The evidence comes from seemingly very unfashionable lice, since scientists tracked when head lice evolved into clothing/body lice around 170,000 years ago. So lice have been with us since the world's first clothes were made.
The study, published in this month's Molecular Biology and Evolution journal, explains how DNA sequencing of the parasites was used to calculate when clothing lice first began to genetically diverge from human head lice.
“We wanted to find another method for pinpointing when humans might have first started wearing clothing,” said project leader David Reed, associate curator of mammals at the Florida Museum of Natural History, in a University of Florida press release. “Because they are so well adapted to clothing, we know that body lice or clothing lice almost certainly didn’t exist until clothing came about in humans.”
The findings reveal that our ancestors started to wear clothing long after they lost their ape-like body hair. Genetic skin coloration research shows that hair loss happened around one million years ago, long before modern humans emerged in Africa. Our ancestors were likely running around nude and relatively hairless for quite some time then.
“It’s interesting to think humans were able to survive in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years without clothing and without body hair, and that it wasn’t until they had clothing that modern humans were then moving out of Africa into other parts of the world,” Reed said.
He added that our success and progression as a species has been made possible, in large part, to our "controlled use of fire, the ability to use clothing, new hunting strategies and new stone tools."
Since our ancestors are thought to have migrated out of Africa and into colder climates and higher latitudes anywhere from 100,000 to 60,000 years ago, the findings indicate the invention of clothing made such long journeys northward possible.
Read more at Discovery News
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