The Origin of Our Species by Chris Stringer

Author:Chris Stringer [Stringer, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780141968360
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-06-29T22:00:00+00:00

A 14,000-year-old sculpture of swimming reindeer carved from mammoth tusk, found in Montastruc Cave, France.

In chapter 4 I discussed how fossil foot bones from Europe and China showed that early moderns in both regions had seemingly discovered the benefits of footwear, and patterns of objects, such as sewn beads, pins and toggles, in Cro-Magnon burials imply the existence of fitted clothing, as does the presence of eyed bone needles. Clothing would have been of great value to humans in colder climates, and although direct evidence for it has perished, it seems likely that the Neanderthals had the skin-working technology required to make at least basic clothes to keep the cold and wet off their bodies.

Many modern peoples in tropical and subtropical regions often wear little or no clothing, beyond what may be required for reasons of modesty or tradition, and humans do have the ability to adapt physically to colder climates. When Darwin and the Beagle visited the bitterly cold regions of Tierra de Fuego at the subpolar tip of South America, he was astonished to see that the native peoples wore little or no clothing and slept naked in the open. Native Australians also have physical adaptations that help them sleep at night in the outback, but interestingly Europeans seem physiologically poorly adapted to the cold – something they do not seem to have acquired from the Neanderthals, despite the likelihood of interbreeding. However, cold conditions were also present in Africa, in the highlands and in cloudless areas at night, and basic clothing and warm bedding would have been advantageous at times.

With the lowered temperatures of the last Ice Age, moderns in parts of Africa 60,000 years ago would certainly have benefited from clothing and warm bedding, although we have no direct evidence of these from that time period. However, there are some genetic clues to this. Humans are infected by head and body lice, and while they feed by blood-sucking on our skin, the latter live and lay their eggs on clothing and bedding, a fact which both Mark Stoneking and Melissa Toups and colleagues have utilized for evolutionary studies. Both teams reasoned that the origin of the distinct form of body lice probably corresponded to the opportunity provided by the regular use of clothing and bedding. Using mtDNA molecular clocks of lice evolution in humans and apes, they have estimated the origin of body lice to between 80,000 and 170,000 years ago. This in turn suggested that bedding and clothing could already have been in use by modern humans in Africa, and they then took this valuable innovation with them when they left their ancestral homeland – together with the lice. However, there is another possibility to consider. The archaeologist Timothy Taylor has quite rightly highlighted the invention of the baby sling as a crucial development for the way that it liberated women from the restrictions of baby-carrying and the confines of static nursing, and he considers this must have happened relatively early in human evolution. But

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