How our ancestors invented clothing and transformed it into fashion

Remarkable archaeological finds are telling a new story of how prehistoric

humans turned clothing from a necessity into a means of self-expression
By Alison George

Venus figurines are most famous for their sexual features. These often-
voluptuous carvings of female forms, made between around 30,000 and 20,000 years
ago, have been interpreted as ritual fertility figures, mother goddesses and self-
portraits. One thing they are generally not seen as is fashion plates. Yet some of them
provide tantalising glimpses of what the well-dressed Stone Age woman was
wearing. One, from Kostenki in Russia, sports a wrap-style robe with straps. Others
have string skirts. And the famous Venus of Willendorf wears just a woven hat – but
a very fine one.

These statuettes are a far cry from our popular conception of prehistoric
humans draped in animal furs. The lavish detail with which their garments are
depicted indicates the importance of clothing to societies tens of thousands of years
ago, according to archaeologist Olga Soffer, professor emerita at the University of
Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Something that began as a necessity, to keep people
warm, had by then morphed into a canvas for aesthetic expression and meaning.
Now, the story of how that happened has taken a twist, thanks to some new
discoveries.

Before the Stone Age: Were the first tools made from plants not rocks?
Clothing is perishable, and the oldest remains are only around 10,000 years
old. But, as the Venus figurines illustrate, we can follow trends back in time in other
ways. These archaeological clues reveal the origins of both simple capes and
complex tailoring to be remarkably ancient. Most surprising, though, is research into
the technology most strongly associated with clothing, needles. This is now
revealing how our ancestors transformed clothing from a utility into a social
necessity and means of self-expression.

“Wearing clothes and not appearing naked in public may seem perfectly
natural for us, but this habit is really very unusual,” says Ian Gilligan at the
University of Sydney, Australia. “There are no other animal species that use
clothes.” Admittedly, there are rare examples of non-human animals adorning their
bodies with items and passing on this trend to their peers – orcas wearing salmon
hats, for instance, and chimps choosing to put a blade of grass in their ear – but
humans take getting dressed to a completely different level.

To understand how this came about, we need to go back around 2 million

years, which is when our ancestors are thought to have lost their fur. This, combined
with an enhanced ability to sweat, would have helped them survive in the hot, dry
climate that prevailed in parts of Africa at that time. However, the lack of body fur
became a distinct disadvantage later when the climate got colder, and also when
these hominins moved to cooler regions. Being inventive species, though, our
ancient ancestors devised ways to overcome this thermal obstacle. “We don’t have
clothing from that time,” says Gilligan. “But we do have indirect evidence in a
number of areas.”

The first hints that hominins were covering up come from flat stone tools
called hide scrapers, which begin to appear around 500,000 years ago. These were
used to clean the inside of hides, which is an essential step in the production of fur
clothing. This development corresponds with a key turning point in Earth’s climate.
Not only did average temperatures become cooler, but there were extreme
temperature swings over timescales for which it wouldn’t be possible to evolve the
traits needed to cope, such as regrowing fur. “It’s quite incredible to see this
coincidence between the first evidence of use-wear on stone tools for working skin,
and the fact that at 500,000 to 400,000 years ago you come into this period which is
both colder and sometimes experiencing very rapid climate change,” says Francesco
d’Errico at the University of Bordeaux, France.

Utility wear
But our ancestors’ commitment to clothing was not yet complete. Hide
scrapers are more common at sites occupied during colder phases, compared with
warmer ones. “This indicates that people wore clothes to keep warm when necessary
but went naked when the weather improved,” says Gilligan. In other words, clothing
was utilitarian and only used on an ad hoc basis.

More clues about early clothing come from distinctive cut marks on bones that
signify an animal was skinned for its fur. For instance, analysis of bones at
Contrebandiers cave in Morocco suggests that leather-making occurred there at least
90,000 years ago. Meanwhile, footprints of a child, probably Neanderthal, show that
they were wearing shoes around 120,000 years ago in what is now Greece. Then
there are lice. Genetic studies indicate that clothing lice evolved from head lice by
at least 83,000 years ago and as far back as 170,000 years ago. This suggests that
some human populations were wearing clothes well before then. Lice need to feed
on human blood at least every three or four days, so this speciation “marks the
beginning of wearing clothes on a fairly regular basis”, says Gilligan.

At first, clothes were utilitarian and only worn on an ad hoc basis

The first clothes were probably loose garments such as capes and poncho-
style cloaks – easy to make, but not so warm in very cold conditions. However,
thanks to rare discoveries from the past two decades, we now know that this began
to change around 75,000 years ago when people in southern Africa invented a new
type of tool called an awl. These piercing implements fashioned from bone would
have made it possible to make seams, leading to tighter-fitting clothing. The oldest
known awls come from Blombos cave in South Africa, and an analysis of the wear
marks indicate that they were used to make holes in soft material such as well-
prepared hide. Awls turn up in Carpenter’s Gap in Australia around 47,000 years
ago and in Europe from around 45,000 years ago, after which they became an
increasingly common feature in the toolkits of the people living in these regions.

Inventing underwear
Further evidence that clothes were becoming more fitted was found in 2023.
Analysis of a 39,000-year-old bone fragment discovered in Spain suggested it was a
punch board used for making holes to create seams in leather. A strange pattern of
notches in the bone appear to have been formed when a chisel-like stone tool called
a burin was knocked through a hide – a method still used today by cobblers and in
traditional societies. Thread could then be pushed through holes to make a tight
seam.

These tools and techniques are significant, because they allowed people to
create fitted clothing and don multiple layers of garments –it was the beginning, if
you like, of underwear. And this warmer clothing enabled people to expand into
places they were not physiologically suited to. It may even help explain why Homo
sapiens thrived after migrating to Europe around 45,000 years ago during the last
glacial period, whereas Neanderthals died out around 40,000 years ago. Mark
Collard at Simon Fraser University, Canada, and his colleagues found that sites
occupied by Neanderthals contained fewer bones of animals with pelts that make
good clothing, such as bears, bison and deer. In addition, unlike the H. sapiens sites,
there were no traces of animals with a mix of long and short hairs – like weasels,
wolverines and dogs – whose super-warm pelts would have made an ideal trim for
hoods and sleeves. Neanderthal clothing has been much debated, with some
researchers arguing that they wore nothing. Other findings suggest that they used
only cape-like clothing, which may not have been enough when temperatures
plummeted.
 Needles mark the point when clothing became a form of self-expression
So far, so functional. What changed to turn utilitarian clothing into fashion?
It can’t have been a cognitive leap because humans clearly had an urge to adorn
themselves long before this. Pierced shells found in Africa indicate that people were
making necklaces at least 142,000 years ago. And there is plenty more evidence that,
as well as jewellery, we have a long tradition of altering our bodies with tattoos and
scars, and painting them with the red pigment ochre. Instead, the innovation appears
to have been a technological one. And this is where needles come in.

Archaeologists once considered the invention of needles to represent the

dawn of clothing, but we now know this happened long after people began to make
tailored garments, says d’Errico. Eyed needles were created with a simple
amendment to the awl – the addition of a hole in which to insert thread. Made from
animal bones, ivory or antlers, and requiring a big investment in time and skill to
manufacture, needles first appear in the archaeological record around 40,000 years
ago, in Denisova cave in Siberia, but were rare until the colder temperatures of the
last glacial maximum 23,000 to 19,000 years ago. Eyed needles seem to have been
invented independently in China around 30,000 years ago. The finest of all,
however, were made by the first people to reach North America, and they must have
been key to producing the tailored clothing needed to survive in the frigid north of
the continent. But now a new study by Gilligan, d’Errico and others, investigating
why needles were invented, highlights how an overlooked aspect of this innovation
transformed the way people dressed.

The researchers argue that needles didn’t just allow our ancestors to make
more functional garments, they could also create more beautiful ones through
embroidery or the attachment of decorative items such as beads, shells and feathers.
In other words, needles mark the point when clothing became a form of self-
expression. Dramatic evidence for the importance of decorated garments, and the
lengths people went to create them, comes from a remarkable burial of a man and
two children 34,000 years ago at Sungir near Moscow. Their bodies are covered in
huge numbers of beads that must have once been attached to clothing. “You’ve got
thousands of mammoth ivory beads that were around the skeletons, and they’re in
such a pattern that clearly show they were sewn onto separate sleeves and shirts and
trousers,” says Gilligan.

Revolution in cultural evolution

The ability to decorate clothing through the development of fine needles may
not sound like much, but Gilligan argues it marks a quantum leap in human cultural
evolution. “What eyed needles confirm is this transition in the function of clothing
from a thermal necessity to a social necessity,” he says. “People have transferred the
important social and psychological functions of body adornment from the naked skin
surface – with body painting and scarification, and tattooing – onto the surface of
clothing.” As today, what someone wore carried messages about their identity.
“Clothing moves from being just functional to taking on these other symbolic
aspects… as a way of broadcasting who you are,” says April Nowell at the
University of Victoria, Canada. This means that when strangers met, their clothing
would advertise information about them such as which ethnic group they belonged
to, their social status and even which language they spoke. Gilligan believes
clothing became a social necessity in mid-latitude Eurasia during a period of
heightened cold between 40,000 and 22,000 years ago. If so, then the materials worn
weren’t limited to fur and leather. By this stage, textiles made out of wool and woven
plant material had been invented too. Their origins are far from clear. But we do
know that Neanderthals were capable of making three-ply string 50,000 years ago.
And imprints of clothing left on ceramics show that H. sapiens living at Moravia in
the Czech Republic were wearing woven clothing 27,000 years ago.

30,000-year-old spun flax was dyed black, grey, turquoise and pink
Then, of course, there are the Venus figurines. Although some, including the
Venus of Willendorf, are undoubtedly clothed in textiles, others wear fur. These
include carved ivory figurines found at the Siberian site of Mal’ta. “They’re wearing
head-to-toe clothing,” says Nowell, complete with hoods. Although they may not
have dressed in the latest fabrics, they have another story to tell. Analysis of their
surface has revealed that they were originally covered in bright pigments – red, blue
and green – hinting that clothing from this time was vividly coloured. More
evidence to back up this idea comes from the discovery that 30,000-year-old spun
flax found in Georgia was dyed black, grey, turquoise and pink. “This has totally
changed how I imagined that world,” says Nowell.

Mind-boggling skills
That’s not the only way this research challenges our preconceptions about
Stone Age people. “The study of clothing can help us understand things like
planning, forethought and intergenerational knowledge transfer,” says Nowell. In
today’s industrialised societies, with a wealth of garments readily available in the
shops, it is easy to forget the immense amount of skill that goes into making clothes,
especially when you have to source and create the raw material – animal hides, wool
or plant fibres – yourself. “It’s mind-boggling, when you think about it, all the
different kinds of technologies and knowledge of materials,” says Nowell. “And then
how do you teach that over generations – the dyeing, the aesthetics of it? Those are
things that are learned from one generation to another. It’s a massive, cumulative
knowledge.”

Survival of the friendliest? Why Homo sapiens outlived other humans

Some researchers even think that the skills our ancestors honed to make
clothing could have sparked other technological innovations. For instance, in a study
published in 2024, researchers suggest clothing production inspired the invention of
the wheel. They believe that 12,000-year-old stone objects found in Israel were
spindle whorls, devices still used today to spin thread. This would make them an
early example of rotation technology, incorporating ideas essential for creating the
first wheels, which are thought to have emerged some 6000 years later.
 But it was the invention of the needle that transformed clothing into what it is
today. With clothes being worn on a regular basis in certain societies, and not just
for utilitarian reasons, notions of modesty around the naked body arose. And the
rest, as they say, is history – not just our dedication to fashion but also the fact that
most of us wouldn’t be seen dead in public without clothes, even when we don’t
need them to keep warm.

*Taken from The New Scientist