Clothes make the caveman? Scientists dig into the latest Stone Age fashion

From your high school science book to 'The Flintstones', we think we have a solid idea of what cave people looked like. However, we know very little about what our Stone Age ancestors used to wear.

Cave people had to live through very harsh conditions, such as the ice age, with tools we deem primitive today, so for the longest time, we have imagined them wearing furs and loincloths.

Organic materials, such as fur and leather, don’t last beyond 100,000 years, meaning that we have little to no direct evidence of what cave people actually used to dress.

Image: Kelly Sikkema / Unsplash

CNN reports that archeologists in Schöningen, in Northern Germany, have found cut marks in a cave bear paw that suggest that these animals were skinned for their fur, some 300,000 years ago.

Cave bears were large animals, that could reach a length of three meters (about 10 feet), that went extinct about 200,000 years ago.

According to a study published by the Journal of Human Evolution, the fur of the cave bear was suitable for making simple clothing or bedding.

Scientists speculate these early clothes were probably wrapped around the body with no tailoring since archeological evidence for eyed needles only emerged from about 45,000 years ago.

“The study is significant because we know relatively little about how humans in the deep past were protecting themselves from the elements,” said study author Ivo Verheijen (pictured) to CNN.

Verheijen, who is a doctoral student at Tübingen University, added that “From this early time period, there are only a handful of sites that show evidence of bear skinning, with Schöningen providing the most complete picture.”

Image: Lasma Artame / Unsplash

The study author pointed out that the cut marks on the cave bear couldn’t have originated from butchering the animal, since these were done in areas that have very little fat, such as the paws.

Image: Zdeněk Macháček / Unsplash

The Schöningen archeological site is famous for being the location where some of the oldest wooden weapons, used to hunt animals as back as 300,000 years ago, were found.

However, when humanity started to wear clothes still remains a mystery.

Bone tools in current-day Morocco suggest that humans wore clothes made with animal skins somewhere between 90,000 and 120,000 years ago.

Meanwhile, genetic studies of lice show a divergence of head and clothing lice that place the use of clothes as early as 170,000 years ago.

It's hard to imagine there was a time when humanity didn't have some sort of garment to cover. Clothes have varied through time, culture, region, and need.

Which makes us wonder what clothes will look like thousands years from now? And who will be studying what we wore and what will they think?