The needle, an invention that changed our clothes... and humanity

Paleolithic Venus statuettes are best known for their sexual characteristics. These sculptures, often with their voluptuous female forms, made around 30,000 to 20,000 years ago, have been thought to have been fertility ritual figures, representations of the mother goddess, or self-portraits. But few see them as fashion icons. Yet, some provide a good glimpse into how an elegant woman would have dressed during the Stone Age. One of them, from Kostienki, Russia, sports a strappy wrap dress, while others wear miniskirts. As for the famous Venus of Willendorf, her only adornment is a braided headdress, but it is very beautiful.

These statuettes are a far cry from the usual image of prehistoric humans wrapped in animal furs. According to archaeologist Olga Soffer, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the fact that their clothing is depicted in such minute detail speaks to the importance of clothing for these societies living tens of thousands of years ago.

What initially simply met a need—to keep warm—has ultimately served as a vehicle for aesthetic expression. Today, new discoveries are disrupting the way this evolution was previously understood.

Because clothing is made from perishable materials, the oldest found are only about 10,000 years old. But it is possible to trace its development to an earlier period by other means, as shown by the Venus statuettes. These statuettes provide archaeological evidence of the extremely ancient origins of simple capes, but also of more elaborate garments.

However, it is the use of needles, the technique most closely linked to clothing, that research provides the most surprising information. It reveals how our ancestors transformed the functional object of clothing into a social necessity and a means of self-assertion.

“While it seems perfectly natural to us today to wear clothes and not be naked in public, this habit is not self-evident,” explains Ian Gilligan of the University of Sydney, Australia. “Besides, no other animal species wears clothes.”

Of course, there are rare examples of animals that like to adorn themselves with objects and pass this fashion on to their fellow creatures, such as orcas that cover their heads with a sort of salmon hat, or chimpanzees that put a blade of grass in their ears, but human beings have given clothing a whole new dimension.

To understand how we got to this point, we have to go back nearly 2 million years, to the time when our ancestors are thought to have lost their hair. This, along with their increased sweating ability, would have helped them survive in the hot, dry climate that prevailed in parts of Africa at the time.

However, the lack of body fur became a distinct disadvantage later, as the climate cooled or these hominids migrated to cooler regions. But thanks to their inventiveness, our distant ancestors found ways to overcome this thermal obstacle. “Even though we don't have any clothing from this period, we have various indirect evidence of their existence,” explains Ian Gilligan.

The earliest evidence that hominids covered themselves comes from hide scrapers. These flat stone tools, which appeared around 500,000 years ago, were used to clean the inside of animal skins, an essential step in the manufacture of fur clothing.

This development corresponds to a major turning point in the Earth's climate, with not only a drop in average temperatures but also extreme temperature variations over periods too short to allow human adaptation through the development of new characteristics, such as the regrowth of a hair cover. Francesco d'Errico, a researcher at the University of Bordeaux, points out: "It's quite incredible to note that the first evidence of the use of stone tools for working animal skins coincides precisely with the entry into a period that was both colder and marked by abrupt climate changes, 500,000 to 400,000 years ago."

However, at the time, our ancestors' attachment to clothing was not yet complete. This is why we find more skin scrapers at sites occupied during colder periods than at those occupied during warmer periods. “This indicates that people wore clothes for warmth when necessary, but remained naked when the weather became milder,” explains Ian Gilligan. In other words, clothing had only a utilitarian function and was only worn occasionally.

Other clues come from characteristic cut marks on the bones indicating that an animal was skinned for its fur. Analysis of bones found in the