidence is scarce, and expert guesses have ranged wildly, from 40,000 to as much as 3 million years ago.
The louse method, developed by Ralf Kittler, Manfred Kayser and Mark Stoneking at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, rests on a simple logic. The body louse can only have split from its ancestor once there was clothing to live in, and mutations build up at a known rate, so the gap between the two lineages works as a clock. A 2003 study put the split at 107,000 years ago; a 2011 study settled on 170,000. The team links the change to modern humans moving north out of warm Africa, though another group using a similar clock proposed 30,000 to 114,000 years, and some dates predate the known exodus. One possibility is that humans picked up the lice from other, now extinct hominins who wore clothes earlier.
Archaeology broadly agrees. In September 2021 researchers reported signs of clothing manufacture from 90,000 to 120,000 years ago in deposits in Morocco, yet no single estimate has won general acceptance. Cave art hints at skin garments around 30,000 years ago, and woven clothing appears about 27,000 years ago, although the oldest surviving textile fragments are from 7000 BC.
Plant and animal fibres followed. Silk weaving in China goes back 8,500 years. The earliest cotton yet found consists of fibres mineralised inside copper beads at Mehrgarh in the Indus Valley, from around 6000 BC, and cotton spinning began in India around 3000 BC. Felted or spun, then netted, knitted or woven, textiles shaped not only how people dressed but how they carried possessions and decorated their homes.
Source: History of clothing and textiles
