the evolution of clothes?

sure.

Perhaps it is a combination of both protection and class struggle. Caveman A might find a better fur than caveman B and starts to say, "argg..." which translates to "haha, I'm better than you." This eventually leads to the head caveman of the clan demanding the other cavemen to give him the best furs.

Absolom:
"What I guess I am asking you for is proof of some sort that clothing, or even scraped hide shelters, existed at such an early date as 1.6 billion BP as you stated in your previous post. I find that a startling claim in that no evidence seems to exist to support clothing by species other than Neanderthals and CroMagnons."Nowhere did I say "Billion".. that's "Million", BTW.I said evidence of hide working, not evidence of clothing. Hides might have been roughly worked for a variety of reasons. I'm going by the Bob Brain's work at Swartkrans. I don't know of any other residue analyss, so I'm going by taphonomy (study of wear patterns on tools). Is there any reason that you have for rejecting taphonomy?I'm not sure that the first clothing would have been of hides. Twisted grasses may hve been used as rope and string, so grasses may have been used as clothing. The FLK site at Olduvai (associated with H habilis) shows a the remains of a windbreak and possibly a fence. About 1.6 MYA. So "shelter" was a familiar concept.Anyways, I would hazard that hominids had clothes before they left Africa.. they were colonizing areas that were less than inviting to the naked, and they did so rapidly. Granted that they already had controlled fire by then, but you can't carry a compfire with you. So that puts clothing firmly with H erectus at 2 MYA, perhaps earlier.Speaking of habilis, s/he carried stuff around with him/her. Perhaps hide bags? A lot of what we find with erectus is foreshadowed in habilis.

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Perhaps it is a combination of both protection and class struggle. Caveman A might find a better fur than caveman B and starts to say, "argg..." which translates to "haha, I'm better than you." This eventually leads to the head caveman of the clan demanding the other cavemen to give him the best furs.

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Umm kinda. I don't think that scenario would actually happen becuase in most such societies the killing of the beast is a very personal act, and the fur as symbol of that act is likely to be much more important, and socially protected, than its utility value. So this situation would be more likely to be perceived as a challenge to go out and kill and even better, bigger, glossy-coated version for yourself.But textiles are a different matter becuase they are EXTREMELY labour intensive. It is at this point I think that clothing becomes significant as something other than statements of personal prowess and enter the field of "social management". Furs can be produced by isolated individuals in short order, while textiles require both a technical and labour investment before production can begin.

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I'm not sure that the first clothing would have been of hides. Twisted grasses may hve been used as rope and string, so grasses may have been used as clothing. The FLK site at Olduvai (associated with H habilis) shows a the remains of a windbreak and possibly a fence. About 1.6 MYA. So "shelter" was a familiar concept.

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British MuseumThis is a not-very-good picture of the strange object known as the Standard of Ur for lack of any better name clearly shows what seems to be grass skirts. One imagines they must not have been radically different to those worn until recently in the Polynesian islands.I'me well aware that this is much much later than the period you were discussing, but it does show an early use of grass skirts by humans (on the timescale of our civilisaiton). Given the slow pace of technical development in pre-industrial societies, these may well be the very first form of dress, still in use.

Graculus: Sorry for the typo. Yes, I meant to quote you at 1.6 MILLION years BP, not Billion.Again, I would find it very enlightening if there is evidence of "clothing" that early. It is "clothing" we are speaking of in this topic, not shelters or windbreaks. Gorillas and Chimps construct bedding and rudimentary shelter from twigs, branches and leaves.We need scrapers to prove hides were scraped. Wooden scrapers 1.6 million years old will be hard to come by. Bone scrapers may be extremely rare as well. But stone scrapers would survive.Maybe the hides were worked by mouth. Then the wear on teeth might reveal a reasonable early date if a jawbone is available.However, all this is speculative since hides could've been worked for bags and shelters as you have already posited. And hides used for shelters and bags could be draped, poncho style, over the body as rudimentary "clothing."But when we get to the stage of manufactured clothing beyond rudimentary poncho cloaks and loin cloths, their assembly requires binding or stitching of some sort; and needles and awls will prove the approximate date of assembled clothing (other than grass garments). Bone needles and awls seem only to be found in association with Neanderthal and CroMagnon, so I find it hard to accept anything other than rudimentary cloaks, loin cloths, and maybe headdresses prior to Neanderthal.I reject the theory that hominids absolutely require clothing for migration and habitation outside Africa. There is nothing to support such a theory other than the fact that we contemporaries cannot conceive of living naked in other than temperate regions, while many of us keep domestic stock and chain dogs outside in extremely frigid weather.A lot can evolve in 1.6 million years, I think; and we're transfering our own unsubstantiated concepts of necessity on an extinct species when we suppose they absolutely required clothing to survive "outside Africa."Regards, AbshalomThis message has been edited by Abshalom, 01-06-2005 10:48 AMThis message has been edited by Abshalom, 01-06-2005 10:51 AM

I was going to say that penis sheaths were hardly a way to minimize the visual impact of genitalia.
We also need to draw a distinction between scraped hides and cured hides, as it is only the invention of a curing process that allows a hide to be used as anything but temporary, and smelly, covering.I would think the first use was for camoflage, as you have mentioned, and where curing would not be necessary. The ability of humans to walk up to or run down prey is limited (walking down is another matter, and very time consuming). This would have evolved from using grass and bushes to using skins of other dead animals where the plains became too open to use vegetation. We also see evidence of this use in late examples of "primitive" cultures.Curing could have developed as a way to wear "trophies" longer before it became useful in the production of clothes.And as far as stones go, I thought that Leakey had demonstrated that stones used by Australopithicus were capable of cutting and cleaning hides. University of Missouri–St. Louis BUT another question that has not been asked is: why have humans {lost\reduced} their fur? The "it's cold" answer begs this question, as all our ape relatives have healty coats that would provide warmth, especially those living high in the mountains.The logical conclusion is that humans lost fur when they were able to supplant it's purpose with a more adaptive covering that provided better regulation of heat and cooling.Enjoy.

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There's some evidence that humans lost their fur as an adaptation for persistance hunting - our greater heat loss ability allows us to keep going for longer. Clothes, even furs, are not equivalent to having your own fur because you can just take them on and off.

exactly. there is also an argument that increased brain size allows for greater cooling, and that helped the human brain to grow in size.

RAZD: I'm having trouble associating the depiliation of the human body solely with clothing. In fact, I think the majority of hair reduction most likely occured before the emergence of widespread and heavy clothing use, but then how do we determine that? Do cave paintings give us any clue as to Paleolithic piliation?Does natural selection, ala sexual attraction, play into this? I mean, sex always seems to be a primary motivator. Did prehistoric hominids favor the less hairy mates? Or even more to the point, were less hairy females more healthy, productive, and fertile due to their more effective manufacture of vitamin D and folic acid?Vitamin D is actually a steroid hormone called calcitriol which works by turning your genes on and off. In hundreds of tissues throughout your body, calcitriol demasks your genome. It signals your genes to make hundreds of enzymes and proteins crucial to maintaining health and fighting disease. Vitamin D is produced in human skin when sunlight strikes your skin. http://www.cholecalciferol-council.com/Folic acid is essential for reproduction. Folic acid production is regulated by skin color and exposure to sunlight.In other words, was it necessary for the human body to divest itself of hair in order to facilitate the production of vitamin D and folic acid essential for health and reproductivity?If the answer is "yes," then can the reduction of body hair on humans be attributed solely to weather and clothing or more to survival of the species through efficient reproduction?

I think we have to consider their co-evolution, increase use of skins less use for fur, less fur, more need for skins.I am also personally fairly certain that sexual selection had a lot to do with it's co-evolution.First off, one of the visible differences between man an most other apes is the estrus cycle: in most other apes this period is marked by loss of hair\fur in sexual signaling areas (breasts) and swelling of certain parts. Thus loss of hair\fur in females more than in males.This would also lead to covering\uncovering certain areas for {political\personal} reasons.We have also discussed trophyism in the wearing of skins and such adornments: this too can be related to sexual selection. One young man has a nice plush lion skin from a beast killed in combat (the zulu test of manhood), another has a patchy hide of a zebra that he took off a dead animal: who is going to get the mate?And then there is the issue of lice and related pests that have a harder life in the less hairy clothed individual than in his more hirsuit companion. And absence of disease and parasites is a well known marker for sexual preference.In one sense all life is due to sexual selection (but you have to consider single cell division a kind of ?masturbation?)

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we are limited in our ability to understand
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The question of the vitamin D is interesting, but then it should apply to all animals, and we should see a lot more 'hairless' mammals (hairlessness in non-mammals being irrelevant).man
elephant
rhino
hippo (albeit with caveat)
mole-rat (with a different caveat)
sea mammals (with strong caveat)
a hairless cat (that doesn't swim, which, with the very hairy cat that does, effectively refutes the "aquatic ape" theory)that's all I can come up with off the top of my head.the Vitamin D theory should be testable with these and their near kin.the caveats have to do with other factors making hair\fur a disadvantage than just heat\cooling modulation and the critters involved also being in fairly temperature homogeneous environments.

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Absolom:
-"We need scrapers to prove hides were scraped. Wooden scrapers 1.6 million years old will be hard to come by. Bone scrapers may be extremely rare as well. But stone scrapers would survive."Actually, the Swartkrans tools are bone.-"And hides used for shelters and bags could be draped, poncho style, over the body as rudimentary "clothing."Which is still clothing, no matter how rudimentary. After all, this is a discussion of the "evolution" of clothing. Discussing the evolution of, say, horses, doesn't start with the Darley Arabian, either.-"Bone needles and awls seem only to be found in association with Neanderthal and CroMagnon"Actually, there *are* awls associated with H erectus, at Zhoukoudian, 460 KYA.-"so I find it hard to accept anything other than rudimentary cloaks, loin cloths, and maybe headdresses prior to Neanderthal."
As noted, the discussion doesn't have to be confined to sewn and tailored clothing.-"I reject the theory that hominids absolutely require clothing for migration and habitation outside Africa. There is nothing to support such a theory other than the fact that we contemporaries cannot conceive of living naked in other than temperate regions, while many of us keep domestic stock and chain dogs outside in extremely frigid weather."
In Siberia? You may have noticed that they don't have any native short-haired animals up there, never mind a naked ape. And dogs regularly freeze to death because owners think that they are winter-proof."A lot can evolve in 1.6 million years, I think; and we're transfering our own unsubstantiated concepts of necessity on an extinct species when we suppose they absolutely required clothing to survive "outside Africa."Well, I didn't say that it was absolutely a neccessity, but the speed with which less than pleasant environments were colonized indicates that we had the appropriate technologies to live there. By 1.3 MYA there were H erectus north of 40 degrees in China. The climate then had cold, dry spells.Given that by late H erectus (350 KYA) had structures, fire, art, spatial organization, language, ritual, ocean travel, etc, why is clothing so much of a stretch?

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man
elephant
rhino

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Interestingly all three you listed without caveats are savannah animals.Hmm, but I can't take it much further than that becuase all the other savannah animals I can think of are furred.Ah, the hippo. This is not a savannah animal but is probably on the same course as the present aquatic mammals.

hence the caveat on the hippo in my listand the elephant and the rhino are substantially larger creatures and that changes the {heating\cooling} dynamics considerablyif running were the criteria then cheatahs would have significantly less fur eh?ps -- add waterbuffalo, same caveat.This message has been edited by RAZD, 01-07-2005 09:06 AM

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we are limited in our ability to understand
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