# The Not So Naked Ape: The Origins of Clothing

An episode of [Origin Stories](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/982555930), 28 Jul 2026, 39 min.

Audio: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/originstories/OriginStories-Clothing-The_Not_So_Naked_Ape.mp3?dest-id=258524

Humans are the only animals that get dressed every day. Clothing is one of our most important inventions, yet we rarely even think about it as a technology. Nina Jablonski joins us to explore when and why our ancestors started wearing clothes, and what that decision meant for our survival, our migration across the planet, and our sense of self. Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to funding human origins research and sharing discoveries. Please support our work at leakeyfoundation.org/originstories. Links to learn more: Nina Jablonski's website Nina Jablonski lecture on "The Evolution and Meaning of Human Skin Color" The Oldest Sewn Hide Origins of Clothing Lice Blombos Cave Awls Sewing Needles Reveal the Roots of Fashion

## Transcript

[0:03] This is Origin Stories, the Leakey Foundation podcast.
[0:06] I'm Meredith Johnson.
[0:09] I'm really happy to be back today with this new episode, and before we get
[0:13] into it, I wanna thank our generous donors for making this show possible.
[0:18] If you're not already a Leakey Foundation or Origin Stories donor,
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[0:24] The Leakey Foundation is one of the only remaining funding sources for human
[0:28] origins research, and all of our work is made possible by people like you.
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[0:48] Thank you so much, and now, here's our story
[0:56] Morning, you do something that no other animal on Earth ever does.
[1:01] You pick out something to wear and you put it on.
[1:05] It feels so ordinary that you probably don't even think of it as a technology,
[1:10] but clothing is one of the most important inventions in human history.
[1:15] Without it, our ancestors could not have survived the Ice Age or
[1:20] spread to every continent on Earth
[1:24] We humans have been vulnerable, naked, hairless apes for a very long time.
[1:31] But figuring out how and when our ancestors first started getting
[1:34] dressed is a tricky scientific problem.
[1:38] Organic things like skin, hides, and plant fibers rot away over time, so
[1:44] evidence of clothing is almost nonexistent in the ancient archeological record.
[1:50] Today on the show, we're exploring the origins and evolution of clothing
[1:54] as both a practical means of survival and the wildly creative form of
[1:59] self-expression we know today.
[2:02] Nina Jablonski: This is probably one of the most fascinating stories in
[2:06] human evolution that is rarely told.
[2:09] Meredith Johnson: That's Nina Jablonski.
[2:11] She's a paleoanthropologist, Leakey Foundation grantee, professor emerita
[2:16] at Pennsylvania State University, and an emerita member of our Leakey
[2:20] Foundation Scientific Executive Committee.
[2:22] She has spent much of her career studying something else
[2:26] that doesn't preserve, skin.
[2:29] Nina's work has helped us understand the evolution of our skin and
[2:33] why we come in so many colors.
[2:35] Her books, Skin: A Natural History and Living Color, are essential
[2:40] reading to understand your own skin.
[2:43] Nina Jablonski: Clothing, and more broadly body coverings, this is really sort of an
[2:48] extension of my original interest in skin.
[2:52] How do we protect ourselves from the environment?
[2:56] I think we can imagine that perhaps even our earliest hominin ancestors might
[3:02] have not only sought shelter, but maybe used very simple screenings or coverings.
[3:11] I would not glorify these by saying that they were body coverings, but
[3:15] they were forms of protection from the, the extremes of cold and rain.
[3:23] Meredith Johnson: Keeping our bodies and brains from getting too cold or too hot
[3:27] is a problem we know very well today.
[3:30] Our early ancestors faced the same problems.
[3:33] By two million years ago, ancient hominins had begun to lose their
[3:37] thick covering of body hair.
[3:39] By around a million years ago, our ancestors were walking around with
[3:43] pretty much naked skin like we have now.
[3:46] Without clothes or heat or air conditioning, how did they deal with
[3:51] the basic biological need to keep their body temperature regulated?
[3:56] Nina Jablonski: When we were mostly living within the tropics in equatorial
[4:02] Africa, our native homeland, we would need to mostly keep warm at night and
[4:11] at dawn when the temperatures even close to the equator would be cool.
[4:17] Now, the earliest solution to this would be simply to be together, to be physically
[4:24] together, and we know that our non-human primate cousins do this wonderfully.
[4:30] They huddle, they cuddle, they, they sit together.
[4:35] So that's, that's sort of our baseline wonderful solution, and we still use that.
[4:40] We may not use it as much, but we still use that.
[4:44] But when you think about hominins being much more active as individuals,
[4:50] walking purposefully, striding, running, this brings in sort of new
[4:58] complications to thermoregulation
[5:04] Meredith Johnson: If you need to be out hunting or gathering your food
[5:07] for the day, moving on your own with nothing between you and the world, it's
[5:11] important to keep a stable temperature so you can move and think and do all
[5:15] the things you need to do to survive.
[5:20] Nina Jablonski: Imagine trying to stalk an animal or to creep up on an already
[5:27] killed animal, and it's a cool morning in the African savanna, and you have to wait
[5:37] for a while before you can sneak up on the prey item or on a scavenged animal.
[5:44] There's a real problem here because our hominin ancestors
[5:48] didn't have a lot of fat on them.
[5:51] They didn't have a lot of fur at that point, and so they would
[5:55] have had to have done something to maintain their thermal equilibrium.
[6:01] This is an enormously important part of the story, that we have thermal
[6:05] protection, thermal regulation as a big part of our human adaptation story.
[6:13] And it's absolutely without a doubt that many parts of the world, the extreme
[6:20] high latitudes of both the southern continents and the northern continents
[6:26] could not have been inhabited if hominins could not control their body
[6:32] temperature through some kind of body covering in addition to the use of fire
[6:41] Meredith Johnson: For our ancestors and relatives who spread out to more
[6:43] extreme latitudes, and here we're talking about early Homo sapiens,
[6:48] Neanderthals, Denisovans, the challenge level went up several notches, especially
[6:54] if you're a hairless hominin without fur to protect you from the greater
[6:58] daily swings in temperature of a colder, more seasonal environment.
[7:04] Nina Jablonski: This is a very different ballgame than living within the tropics.
[7:09] When you get into more extreme latitudes, the temperature extremes and the seasonal
[7:16] extremes of temperature become tremendous.
[7:19] And we're talking about way beyond discomfort.
[7:23] We're talking about dangerous extremes of cold, dangerous extremes
[7:30] of wind chill that have to be coped with if people are to live day in
[7:35] and day out in these environments.
[7:38] Meredith Johnson: If you've ever spent time in the winter cold without enough
[7:40] protection or tried to sleep outside when it's cold or wet or windy, you
[7:46] know how quickly things can turn from uncomfortable to dangerous or even deadly.
[7:52] You can imagine what it might have been like to be one of those
[7:55] hominins coming into a new place, and all of a sudden it's so cold you
[7:59] think you won't survive the night.
[8:01] What do you do?
[8:05] Nina Jablonski: I think some of the earliest body coverings were
[8:08] actually blankets that were fashioned from, you know, animal hides.
[8:13] They might not have been fully tanned animal hides, but probably
[8:17] processed in some way, dried so that they were not alive with bugs.
[8:24] And those, in addition to some fire and then the body heat from
[8:31] people in our own group, would have helped us get through the night.
[8:36] When we think about the challenges of extreme high latitudes, think
[8:42] about Siberia or far South Africa with cold wind, very cold winds.
[8:50] Um, these, these extremes basically were not a concern to hominins
[8:55] living within the tropics.
[8:59] So when we think about sort of clothing as we would recognize it, body coverings that
[9:07] wrapped around the body, this is mostly a technology of the extreme latitudes.
[9:16] Meredith Johnson: And this is around half a million years ago-ish?
[9:19] Nina Jablonski: That would be quite an old estimate.
[9:23] Meredith Johnson: Ah.
[9:23] Nina Jablonski: This is a really good, uh, this is a really good
[9:26] inflection point in our conversation because it shows just my uncertainty
[9:31] about putting an exact date on this.
[9:33] Was it 200,000?
[9:34] Was it 300,000?
[9:36] Mm, maybe.
[9:38] Uh, I'm sure that, that hominins at that point were getting really
[9:43] proficient at being able to put animal skins on their bodies somehow.
[9:50] When they began to actually fasten them around their bodies, then I think we're
[9:57] getting definitely into that, uh, middle to late Paleolithic transition when
[10:05] humans have a much more technologically comprehensive tool set, ability to
[10:14] communicate with one another, and, and also, you know, they're able to work
[10:20] together to process an animal skin.
[10:24] And this is a good example of the inexactitude of what
[10:29] we're trying to describe.
[10:30] We're trying to triangulate from the known archeological record, from some dental
[10:37] wear evidence, and from likely patterns of hunting, foraging, and scavenging what
[10:45] would've gone on and when clothing in the broadest sense would've been necessary.
[10:52] This is a challenge, but it's not a challenge that can't be overcome.
[10:57] So it requires a lot of, as I call, paleo detective work.
[11:03] That is part of our good scientific tradition.
[11:08] In paleoanthropology, we often work with many limitations of data, but
[11:14] we do our best with what we have.
[11:17] Looking at the paleontological, archeological, paleoclimatological,
[11:23] whatever else kind of evidence might be at hand, we use it all
[11:28] to try to figure out what went on.
[11:34] Meredith Johnson: The first and only scrap of clothing to survive the Pleistocene
[11:39] period was just announced a few months ago by scientists at the University of Oregon.
[11:45] That's one thing from a time that stretched from roughly two point
[11:48] six million years ago through eleven thousand six hundred years ago.
[11:53] It's a bit of sewn hide found in a dry, sheltered cave in Central
[11:57] Oregon and dated at up to twelve thousand six hundred years old.
[12:02] For the long expanse of time before that, scientists use other clues and
[12:07] more durable artifacts to figure out the backstory to the clothes we wear today.
[12:12] One clue some scientists have used to track the timing of some of the earliest
[12:16] forms of clothing comes from lice.
[12:19] Nina Jablonski: When you study the evolution of skin, a lot of people have
[12:24] said, "Well, you know, we can get a lot of evidence about the evolution of naked
[12:31] skin by looking at the evolution of the ectoparasites, especially the lice,
[12:38] that, that have afflicted humans in the past and that afflict humans today."
[12:46] Meredith Johnson: Today, we're afflicted by three different species of lice.
[12:50] Head lice, the scourge of parents and teachers everywhere, pubic lice,
[12:55] and body lice, also known as clothing lice, which is adapted to live in
[12:59] the seams of clothing and bedding.
[13:01] A twenty ten study in the Journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution suggested
[13:06] that since clothing lice evolved from head lice ancestors sometime between a hundred
[13:11] and seventy thousand and eighty-three thousand years ago, that this can help
[13:15] pin down the timing of when humans started habitually wearing clothing.
[13:19] Other studies used lice as a way to figure out when our ancestors became hairless.
[13:25] Nina Jablonski: Much ink has been spilled on this lousy topic of when did humans
[13:33] develop unique forms of body lice and head lice that are different from one
[13:39] another, and did this have to do with the evolution of body hairlessness?
[13:45] I have not actually found a lot of support for the hypothesis that,
[13:53] that body lice became different from head lice when humans became
[14:00] hairless and started using clothing.
[14:04] I think what is more likely is that lice actually started inhabiting
[14:14] the blankets, the animal hide blankets under which we slept.
[14:20] And so we started being bitten by body lice, not as a result of
[14:27] having naked skin and clothing at that time, but rather because of
[14:34] our communal sleeping arrangements under animal hides, some of which at
[14:40] least would be infested with lice.
[14:44] Meredith Johnson: Delightful.
[14:46] Nina Jablonski: It wasn't pretty.
[14:48] Much of prehistory was not pretty, and it was certainly very smelly.
[14:56] Meredith Johnson: Other evidence comes from things like Neanderthal teeth showing
[15:00] signs that they were using their mouths like a third hand while processing hides.
[15:06] In the archeological record, we commonly find tools like stone scrapers that
[15:10] can be used to work animal skins.
[15:12] And then in the later Paleolithic, we start to see more specialized tools
[15:18] like awls, sharp, pointy objects made of bone that could be used to poke holes in
[15:23] hides, which you could then run a tendon or a twisted fiber cord through so you
[15:28] could lash something close to your body.
[15:31] The oldest of these come from Blombos Cave, South Africa, dated
[15:36] to seventy-seven thousand years ago.
[15:38] Nina Jablonski: I think awls would have been a real breakthrough.
[15:43] And not long after that, needles.
[15:47] Needles with eyes that would have allowed a, a thread of some kind, even
[15:54] a coarse thread, whether it be fiber or a thin piece of tendon or sinew, uh,
[16:01] from an animal to be threaded through the eye and then the needle passed
[16:08] through, uh, smaller holes in, in a hide.
[16:15] When we have awls and certainly needles, we can actually begin to think
[16:21] about tailored fashioned clothing.
[16:25] Clothing that really was shaped to cover the body.
[16:30] Skins that could enclose the limbs separately from the trunk.
[16:37] Sleeves.
[16:38] Wow!
[16:40] I mean, it sounds, it sounds like a silly thing to make an exclamation
[16:44] about, but, but sleeves were a terrific invention because sleeves and l-later
[16:52] pant legs would have protected the appendages against cold and wind because
[17:00] the appendages are very susceptible, more than the core, to, to, uh,
[17:05] fluctuations of body temperature.
[17:08] We don't, or at least I don't exactly know when we see the first sleeves and
[17:14] pant legs, but we definitely do see early awls and needles by seventy thousand,
[17:23] sixty thousand, fifty thousand years ago in southernmost Africa, in the Denisovan
[17:30] Caves, uh, and throughout, uh, areas used by early Homo sapiens in Europe.
[17:40] Meredith Johnson: It's interesting to think about needles, awls, and
[17:43] clever, stylish inventions like sleeves popping up in far distant
[17:47] places at roughly the same time.
[17:49] I could imagine if you've never used a needle or had a sleeve before
[17:54] and you saw someone with sleeves, you'd want them to show you how
[17:57] they made such a wonderful thing.
[17:59] But how did this new tech spread so far and wide?
[18:02] Nina Jablonski: Archeologists have been puzzling over this very thing
[18:05] for dozens of years, if not longer.
[18:09] Uh, and there's certainly many guesses as to how many times these
[18:17] things evolved independently.
[18:20] It is pretty clear though that once they evolved, that they caught on very quickly.
[18:29] Now, how many times were populations in touch with one another?
[18:35] How much evidence of, you know, clothing and needlework were observed by different
[18:40] populations, and there were aha moments like, "Oh, I could do that, too"?
[18:45] We don't know.
[18:47] There was certainly a lot of independent invention of awls, simple piercing
[18:54] implements, and probably also for needles.
[18:58] But equally, there was a lot of transmission of needle technology.
[19:05] So many things in especially Homo sapiens cultural evolution are like this.
[19:12] People get the same good idea in different parts of the world, because
[19:17] people are observant and smart, and they have many of the same needs regardless
[19:22] of where they are, and they can put two and two together extremely well.
[19:28] And similarly, we can think of other aha moments with, you know, with th-
[19:33] with good foot coverings and mittens and something like gloves that would protect
[19:40] the hands when, when we weren't actively using them in, you know, manipulating
[19:46] tools or animal parts and so forth.
[19:49] These things are really fascinating to ponder.
[19:52] How did we get by without them?
[19:54] How did w- you know, where did the earliest ones come from?
[19:58] How exactly, what exactly was this process?
[20:05] Meredith Johnson: Awls and needles are the clues left behind, but
[20:09] they point to a blossoming of creativity and technology during the
[20:12] Paleolithic that has been thought of as an indicator of the modern mind.
[20:18] Not long after the oldest needles show up in the archeological record, we see
[20:22] cave art in Indonesia, Europe, Africa.
[20:26] We see small sculpture, beads, and pigments from that time.
[20:30] I wish we could see what they were wearing.
[20:33] Nina Jablonski: It was a blizzard of, of invention, or at least, you
[20:37] know, a, a storm of things that we can actually see and, and an even bigger
[20:42] storm of things that we can infer.
[20:44] Again, one of the most frustrating things is that much of the evidence for this
[20:51] sophistication in technology is lost to us because it was in the form of
[20:58] perishable materials, not just animal hides, but in the form of fibers and plant
[21:05] materials that were being used to make ropes or make simple braided fabrics or
[21:14] the soles of, of simple foot coverings.
[21:19] These things, you know, we begin to actually pick them up in the archeological
[21:25] record in some dry environments, but, you know, we know that they existed a
[21:32] long time before we actually find them.
[21:35] It's the tip of probably a very big iceberg of what we were
[21:40] doing with fibers before that.
[21:43] Because even before weaving was developed, humans have been twisting
[21:51] fibers together to make ropes, putting ropes together to make larger
[21:56] ropes, but also to make baskets.
[22:00] Meredith Johnson: When you think about the skill and technology that goes
[22:03] into weaving baskets, it's not a far stretch to think if they were weaving
[22:07] plants into baskets, they could have also been weaving some form of cloth.
[22:12] Nina Jablonski: Again, the, the physical evidence for this is frustratingly absent.
[22:21] We have evidence of early basketry, and then we have some nicely preserved
[22:27] evidence of early cloth from, not only from prehistoric Egypt, but
[22:35] also in Central Asia, far western China, far eastern Europe, that we
[22:42] have evidence of, you know, ancient pieces of cloth, even patterned cloth.
[22:49] So what does that tell us?
[22:51] It tells us that people had the ability to make fine fibers that
[22:57] could be woven, and then they wanted to make designs similar to those
[23:03] that they would be using in basketry.
[23:08] I mean, the, the mind boggles because humans have been so
[23:13] creative for, for so very long.
[23:17] Uh, so I think it's really important for us to continue digging, literally
[23:23] digging, and, you know, finding more evidence, including paleobotanical
[23:31] evidence that might help us get at the types of plants that were
[23:36] present or that were being harvested i- in, in hominin habitation areas.
[23:44] This quest is limited by our practical abilities to retrieve
[23:49] materials and the money available for this, but it's also limited to
[23:54] some extent by our imaginations.
[23:57] Archeologists tend to be extremely conservative in, in what they
[24:02] will interpret as having happened.
[24:05] The, you know, if you don't have a stone tool for it, it didn't exist.
[24:10] Well, I guess the fact that I'm not an archeologist frees me to do a
[24:16] little bit more speculation, because I know just how inventive humans can
[24:22] be when it comes to decorating their bodies, protecting their bodies.
[24:27] They're going to use everything at hand, and they're going to use their
[24:31] imaginations first and foremost.
[24:37] Meredith Johnson: Lucky for us, clothing isn't just for the Ice Age.
[24:41] Not everybody left the tropics, and also humans are complicated.
[24:46] We can have more than one reason to invent something amazing and
[24:49] revolutionary like clothing.
[24:52] Sometimes you need a thick furry coat to stay alive, and sometimes you just
[24:56] wanna look good or express yourself
[25:01] Nina Jablonski: Here we have to look at the interesting differences between
[25:07] people who have to wear clothing in order to stay warm and people
[25:13] who don't have to wear clothing.
[25:16] And I want to come back to our ancestors and relatives and people
[25:20] living today in the tropics because what we see is the development of
[25:26] clothing among tropical-dwelling people that is much more centered
[25:33] toward modesty And toward decoration.
[25:40] Humans are visual animals, and they have been visual for millions of years.
[25:47] So okay, if you don't have to stay warm in the tropics, you might want to advertise
[25:55] or conceal some other aspect of your body, and you could use an animal skin
[26:02] or some plant parts, and you might do this in some kind of creative pattern.
[26:09] Uh, there is no doubt that, that people within the tropics
[26:16] probably were the originators of style in, in a, the modern sense.
[26:23] The covering for the sake of covering, the covering for the sake of decoration, the
[26:29] covering for the sake of visual effect, perhaps to show status, to show age.
[26:36] One can imagine that it was important, at least in some groups, to be able to
[26:42] show or to not show evidence of sexual excitation because this could be quite
[26:51] a source of, of discord in a group, or perhaps even worse than discord.
[26:56] Meredith Johnson: That's so interesting.
[26:57] I hadn't considered covering certain body parts as part of a
[27:04] driving force for innovation in clothing, but it does make sense.
[27:10] Nina Jablonski: Yes, and you can, you can imagine that, you know, I mean,
[27:14] quite apart from 19th and 20th century mores and practices that, that some body
[27:23] coverings, especially evidence of sexual excitation in males, could be quite
[27:30] divisive and destructive to group harmony under certain circumstances at least.
[27:37] And so concealing that evidence is important, becomes socially
[27:47] important to maintain social harmony.
[27:50] We see evidence in many parts of the world of, you know, penile
[27:57] sheaths being made out of animal hides, gourds, and other materials.
[28:03] This is certainly part of that process.
[28:06] By concealing at least some of the male sexual apparatus, you reduce
[28:15] the likelihood of it becoming a point of discussion and discord.
[28:20] Let's just put it that way.
[28:22] So you know, this is, this is really interesting stuff to think about
[28:26] because, you know, when, when we look at, at an item of clothing like this, we
[28:33] think- Ooh, well, that's a bit unusual.
[28:38] But when you think about the likely reasons for this having
[28:42] evolved, it's not at all weird.
[28:44] It makes complete sense.
[28:46] And remember, the premium in human societies was on figuring out how to
[28:53] get along without killing one another, because human lives were precious.
[29:00] And you, you know, you didn't want to kill someone or, or wound
[29:04] them badly just because you feel offended by their appearance.
[29:09] So you figure out ways in which, you know, these, these states of
[29:15] arousal or whatever can be concealed
[29:20] Meredith Johnson: So in a place where protection from extreme temperatures
[29:23] isn't the main driver, as social visual beings, social needs, modesty,
[29:29] visual flair, and communication would have been more important.
[29:33] And we see in Africa some of the earliest combinations of body paint plus inventive
[29:39] use of hides, shell beads, and even shell beads colored with ochre pigments
[29:46] Nina Jablonski: This was humans' time to figure out how to display themselves
[29:53] and what those displays might mean.
[29:56] I mean, fashion emerges at this time.
[30:00] Maybe not in the sense of, you know, runway fashion, but certainly the
[30:05] ability to decorate oneself, to augment one's appearance or to conceal certain
[30:11] aspects of one's appearance became really important in, m- more in the tropics at
[30:18] first than at the extremes of latitude.
[30:23] I don't want to say that, that people living in the northern extremes of
[30:28] Eurasia or in the southern part of Africa didn't decorate themselves,
[30:35] but thermoregulation was probably more important, a primary consideration, and
[30:42] decoration would be used on top of that.
[30:45] So clothes possibly become seasonal and more decorative, more oriented towards
[30:52] an individual's age or status later in prehistory and later in history in,
[30:59] in higher latitudes.
[31:01] This brings, you know, clothing into sort of a different frame because clothing
[31:07] is certainly practical, but there's a lot of, of status identification
[31:14] and simple decoration that comes into the equation, and certainly people
[31:19] living in warmer climes really get the jump on the, on the decoration
[31:25] piece earlier than people elsewhere.
[31:29] And when you look at tropical peoples today, whether they're living in Africa
[31:36] or broadly Melanesia and Polynesia, you see this welter of materials
[31:42] that are used to fashion clothing.
[31:45] Not just hides, not just fabrics, but feathers, and today pieces of plastic,
[31:54] uh, beads, all sorts of things are, are used as items of adornment to signify
[32:03] status, a special occasion, age, all sorts of things, special ceremonies.
[32:09] It's delightful to actually see how these things developed, and so quickly.
[32:15] And we haven't even begun to talk about hats, so you know, because of
[32:22] course, you know, head coverings, including masks Oh my word.
[32:27] They become an enormous part of our culture of adornment and display.
[32:34] They augment our height.
[32:36] They can show all sorts of things about who we belong to, how old we
[32:42] are, uh, and what our aspirations are.
[32:45] So, I mean, hats, oh, this is a topic for a whole nother podcast.
[32:51] Meredith Johnson: This is so interesting because when people
[32:54] think about human evolution, clothing isn't usually even mentioned.
[32:58] You know, you talk about our big brains, tools, fire, all of that
[33:02] kind of stuff, but clothing seems to me just as essential as a, as, as a
[33:10] part of what it means to be human.
[33:12] What, what do you-
[33:13] Nina Jablonski: Absolutely.
[33:14] And again, I, you know, I, I come back to the problems that we have had broadly in
[33:22] science and paleoanthropology specifically about talking about things for which
[33:28] we don't have direct evidence There's been, you know, great hesitation about
[33:35] talking about the history of clothing, even the history of skin before that,
[33:40] because of the lack of direct evidence.
[33:43] Now, with many other methods and techniques available to us, we can begin
[33:49] to say, "Okay, well, we may not have direct evidence of skin and clothing and
[33:55] hides that were used as body coverings, but we have indirect evidence from
[34:00] ancient DNA or from pollen or from some other sources." And we can continue to
[34:08] construct good hypotheses from available evidence to sort of triangulate and
[34:15] say, "This likely could have happened or would have happened given the other
[34:22] pieces of evidence that we have."
[34:25] Meredith Johnson: So do you see or would you like to see more paleoanthropologists
[34:30] take an interest in clothing?
[34:32] Nina Jablonski: I certainly would.
[34:34] Uh, I certainly would because this is such an essential part, especially of
[34:41] the adaptation to extreme environments.
[34:44] So really, we see this as an outgrowth of the study of, of exercise physiology
[34:50] and thermal physiology, so a very sort of nuts and bolts scientific discipline.
[34:56] You know, when did these things evolve?
[34:59] What thermal properties were we looking for, et cetera.
[35:03] So even, you know, even before we start talking about the universe of decorative
[35:08] uses of clothing, finding out more about the kinds of body coverings that would
[35:16] have been essential for people who were, let's say, some of the first inhabitants
[35:22] of the Americas, toiling through the coastal waters of the Aleutians.
[35:29] It wasn't easy.
[35:31] What were they wearing?
[35:32] How were people protected?
[35:34] You know, the, I think these are real questions of human adaptation, real
[35:40] questions about why we were able to live year in, year out in extreme environments.
[35:49] Meredith Johnson: Does thinking about clothing in this, like, deep
[35:53] history sort of way change how you think about getting dressed?
[35:57] Nina Jablonski: It certainly does, uh, in the morning.
[36:01] Like this morning was fairly cold outside, and I thought, "Okay, I've
[36:05] gotta put on more layers to keep warm." So yes, in a sense, I was back in
[36:11] the Paleolithic thinking about what kind of hide and how tightly do I
[36:16] need to, to fasten it around my body.
[36:20] But certainly also, I think about all the different messaging we have in
[36:25] our clothing, messaging about our own personal styles, signaling who we are,
[36:34] what our intentions are, how we think of ourselves, how we wanna project ourselves
[36:38] in public, how we wanna be perceived.
[36:41] So I, I think about the thermoregulatory piece, but also the signaling piece.
[36:48] What am I saying through my clothing?
[36:51] How will it be interpreted?
[36:53] So I think this makes it a whole lot more fun, to be honest, because when
[36:58] you just sort of put on, you know, a sweatshirt and sweatpants, okay,
[37:03] you covered the basics, as it were.
[37:05] But there's just so much more that you can think about and so much more
[37:10] that you can do when you realize the import of the act of clothing yourself,
[37:19] what you are saying about yourself as a, a warm-blooded primate that
[37:26] needs protection from the elements, and as a highly visual primate that
[37:32] advertises its own identity to others.
[37:37] Meredith Johnson: Thank you to Nina Jablonski for exploring
[37:40] the history of clothing with us.
[37:41] You can learn more about her and her work through the links in your show notes.
[37:47] Origin Stories is a project of the Leakey Foundation, a nonprofit
[37:51] dedicated to funding human origins research and sharing discoveries.
[37:56] This episode was made possible by our listeners.
[37:59] It was generously sponsored by Leakey Foundation trustee Naoma Tate, with
[38:03] additional support from the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, Jeannie Newman,
[38:07] Camilla and George Smith, and the Joan and Arnold Travis Education Fund.
[38:12] This episode was produced by me, Meredith Johnson, and Ray Pang.
[38:15] Our editor is Audrey Quinn.
[38:17] Theme music by Henry Nagle.
[38:20] Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions and Lee Rosevere.
[38:23] We'll be back next month with another new episode.
[38:27] Thanks for listening

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