Pants Were Optional, 100,000 Years Ago

RobertB-DC writes "German scientists have used differences in the DNA of lice to determine when humans started wearing clothes. It seems lice are highly specialized -- head lice lay their eggs only on hair, while body lice hide theirs in the folds of clothing. Using the differences in the two species' DNA and a "standard" mutation rate, the scientists determined when clothing-specific lice (and by extention, clothes) came into existence. No comment, though, from Calvin Klein."

Comments

We naturists...

[n1ywb]

We naturists have known for some time that pantsless is the way to go. No news to us.

Re:Atricle has flawed logic IMO

[Lars Arvestad]

This is what the actual paper in Current Biology by Kittler et al says:

A critical assumption is that the origin of body lice reflects the origin of clothing; it is possible that clothing existed for some time before lice exploited this new ecological niche, in which case the origin of clothing could be much more ancient than the origin of body lice. While we cannot exclude this possibility, the colonization of a new ecological niche usually occurs rapidly after it becomes available. Since modern humans and archaic humans such as Neandertals diverged about 250,000-500,000 years ago, in order to associate clothing with archaic humans, clothing would have had to exist for hundreds of thousands of years before the origin of body lice, which seems improbable. Moreover, archaeological evidence does not contradict an association of clothing specifically with modern humans, as the only tools that can be definitely associated with clothing, such as needles, are only about 40,000 years old.

So they certainly address the issue. These guys are not naive---The last author, Mark Stoneking, is a very experienced and respected investigator.

Their dating is actually 72000 +- 42000 years btw.