Clothing

Clothing is humanity's portable climate. While other species adapted bodies to environments over millions of years, humans adapted environments to bodies within single lifetimes. Animal hides draped over shoulders let tropical primates survive ice-age winters, colonize continents where they had no evolutionary right to exist, and outcompete every other large mammal on Earth.

The adjacent possible for clothing required conceptual revolution before material technology. Some primate must first understand that properties of materials could be transferred—that fur kept animals warm and might keep humans warm too. Genetic evidence from body lice, which colonized humans only after clothing appeared, suggests this conceptual leap occurred around 170,000 years ago in Africa, long before humans left the continent.

Early clothing was processed hide—scraped, dried, perhaps softened with brains or urine. No weaving, no spinning, no needles: just animal skin modified enough to drape. Even this minimal technology required tool use and processing knowledge. Scraping hides demands sharp stone edges; preserving them requires understanding that untreated skin rots. Clothing accumulated several technologies into one product.

Clothing unlocked human geography. Without thermal regulation, Homo sapiens was confined to warm climates where nakedness was viable. With hides, humans pushed into the European cold during the last glacial maximum, crossed the Bering land bridge into the Americas, and settled the Arctic circle. Each expansion required improving the technology: from draped hides to tailored garments, from simple wrapping to weatherproof seams.

The invention reveals humans' unique strategy: instead of evolving for environments, we engineer environments around our unchanged bodies. Clothing was the first external adaptation, followed by shelter, fire control, and eventually all technology. Every tool extends body capability without modifying the body—a pattern that began when the first primate wrapped itself in fur that wasn't its own.