People today can take for granted the need and existence of all kinds of clothes, from pants to dresses, coats, skirts, socks, underwear, bow ties, hats, to kilts and bikinis. But everything has a beginning.
Scientists say the 120,000-year-old artifacts they discovered in a cave in Morocco suggest that humans made special bone tools, skinned the animals and then used other tools to process the skins.
The items found in the Cave of the Smugglers, about 250 meters from the Atlantic coast, near the city of Temara, seem to be the oldest known evidence for the processing and manufacture of clothes in the world.
Our species, Homo sapiens, first appeared in Africa about 300,000 years ago and then spread around the world. The “invention” of clothing was a milestone for humanity, as it represents the cultural and cognitive evolution of man.
“We assume that clothing was an integral part of the spread of our species in cold environments,” said Emily Hallett, an evolutionary archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Science and Human History who co-authored the study, which is published in the journal Science Review.
Scientists found 62 tools made from animal bones. They also found that the bones of three small carnivores (a fox, a jackal and a wildcat) had characteristic cuts – suggesting that they had been scratched to get their fur and not to eat the meat. Bones of antelope and wild cattle suggest that from these animals, in addition to meat, humans also used the skin.
“Clothes are a unique human innovation,” said Evinor Schery, an evolutionary archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute. “We use clothes for practical reasons, for example to keep warm or to protect our skin. But we also use them symbolically, to express who we are “and our different cultures, he added.
Evidence has been found in various archeological sites that at the same time people began to use ornaments.
The furs, leather and other materials from which the clothes were made wear out over time. No prehistoric “clothing” was found in the cave and the “fashion” of the time remains unknown.
Researchers believe that humans began making clothes many thousands of years earlier, but they have no evidence. Genetic studies on clothing lice by other researchers suggest that the first garments may have been made in Africa 170,000 years ago. It is also possible that the Neanderthals, the “cousins” of Homo sapiens who lived in Eurasia before him, made clothes, given that they lived in a very cold environment.
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