Naked: it's so 68,000 B.C

Natural History, Nov, 2003 by Stephan Reebs

One of the great questions for the fashion industry must be, When was clothing invented? Climate being what it is, body coverings could not have been long in coming after the loss of hominid fur, but the familiar paleontological clues aren't much use in pinning gown either of those developments. Fossilized bones say nothing about external layers, and skin and clothes don't fossilize well. But Ralf Kittler, a geneticist now at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, and his colleagues haven't let such details stand in their way.

The body louse (Pediculus humanus corporis)--an evolutionary offshoot of the head louse--munches on the skin but inhabits clothing. So Kittler and his team reasoned that by estimating when the body louse emerged as a separate subspecies they could estimate when wearing clothes became the normal thing to do. The team examined differences between parts of the genes of body lice and head lice. In addition, because human beings and chimpanzees went their separate ways 5.5 million years ago, the team compared the human louse sequences with the sequences of chimpanzee lice. The latter comparison made it possible to calibrate the rate of change in the genomes of the lice. On the basis of their estimates of those rates of genetic change, they calculated that the human body louse emerged as a species some 70,000 years ago--a time frame that coincides nicely with the spread of modern humans out of Africa and into colder climes.

Earlier estimates for the widespread use of clothing were based on artifacts. Bone needles have been dated to 40,000 years ago; statuettes and clay impressions attest to the variety of weaving techniques in Europe by 30,000 years ago. Fashion mavens, rejoice: the demise of nakedness is no longer completely cloaked in mystery. ("Molecular evolution of Pediculus humanus and the origin of clothing," Current Biology 13:1414-17, August 19, 2003)