"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society."
Mark Twain, More Maxims of Mark (1927)
Around 400,000 years ago, Homo sapiens devised a solution to protect the vulnerable naked human body from the environment—clothes. Anthropologists believe the earliest clothing was made from the fur of hunted animals or leaves creatively wrapped around the body to keep out the cold, wind, and rain.
Determining the date of this invention is difficult, although sewing needles made from animal bone dating from about 30,000 B.C.E. have been found by archeologists. However, genetic analysis of human body lice reveals that they evolved at the same time as clothing. Scientists originally thought the lice evolved 107,000 years ago, but further investigations placed their evolution a few hundred thousand years earlier.
Clothing has changed dramatically over the centuries, although its ancient role as an outward indication of the status, wealth, and beliefs of the wearer is as important as ever. During the Industrial Revolution the textile industry was the first to be mechanized, enabling increasingly elaborate designs to be made at a faster rate. In the twenty-first century, mechanization has allowed sophisticated practical clothing to be devised to protect us from dangers such as extreme weather, chemicals, insects, and outer space. Without clothes we would not have been able to explore and exploit our world and the surrounding universe to the extent that we have.
