For instance, fossils show humans inhabited ice age Eurasia when the frigid windchill reduced safe exposure times to an hour or two. Stone Age clothing may be invisible to archaeology, but that does not mean Paleolithic clothing origins cannot be investigated scientifically. Archaeologists are reluctant to look for something they will never find. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, considering not a single shred has survived from this ice age era between roughly 2.6 million and 12,000 years ago. The invisible remnants of early clothesĪrchaeologists who study the Paleolithic or Stone Age tend to ignore clothing. Though many gaps in the story remain, the emerging evidence suggests clothing really had two origins: first for biological needs, then cultural. Why our ancestors, alone in the entire animal kingdom, adopted clothes is one of those big questions that science has only recently begun to tackle. For folks in cold climates, insufficient clothing can be fatal, as I sensed in Siberia. But many people would be mortified to be caught unclad in public. Standards of body cover vary across cultures. My brush with hypothermia, though embarrassing for someone with my expertise, reaffirmed my approach. Trained in medicine and archaeology, I investigate the matter by combining what’s known about the thermal limits of human bodies and paleoenvironments. The origins of clothing is my special interest, a notoriously difficult topic because items of dress rarely last long. Siberia is a region where people surely always needed warm apparel. I was cold on the inside.Īs a medical doctor, I recognized the symptoms of mild hypothermia. I crept near the campfire and held my hands so close that the gloves began to smolder. On the first morning, I awoke cold to my core, even in a well-padded sleeping bag. Not long ago, I left my home in sunny Australia to join an archaeological dig in the Siberian mountains of eastern Russia.
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