During the last ice age, when glaciers spread across the northern world, ancient humans had some serious adapting to do; our species wouldn’t survive without developing new ways to keep warm. We got there by improving the ways we clothed ourselves using new tools, such as bone needles, traps, snares, and wooden artifacts – and these creations mark a crucial point in human evolution, as they helped our ancestors endure diverse conditions across different latitudes.
There’s not a lot left for archaeologists to study; most of these tools were made from perishable, organic materials. Fortunately, in the 1950s, archaeologists found a small treasure trove of such artifacts in Cougar Mountain Cave in Oregon. The pieces recovered include 24 fiber items, 12 wooden implements, and three animal hides. For decades, these artifacts went unexamined – until recently, when a team led by Richard Rosencrance revisited them, using modern techniques to analyze and date the pieces.
“We found a fairly limited number of items that date to the late Pleistocene,” Rosencrance told New Atlas. But among those items, “we found tremendous technological diversity, as well as raw material use that attests to a really complex and detailed knowledge system.”
Among the three animal hides, artifact CMC21-1 is a remarkable example: a small fragment of processed elk hide, which now stands as the earliest known evidence of stitched clothing. It dates to around 12,600 years ago, and is composed of multiple parts of cut hide that are sewn together, featuring a Z-twist of the cord. To prevent the cord from pulling out, the thread was secured with a knot. The piece offers a rare glimpse into how ancient peoples used sophisticated technologies to survive in the extreme cold.
Image courtesy of the researchers / Science Advances
In all probability, this small fragment “would have been covered with some sort of paint, like ochre,” Rosencrance speculates. Though there is no physical evidence of any such coloring, “that’s often a way that people express identity in the past.”
In an interview, Rosencrance told us that the physical remains of such ancient materials provide details like which hides the ancient humans used for clothing, and what fiber materials they used to make cordage, essentially validating what were previously assumptions about how our ancestors lived.
Image generated using Google AI
“I think our study is special because we don’t have to assume; we know based on these extremely rare items that tell us these details,” the archaeologist told us.
This is “an entire part of cultural evolution that we cannot entirely grasp,” because it is based on organic perishable materials; so the development of stitched clothing is an aspect “that is often overlooked in the study of human evolution,” says Costantino Buzi, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Perugia, who was not involved in the study.
The study has been published in the journal Science Advances.
