First fashions appeared on humans 170,000 years ago

Models present creations by British designer John Galliano as part of his Spring/Summer 2011 women's collection during Paris Fashion Week on October 3, 2010.

 

Fashion followers around the planet are quivering with excitement over upcoming shows in New York, Paris and L.A., where models will walk the runway wearing feathers, fake furs and a galaxy of clothing that runs the gamut from the sublime to the absurd.
If you have ever wondered how clothing started, the University of Florida says it has found the origins of fashion far, far away in the mists of time.
According to new research from the school, a study of the evolution of lice shows modern humans first began wearing clothing about 170,000 years ago.
David Reed, associate curator of mammals at the Florida Museum of Natural History, on the UF campus, studies lice in modern humans to try to understand human evolution and how that translates into migration patterns. His latest study looked at how clothing lice first began to diverge from human head lice.
"We wanted to find another method for pinpointing when humans might have first started wearing clothing," Reed said in a news release. "Because they are so well adapted to clothing, we know that body lice or clothing lice almost certainly didn't exist until clothing came about in humans."
According to Reed's data, humans first put on shirts and such about 70,000 years before migrating out of Africa into colder climates. That trek northward began about 100,000 years ago.
That fur and leather number that Raquel Welch donned for One Million Years B.C., was way ahead of its time, according to the study which says the lice tell the true tale. Reed says the date of the first fashions would be virtually impossible to determine using archaeological data because early clothing would not survive in archaeological sites.
The study also shows humans started thinking about clothing long after they lost all that body hair they were sporting in the early days. What that means is that humans were hanging around naked for a considerable period of time until the Coco Chanel of the day came up with the equivalent of a pair of balloon pants and a halter top.
"It's interesting to think humans were able to survive in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years without clothing and without body hair, and that it wasn't until they had clothing that modern humans were then moving out of Africa into other parts of the world," Reed said.
He adds that lice are studied because they are on their hosts for long periods of evolutionary time. This icky relationship allows the scientists to learn about evolutionary changes to the host humans based on changes to the parasite.
"The . . . result from this lice study is an unexpectedly early date for clothing, much older than the earliest solid archaeological evidence, but it makes sense," said Ian Gilligan, a lecturer in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. "It means modern humans probably started wearing clothes on a regular basis to keep warm when they were first exposed to Ice Age conditions," Gilligan said.
The last Ice Age occurred about 120,000 years ago, Gilligan said, but the study's date suggests humans started wearing clothes in the preceding Ice Age 180,000 years ago.
So, the next time you are looking at a cashmere sweater on the runway in New York, or a space age wrap on the catwalk in Paris, you can thank your ancestors from way back when who first figured out it might be better to cover up a few of the fleshy parts or lose them to frostbite.