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In a cave on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, archaeologists have discovered more than 60 bone tools that ancient people used to produce clothing made of leather and fur. The age of the finds is 90—120 thousand years. This is the oldest evidence to date of the manufacture of clothing by representatives of Homo sapiens. The results of the study are published in the journal iScience.

The beginning of the use of clothing is an important milestone in the history of mankind. Its appearance not only marks the rise of man to the next step in cultural and cognitive evolution, this innovation has given people the opportunity to settle outside Africa, in colder and more unfavorable regions from the point of view of climate.

Archaeologists and anthropologists agree that Homo sapiens began using clothing in the late Pliocene, but they could not say more precisely until now: leather, furs and other organic materials used for manufacturing are poorly preserved in the archaeological record. Therefore, scientists are constantly trying to find indirect evidence of the appearance of clothing production technologies among ancient people – specialized tools for making skins.

Researchers studying the site of an ancient man in the Contrebandier cave in Morocco have found here about 12 thousand fragments of animal bones, at least 60 of which have been identified by scientists as tools for skinning and skinning. The found bone tools have a certain correct shape, they are polished and smoothed, which indicates long-term use.

Next to the bone tools, the bones of small fur – bearing animals – sand foxes, golden jackals and wild cats – were found with traces indicating that the animals were butchered to skin them. The bones of other animal species found in the cave, belonging to cattle, have marks of a different type, indicating that they were processed for meat.

«The combination of predator bones with traces of skinning and bone tools, which were probably also used for fur processing, provides very convincing indirect evidence of the production of the earliest clothing in the archaeological record,» the words of the first author of the article Emily Hallett from the German Max Planck Institute for the History of Mankind are quoted in the press release of the publishing house. «But given the level of specialization, these tools are probably part of an earlier tradition, examples of which have not yet been found.»

Experts compared the tools from the Contrebandier cave with descriptions of skin treatment tools from other studies and found that they have the same shape and the same markings. The age of the oldest of the finds is 120 thousand years. This is the earliest evidence to date of the emergence of a culture of clothing production and specialized tools for its manufacture.

In general, according to the researchers, the findings from the Contrabandier cave emphasize the emergence of a complex culture in the late Pleistocene in Africa, including the use of a wide variety of materials for the manufacture of specialized tools.

«Bone tools from the Contrebandier cave demonstrate that approximately 120 thousand years ago Homo sapiens began to actively use bones to make specialized tools for solving specific tasks, including processing leather and fur. This feature, apparently, is the basic one for our species, and did not appear after the expansion into Eurasia,» Hallett summarizes.

Learn more: https://ria.ru/20210916/odezhda-1750382673.html

Scientific comments are given in parentheses.