A news item in Archaeology Headlines for January 10 (www.archaeology.org/news/) showing that humans began wearing clothing between 83,000 and 170,000 years ago repeats a common assumption that I think is wrong. The lead scientist on the team, David Reed, was quoted as saying, “I find it surprising that modern humans were tinkering with clothing probably long before they really needed it for survival,” i.e., before they left Africa for the colder climate of Europe. Archaeologist Ian Gilligan at the Australian National University in Canberra, who did not take part in this research, was quoted in the article, saying "It means modern humans probably started wearing clothes on a regular basis to keep warm when they were first exposed to ice age conditions" that began about 130,000 to 180,000 years ago.
Why does no one think about why clothes might have been needed in a hot arid environment where modern humans evolved? These research findings were reported in our local newspaper on the same day as an article about the “Lost Boys of Sudan.” This article quoted a southern Sudanese man of the Dinka tribe, now at Simon Fraser University, describing his long trek at age six with other orphaned boys to a refugee camp after their village had been destroyed by raiders from the north and their parents murdered. They had fled without shoes, but when their feet became bloody, they made sandals from dried antelope skins. If these six-year-olds could invent sandals to enable travel across stony, thorny ground, why would not archaic Homo sapiens do so? Moreover, anyone who has walked through the arid thorn-scrub that characterises much of eastern and southern Africa knows how difficult it is to avoid thorns. After inventing sandals, how long would it be until people began throwing animal skins over their shoulders to ward off thorns?
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