Why Did Humans Start Wearing Clothes?

Clothes rot. Every piece ever made before a few thousand years ago is gone — no fabric, no thread, nothing to dig up. So how do you date the invention of clothing when the evidence doesn't exist? You use lice. Body lice can't live on skin. They live in the seams of clothing, which means they could not have existed before clothing did. Compare their DNA to head lice, measure how far the two have drifted apart, run the clock backwards, and you get a date. But that date raises a much stranger question, because it puts clothing in Africa, in the warmth, long before anyone needed it for cold. And once you pull on that thread you end up somewhere unexpected: we lost our fur around a million years ago, and didn't put anything back on for roughly eight hundred thousand years after that. This video covers the whole trail — why we went bare in the first place, what finally made that a bad idea, what the first clothes actually were, why a bone needle with a hole in it mattered more than it sounds, and why we don't find those needles at Neanderthal sites. And at the end, the one prehistoric outfit that survived intact. Every layer of it, down to the dry grass somebody packed into his shoes because it was cold. 00:00 Clothes rot, so there's nothing to dig up 00:35 The lice trick 01:27 What the dates actually say 02:16 Why were we naked in the first place? 03:19 Eight hundred thousand years bare 04:12 So why get dressed? 05:02 What were they actually wearing? 06:02 The Neanderthal problem 07:02 The one outfit we can see 08:15 So Sources and further reading: Molecular dating of head lice / body lice divergence Eyed bone needle, Denisova Cave, Siberia Ötzi the Iceman, South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology Genetic dating of human skin pigmentation Every date in this video is an estimate, and we say so where the evidence is disputed. #AncientHumans #History #Evolution #Archaeology