The natural and synthetic fibers wrapped around your body at the moment are truly a mix of function and aesthetic. Clothing has been around for thousands of years, and it has evolved and changed through the centuries since its inception as our cultures and trends change. Different peoples have different preferred ways of clothing themselves, leading to a vast myriad of clothing options from cultures around the world. New research from the journal iScience, though, wants to take the history of the cloth a step further—all the way to its roots.
Here, in a cave known as Contrebandiers Cave in the Atlantic coast of Morocco, scientists found several bone tools—tools that, according to the authors, were used for skinning animals for their fur. The tools were dated to be around 120,000 years old, making them the oldest evidence obtained so far for human clothes-making.
Originally, the scientists were interested in studying the ancient diet these ancient humans once had. Given the myriad of bone fragments scattered inside the cave, they wanted to obtain some information about what they ate and how they ate it. Alongside this, however, they obtained several bone fragments that were clearly shaped into bone. These bones possessed use marks and shaping that implied its use as skinning tools, specifically “scraping hides to make leather and […] scraping pelts to make fur,” according to Emily Hallett, a researcher from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
Several bone fragments from known carnivores in the area at that time, including wild cats and foxes, were obtained. Specifically, they found pieces of their lower jaws with skinning marks—meaning that, according to the authors, these ancient humans actually hunted these carnivores for their fur. These very tools were dated to be between 90,000 and 120,000 years old.
Ian Gilligan, an adjunct professor of archaeology from the University of Sydney who’s unrelated to the study, also found that the time periods these authors found to be associated with their newly-obtained clothing-making evidence also correspond to the known beginning of the last Ice Age, also some 120,000 years ago. This, according to Gilligcan, corresponds these ancient humans’ desire for clothing with the onset of these global cold spells, making them necessary for survival in these harsh conditions.
Hallet added: “The Contrebandiers Cave bone tools demonstrate that by roughly 120,000 years ago, Homo sapiens began to intensify the use of bone to make formal tools and use them for specific tasks, including leather and fur working. This versatility appears to be at the root of our species and not a characteristic that emerged after expansions into Eurasia.”
The study in Contrebandiers Cave also found a whale or dolphin tooth dated to about 100,000 years ago, complete with evidence of intentional shaping for tool use; this find gives the research team a new first, as it is also currently the oldest evidence obtained so far of tool use from the bones of marine animals.
(Read on about the history of our species with our pieces about the first evidence of beer-making, as well as some of our oldest art installations over at Sulawesi—which are, unfortunately, in danger of vanishing due to human-induced climate change.)
References
- Hallett, E. Y., Marean, C. W., Steele, T. E., Álvarez-Fernández, E., Jacobs, Z., Cerasoni, J. N., Aldeias, V., Scerri, E. M. L., Olszewski, D. I., Hajraoui, M. A. E., & Dibble, H. L. (2021). A worked bone assemblage from 120,000–90,000 year old deposits at Contrebandiers Cave, Atlantic Coast, Morocco. IScience, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2021.102988
- Haridy, R. (2021, September 17). Oldest archeological evidence of clothes making found in Moroccan cave. New Atlas. https://newatlas.com/science/oldest-evidence-clothes-making-tools-moroccan-cave/
