In this article, we'll show you how DNA research and body lice might be linked to the time people started wearing clothes. And the clothes of ancient people did not appear immediately.



As you know, the first people lived in Africa, where the climate is warm enough all year round. And, according to historians, there was no need for clothes for a long time.

Initially, people started to do their hair. Hair got into the eyes, interfered with hunting and picking berries and plant roots. So they began to tuck their hair, for example, in tails or pigtails. Also, even before the advent of clothing, people began to wear jewelry and tattoo.





But the semantic load of jewelry and tattoos was very far from modern. Primitive people believed in the spirits of nature and the spirits of their ancestors. They believed in curses and magical rituals. And jewelry, and tattoos, thus, performed the function of amulets.

They were believed to protect their hosts from evil spirits and curses. And it is quite logical that the most elegant (more jewelry, many tattoos) were tribal shamans, that is, those people who directly came into contact with the other world.



Tattoos also had another function. They served as a kind of "passport" of primitive man. Tattoos could tell about whether a given person had sons (at the birth of sons, some tribes could get tattoos), whether he was a good hunter (with a successful hunt, appropriate marks were applied), and whether this person was an adult.



The ancient people had a rite of initiation - initiation, only after successfully passing which the boy became a man. This rite included a series of tests for endurance and pain resistance. If a young man did not pass it, he was treated like a child and he was not considered a man. After the completion of this rite, the corresponding marks in the form of tattoos or scars could also be applied to the body.



But the clothes of ancient people appeared much later.

Clothes are what protects us from the effects of an unfavorable external environment. This definition of "clothing" can be found in almost any book on the history of costume.



And if in Africa the environment was relatively favorable, then when the ancient people moved to the north, then, most likely, with the deterioration of weather conditions, clothes appeared. Initially, these were warm animal skins, then they began to wear tight-fitting clothes.



So, the most ancient needles for sewing, found by archaeologists, date back somewhere 40 thousand years BC. It is possible that clothing also appears in this period.



There is another version regarding the appearance of clothing. About 1.2 million years ago, the ancestors of modern man became bald (lost the hairline of the body) and, accordingly, it was at this time that clothes could appear.



But a more accurate time of the appearance of clothing can still be considered a period of about 107 thousand years ago.



Scientist Mark Stoneking, interested in the question "when did people start wearing clothes," decided to investigate the DNA of body lice.

Initially, only head lice lived on Earth, which parasitized, including on the head, among the long thick hair, of ancient man.However, then hair lice evolved, and a new species appeared - the body louse. Body lice live only on clothes. Accordingly, the scientist decided, when people began to wear clothes, then body lice appeared.



The scientist collected figurative DNA from both head and body lice and began to examine them. Having determined the rate of accumulation of mutations in the DNA of lice over a hundred years, Mark Stoneing was able to approximately determine the time of appearance of body lice - about 72 thousand years ago.

Later, other scientists clarified the time of the appearance of body lice - about 107 thousand years ago. Thus, it is believed that the first sewing close-to-the-body clothing also appeared about 107 thousand years ago.



By the way, in those days, ancient people still lived in Africa. So, perhaps the appearance of clothing is not so much related to protection from adverse environmental influences. Perhaps clothes, like tattoos and jewelry, originally performed the function of magic amulet.

An interesting fact is that the Indians of Tierra del Fuego (an archipelago in the extreme south of South America), living in a cold climate, did almost without clothes. They wore only loincloths, and put on cloaks made of skins on top.