Before Clothes: When Humans Lived Naked

SPEAKER_00 0:00 You've had that dream, right? The one where you're in front of a crowd or in the middle of a busy room, you look down, and you're naked. Usually more of a nightmare than a dream. And the reason I mention it is because I was thinking about how suddenly being plunged into nakedness would make pretty much anyone embarrassed. I mean, unless of course you're a naturist or a nudist, and then you might love it. But that's the weird thing. Naturists are often seen as weird or unhinged. I don't personally know many people who'd be comfortable getting naked in front of a load of strangers, especially to the extent where they're so insistent on gathering at beaches to do it. But then I wondered, are we, the clothes wearers, the weird ones? Because we're literally born naked. And actually, for most of human history, humans were not dressed. If I told you to imagine a Stone Age man, you'd probably conjure up a mental image of a man with a leaf covering his genitals or maybe a loincloth. But actually, for the vast majority of our evolutionary history, we were just naked. I'm Ollie, this is What We Did Before, and today we're finding out what humans did before clothes, how we stayed warm and safe, and how we protected our modesty, or if we even cared about it. So our early ancestors likely lost most of their body hair nearly 1.5 million years ago. Evolutionary biologists suggest it was to stay cool during endurance hunting in hot climates, which set the stage for humans needing clothing later on. So how long have we been wearing clothes for? Well, clothing is old, but relatively speaking it's quite a recent invention. So it looks like we began wearing them around 100,000 years ago, or even as far back as 170,000 years ago. But modern humans, the type that we are, have been around for quite a lot longer than that. We've been going for roughly 300,000 years, so that means we spent a long time without clothing. It's hard to tell exactly how long we spent naked, but one slightly strange clue comes from lice. Basically, we started off with head lice, the kind that you hate your kid to get, but according to genetic studies, some head lice decided to leave our scalps and turn into clothing lice, and that happened around 170,000 years ago, precisely when humans likely started wearing clothes. So these tiny parasites are like little timestamps in human history. Anyway, if we didn't wear clothes for around 100,000 years, what did early humans do without them? It must have been cold, right? And with your bits flapping around everywhere, was it safe? Was it attractive? Well, to be honest, they didn't really need clothes at first. Our ancestors evolved in warm climates, primarily in Africa, where the lack of clothing wasn't a big issue. In fact, being naked had some advantages. It helped with thermoregulation, allowing sweat to evaporate freely and cool the body, and it reduced the risk of overheating, especially for hunters who needed stamina during long chases. But of course, not everywhere is hot like Africa, and humans do like to travel. So as humans started migrating out of Africa into colder regions, the need for clothing became obvious. This started happening possibly as early as 185,000 years ago, but this early migration didn't seem to lead to sustained colonization. It wasn't until around 60 to 70,000 years ago when the recent dispersal of modern humans took place, leading to our global dominance. But whenever it was, moving out of Africa to places with freezing temperatures and harsh weather conditions wasn't exactly conducive to survival without some form of protection. In fact, if you were to step outside in sub-freezing temperatures without clothes, hypothermia can set in really fast, sometimes within an hour or even sooner if it's windy and wet. And this brings me perfectly onto the issue of protection, and what we did before clothes to make sure that we kept safe. What exactly were we doing before we figured out how to make t-shirts or dresses? Well, we relied on the wonder of nature, of course. Some anthropologists think humans might have smeared mud, clay, or even animal fat or ash on their skin as a primitive form of protection against the sun, insects and the cold. Body paints may have even doubled as both decoration and sun protection. And early humans relied heavily on caves, rock shelters, and other natural structures to shield themselves from the elements. Fire helped, of course, as well, keeping people warm and also acting as insect repellent thanks to the smoke. And when things got really tough, survival wasn't just about tools, but about each other and human connection. There were lots of big hugs all around as people would huddle together for warmth. But eventually, humans started making makeshift clothing, but the first outfits obviously weren't tailored or stitched. They probably draped animal hides or furs over their bodies. Archaeological evidence suggests that tools used for scraping hides appeared around 300,000 years ago, long before clothes as we know them. And by about 120,000 years ago, Neanderthals and modern humans were wearing basic garments, which they seem to have made by tying animals' skins together with sinew or plant fibres. So imagine stiff, poorly cured animal hides that were heavy and smelly. So people clearly weren't wearing these to protect their modesty. It would hardly be worth doing it for that. These were essential for survival. And it turns out early humans were pretty resourceful. There's a guy, well, a 5,300-year-old mummy called Ertzy the Iceman, whose remains were found in the Alps in 1991, and he was found to have been wearing an impressive ensemble getup for his time. A bear fur hat made from the skin of a brown bear, leggings and a coat made from goat skin, a coat and loincloth made from sheepskin, and shoes made from cowskin with a quiver made from roe deer skin. And his shoes were stuffed with hay. So not super fashionable, but very resourceful and cool in its own way. And this brings me back to my point about modesty. I really wanted to know, did humans used to worry about being naked? Like, is modesty or shame something we've always felt, or did it evolve? Well, it seems the idea of modesty and feeling embarrassed about your body if you're not covered up likely emerged much later, and this would have been when humans developed complex social structures and cultural practices. Even the ancient Greeks viewed nudity as a symbol of strength and purity, especially during athletic competitions. And actually some hunter-gatherer societies that are still going today aren't really bothered about modesty as we define it. For example, tribes in warmer climates usually wear hardly any clothes and instead focus on things like jewellery or body paint. In these societies, exposure is neither shameful nor sexualized, like it is in most. Modesty probably came about alongside societal rules about property and things like relationships and sexual behaviour. Covering certain parts of the body could have been signals of status, fertility, or simply that you were willing to follow social norms. And modesty also began to take on moral and cultural weight as religions and organized belief systems emerged around a hundred thousand years ago. Early civilizations like those in Egypt and Mesopotamia began associating nudity with vulnerability, shame, or even poverty. By the time of the Abrahamic religions, clothing was explicitly tied to modesty and morality, as seen in the biblical story of Adam and Eve realizing their nakedness after eating the forbidden fruit. It does seem weird that at one point we were all walking around butt naked, then suddenly it was a scandal for a lady to show her ankle. Humans are weird. So let's continue looking at the evolution of clothing. So it was around 40,000 years ago that we started seeing the first signs of tailoring. Archaeologists have found needles made from bone from this period, which suggests that humans were stitching together garments back then. So this probably tied in with when humans were moving into colder climates like I Sage Europe. And even though, as I've mentioned, clothing is really important for survival and avoiding things like hypothermia, by the time tailoring began, clothing became about more than just that. It started to become more sophisticated and practical. It wasn't as smelly anymore or as heavy and uncomfortable like the hides I spoke about earlier. Humans had learned to tan hides, which is basically a process of making them softer, and they experimented with weaving plant fibres into basic textiles. And while we clearly began wearing clothes for survival and protection, they also helped prevent injuries and insect bites. And over time, that's when the social and cultural elements were shaped. So human societies became more complex, so clothing became a marker of status, tribal role. And obviously, that continues today. What you wear often says a lot about who you are. Now, once humans embraced clothing, things changed dramatically. The fact that we could now explore new environments and survive in harsh climates meant human migration accelerated fast. By 10,000 years ago, when agriculture started, clothing became more diverse and refined. Humans began domesticating animals for wool and raising plants like flax for linen, laying the foundation for textile production. It's also thought that clothing could have indirectly caused skin colour to change over time. As humans moved to colder, less sunny climates and wore more clothing, their bodies received less sunlight, and this reduction in sunlight exposure likely contributed to the evolution of lighter skin tones to absorb more vitamin D. And these days there are very few people left who prefer not to wear clothes, other than the nudists. Only a tiny fraction of people, like certain indigenous groups or isolated communities, live entirely without clothes. But even then, there's usually some form of minimal clothing. For the rest of us, we've got wardrobes lined with clothes, with the global clothing market now worth over $1.7 trillion. And the very thought of letting it all hang out in public? Yeah, that's not gonna happen.