Posted on 07/27/2009 9:30:16 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
The doctoral researcher from the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at ANU is simply making it clear that he's not concerned with the vicissitudes of fashion... Instead, he's fascinated by how humans came to develop clothing, and how that innovation might have in turn given our species an evolutionary edge over other hominids... He has credentials in medicine, psychology, prehistoric archaeology, and is completing a thesis in biological anthropology. This complicated curriculum vitae makes sense in light of Gilligan's project: his drive to understand the physiological, psychological and prehistoric aspects of clothing... "Modern humans have been around 200,000 years, and near-modern humans have been around for a few million years, but what we see as modern civilised existence began very recently, only in the last five to 10,000 years... The other important thing that prehistory tells us is that the natural environment we're used to is fairly recent as well -- it's the post-glacial environment of the last 10,000 years. For all of the time humans have been around, the world has been going through a series of ice ages... We have no clothing from the ice age, which ended about 10,000 years ago," Gilligan says. "The oldest clothing remains in the world in the Middle East dated to around 9,500 years ago. That's one reason archaeologically that we haven't been looking at clothing from prehistory -- it's just not there." ...We may not have records of clothing from before 9,500 years ago, but we do have evidence of the kinds of tools required to make fitted garments -- primitive hide-scraping and cutting devices and needles.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencealert.com.au ...
No face, could be something entirely else. :’)
Makes choosing blanket color for the newborns problematic.
:’D
ah ha.
Humans Wore Shoes 40,000 Years Ago, Fossil Suggests
National Geographic News | 7-1-2008 | Scott Norris
Posted on 07/01/2008 8:09:54 PM PDT by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2039554/posts
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