Homo sapiens began producing garments at least 120,000 years ago in Africa: this is demonstrated by the remains of an ancient prehistoric 'tailoring' in Morocco, with 62 bone tools for processing skins and furs and a cetacean tooth used for their sharpening.
The finds, discovered ten years ago in the Contrebandiers cave near the Atlantic coast, are described in the journal iScience by anthropologist Emily Hallett of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.
"The combination of carnivorous animal bones with flaying marks and bone tools probably used for fur processing provides a very suggestive clue to the earliest production of garments documented in archaeological archives, but given the level of specialization of this collection of tools - explains Hallett - it is likely that they are part of a larger tradition with earlier examples that have not yet been discovered ”.
The finds from the Moroccan cave "show that about 120,000 years ago Homo sapiens began to intensify the use of bones to make tools to be used for specific tasks, including processing leather and fur," adds the researcher.
"This versatility seems to be the basis of our species and not a feature that emerged after the expansion into Eurasia."
