Title: CLOTHING REQUIREMENTS OF UPPER PALAEOLITHIC HUMANS IN EUROPE – A THERMAL MODEL
Author: Nicole D.S. Grunstra
Affiliation: Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, University of Cambridge, UK.
Abstract
The date of the origin of clothing remains inconclusive. Early, organic clothing does not preserve in the archaeological record, and evidence from tools and art is scarce and indirect at best. Interestingly, genetic studies on the divergence time between human head and body lice indicate that the first use of clothing occurred 170-83 ka, but render the issue unresolved because this spans a time span of 87,000 years. A different, more empirical approach is to model thermal conditions throughout time. The model presented here employs palaeoclimate data to present the thermal conditions in which anatomically modern humans (AMH) had to survive in Upper Palaeolithic Europe, and compares it with human minimum sustainable temperatures at nudity and three levels of fitted clothing, as measured by ‘clo’ levels. Compared against AMH sites, the model predicts the necessary minimum level of clothing as required in the reconstructed thermal conditions. ‘Clothing boundaries’ indicate the possible habitat range for each level of clothing. Results indicate that single-layered fitted clothing existed in Europe by 35 ka, and multi-layered clothing by at least 30 ka. These findings coincide with the date of the oldest needle recovered in eastern Europe. Though the results postdate the time span indicated by human lice data, suggesting that the first use of clothing may have come about at an earlier time in Africa, the thermal model offers an empirical method to test such hypotheses. An additional finding of interest was the apparent superior cold
adaptation of the Gravettian culture over the Aurignacians.
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