When Did Humans Start Wearing Clothes?

Leather, fur and plant fibre decay quickly. Apart from rare cases of ice, desert or waterlogged preservation, the clothes of the Stone Age are gone. The oldest known shoe, from Areni-1 cave in Armenia, is about 5,500 years old; the woven sandals from Fort Rock Cave in Oregon are around 9,000–10,000.

So researchers have to work indirectly, like detectives reconstructing a wardrobe from the laundry marks. Four kinds of clue matter most: parasites, tools, butchery marks and the rare surviving fibre.

Clue 1: lice

Humans host two closely related forms of louse. Head lice live and lay eggs in scalp hair. Body lice live and lay their eggs in clothing, emerging only to feed. Body lice therefore could only have evolved once clothing existed as a stable habitat.

By comparing the DNA of head and body lice and estimating how long ago they split, geneticists can date the invention of clothing. A 2003 study by Ralf Kittler, Manfred Kayser and Mark Stoneking gave a rough estimate of around 72,000 years. A larger 2011 analysis by Melissa Toups, David Reed and colleagues pushed it to at least 83,000 and possibly 170,000 years ago.

That fits neatly with a separate estimate from the same lice: the gap between our ancestors losing their body hair (well over a million years ago) and getting dressed. For most of human evolution, our ancestors were naked in Africa — which was usually warm enough.

Clue 2: hide-working tools

Turning a raw skin into something wearable is laborious. It must be scraped clean of fat and flesh, dried, and softened, or it becomes stiff and rotten. Those steps leave traces on tools.

Stone scrapers with microscopic hide-polish show hide working stretches back hundreds of thousands of years — though hides also make bags, shelters and containers, so hide working alone does not prove clothing.

In 2013 Marie Soressi and colleagues described Neanderthal lissoirs from Pech-de-l’Azé I and Abri Peyrony in France, about 50,000 years old: smoothed, polished tools made from deer ribs, identical in form to the bone burnishers leatherworkers still use to make hides supple and water-resistant. Neanderthals were not just wrapping themselves in raw skins.

Clue 3: skinned foxes in Morocco

The oldest direct evidence of clothing production comes from Contrebandiers Cave on Morocco’s Atlantic coast. In 2021 Emily Hallett and colleagues reported more than 60 bone tools, dated to about 120,000–90,000 years ago, shaped specifically for scraping hides and furs. Some were spatula-shaped, like tools used for hide cleaning in recent times.

Just as telling were the animal bones. Sand foxes, golden jackals and wildcats bore cut marks exactly where you would slice to remove a pelt in one piece — around the jaws, feet and toes — with no sign they were eaten. These animals were being killed for their fur. In a warm North African climate, that suggests clothing may have had social or symbolic value as well as practical warmth.

Clue 4: string and fibres

Plant fibre clothing needs cord. In 2020 Bruce Hardy’s team described a tiny fragment of three-ply cord stuck to a Neanderthal stone tool at Abri du Maras in France, between about 52,000 and 41,000 years old. Twisting fibres into strands and strands into cord is a real feat of cognition and dexterity — the same basic process as rope, nets, bags and fabric.

At Dzudzuana Cave in Georgia, Eliso Kvavadze and colleagues found hundreds of wild flax fibres about 30,000 years old, some spun, some knotted and some dyed black, grey, turquoise and pink. At Dolní Věstonice in the Czech Republic, Olga Soffer and James Adovasio identified impressions of woven textiles and nets pressed into fired clay about 27,000 years ago.

The needle revolution

Drape a skin around your shoulders and you have a cloak. Cut and stitch skins to fit arms, legs and hands and you have garments that trap warm air — the difference between surviving an Ice Age winter and thriving in one.

The eyed needle made that tailoring efficient. The earliest appear in Siberia and the Caucasus from roughly 45,000–40,000 years ago, including at Denisova Cave, and they spread widely across Eurasia in the Ice Age. Some researchers, notably Ian Gilligan, argue this is when clothing shifted from simple to complex — and that later, fine needles were also used for decoration and display. The 34,000-year-old burials at Sunghir in Russia, covered in thousands of ivory beads laid out in rows, show clothing had become a canvas for identity.

Did Neanderthals wear tailored clothes?

Neanderthals worked hides, made lissoirs and twisted cord, and survived harsh European winters. But they have no eyed needles, and a 2012 modelling study by Nathan Wales estimated they could have got by with simpler, looser coverings over much of the body. Some researchers suggest that more efficient tailored clothing gave Homo sapiens an edge in the coldest periods — a contributing factor in Neanderthal extinction, though far from a proven one.

Shoes leave a trace in your toes

Even footwear can be detected without shoes. Erik Trinkaus noticed that people who habitually wear supportive footwear have thinner, weaker middle toe bones than barefoot people. By this measure, early modern humans at sites such as Tianyuan Cave in China appear to have worn shoes regularly by around 40,000 years ago.

Why it matters

Clothing is technology, and it made the human world possible. Without it, people could not have crossed Siberia, reached the Arctic or walked into the Americas. It also turned the body into a surface for signals: status, group, age and belief. The first clothes were probably practical. It did not take long for them to become meaningful.