Moroccan cave yields oldest clues about advent of clothing Part 2

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Continued from Part 1… Fur, leather and other organic clothing materials are highly perishable over time, and no actual prehistoric clothing was found at the cave. The tools were made during a period when the cave was occupied by members of our species from approximately 120,000 years ago to 90,000 years ago. The nature of the clothes they may have fashioned remains unclear. Of particular interest were tools with a broad rounded end, called spatulate tools. “There are striations on the spatulate bone tools that are the result of use, and the sheen on the ends of the bone tools is the result of repeated use against skin. Bone tools with this shape are still used today to prepare pelts because they do not pierce the skin, they are durable and they are effective at removing connecting tissues without damage to the pelt,” Hallett said. Until now some of the oldest evidence for Homo sapiens clothing was bone needles about 45,000-40,000 years old from Siberia. The researchers suspect that our species had begun making clothing thousands of years before the date of the Morocco artifacts, though archaeological evidence is lacking. Genetic studies of clothing lice by other researchers suggest an origin for clothing by perhaps 170,000 years ago in Africa. It also is likely that Neanderthals, a close human cousin who entered Eurasia before Homo sapiens, made clothing, considering the cold regions they inhabited, the researchers said. They cited evidence for leather-working bone tools from roughly 50,000 years ago. (Reuters) This article was provided by The Japan Times Alpha.