In another thread, I was invited to respond to claims about when humans first began to use clothing. It is very easy to find articles on the web, so I will not point you to any one of them in particular. Now I have no objection to estimates based on the dating of the oldest human body louse. The body louse lives in folds of clothing or bedding unlike the hair louse or public louse which attach themselves to the human body. Ergo: clothing necessary before the human body louse. Seemingly a sensible point. But wrong. What concerns me is that these articles almost invariably (OK, only mostly) make reference either to the ice age or to humanity moving into colder climes -- because we know humans started in Africa which is warm. Wrong!!! Have you been to Africa? Africa is bloody cold! (OK, only mostly.) It is only in the daytime that Africa is hot. If we are investigating the need of humans to keep warm, it comes at NIGHT. Nothing to do with ice ages or colder climes. You need to cover up at night. Bedding, ideally a fleece, came before clothes. (This is an unscientific statement, but as I said in a previous thread, sometimes to have to make an appeal to what seems reasonable.) Bedding is pretty well as good a host as clothing for the body louse. So there you are: I claim that the advent of the body louse does not provide a dating for the first human use of clothing. I am not saying that anything akin to a primeval nightie exists to be discovered, but it could be the missing link. The above is highly speculative. Is there a flaw in my reasoning? Conversely, is there any substantive evidence in its favour? What, I wonder, can we learn from tribes that have only reached the bedding stage?
We look forward to you supporting this claim with actual evidence. The world's oldest bedding was actually found in South Africa: The oldest known bedding — sleeping mats made of mosquito-repellant evergreens that are about 77,000 years old — has been discovered in a South African cave. This use of medicinal plants, along with other artifacts at the cave, helps reveal how creative these early peoples were, researchers said. An international team of archaeologists discovered the stack of ancient beds at Sibudu, a cave in a sandstone cliff in South Africa. They consist of compacted stems and leaves of sedges, rushes and grasses stacked in at least 15 layers within a chunk of sediment 10 feet (3 meters) thick. "The inhabitants would have collected the sedges and rushes from along the uThongathi River, located directly below the site, and laid the plants on the floor of the shelter,"said researcher Lyn Wadley, an archaeologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. The oldest mats the scientists discovered are approximately 50,000 years older than other known examples of plant bedding. All told, these layers reveal mat-making over a period of about 40,000 years. "The preservation of material at Sibudu is really exceptional," said researcher Christopher Miller, a geoarchaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. [See Photos of the Ancient Beds] Many of the plant remains are species of Cryptocarya, evergreen plants that are used extensively in traditional medicines. The beds appeared to be mostly composed of river wild-quince (Cryptocarya woodii), whose crushed leaves emit insect-repelling scents.
Bells: We look forward to you supporting this claim with actual evidence. Thank you for yours. The crux of my case was that people were overlooking the fact that bedding as well as clothes could shelter human body lice. You really want me to prove that? I hoped people would realise that my reference to a nightie was intended to be humorous. Perhaps that was a mistake.
You claimed that "the advent of body louse does not provide a dating for the first human use of clothing" despite clear evidence from scientists that it does as linked in the other thread. I asked you to provide scientific evidence for that claim because it directly contradicts what is known and has been studied thus far. Can you please support your claim with actual scientific evidence?
My understanding of the matter is that the scientists who draw the link between the body louse and the first human use of clothing need to explain how they know that it is connected to use of clothing rather than the use of bedding. It seems a reasonable assumption that humans needed to bed down for warmth is their native environment before they needed clothing to explore higher latitudes. But please note that I did not say that there was evidence for this assumption; it is simply a probability. It is not that I have scientific evidence; it is that I am questioning the deductions of others.
Human clothing have been suggested to be an ethological exaptation to mudding of the furless human skin. Perceivably not just to keep warm, but also to better protect against parasites and not least the sun. E.g. ochre and other clays are still used by some natural peoples, and are known from excavated stone age tombs in both the old and the new world. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Other furless mammals, in Africa and elsewhere, go to great effort to protect their skin, taking both dust and mud baths, often suggested to serve similar purposes as above. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
DNA analysis tells us that body lice speciated from head lice (which any other animal would simply refer to as "lice") about 70KYA. That happens to be roughly the same time when we find the first evidence of clothing. Many articles of clothing need to be fairly sturdy to withstand the activities humans perform while clothed, resulting in fossilization or simply passing down through history with little damage. But the most common "activity" humans perform in bed is sleeping, so bedding does not need to be as strong as clothing. Prehistoric bedding was, indeed, unknown until quite recently. But the first specimens discovered are approximately the same age as the earliest specimens of clothing: about 77KYA. A ten percent difference in the age of two kinds of relatively soft artifacts isn't good enough to say with conviction that one is definitely older than the other. Considering that making clothes and making bedding are very similar technologies for very similar usage, it would hardly be remarkable if, some day, we find evidence that they were indeed contemporaneous.
Just thought of the iceman. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I was going to say "rendered a little like Kurt Cobain" then I thought, no, Clapton, but then I also thought of Jack Bruce. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! At least no head lice could survive that. Not to get off topic: the iceman is dated to 5,300 years ago. So obviously not first. But I would go to the coldest places and look for the earliest human habitation there. I suppose we could also inquire into earliest clothing to get relief from the sun, flying insects, and abrasive dust or sand.
Some parts of Africa perhaps. However, I did a quick check of diurnal temperatures in the region where some of our hominid ancestors fossils have been found (Awash, Ethiopia) and the minimum daily temperature rarely dips below 20 deg C (even in winter!). Daytime average maximums are about 37 deg C.
