Humans Lived Hairless and Naked for About 800,000 Years

University of Florida researcher David Reed via Jeff Gage, Florida Museum of Natural HistoryGreenTracker| A new University of Florida study revises the date at which humans started wearing clothes to about 170,000 years ago, instead of the 107,000 estimated in 2003 by the Max Planck Institute. Researcher David Reed studies lice in modern humans, using DNA sequencing to calculate when clothing lice first diverged from human head lice.

The new DNA sequencing is so important because clothes don’t survive archaelogical sites under investigation.

Of equal interest is that humans began wearing clothes well after they lost body hard, which is estimated to be 1 million years ago.

“It’s interesting to think humans were able to survive in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years without clothing and without body hair, and that it wasn’t until they had clothing that modern humans were then moving out of Africa into other parts of the world,” Reed said. via Science Daily