It is very difficult to have proof of anything that happened tens of thousands of years ago, especially when it’s as transient as clothing and fiber.

For many thousands of years our ancestors lived in areas where covering the body in protective items were not needed at all. Areas to sleep in could have leaves and vines and animal products like skins or fur and feathers as cushioning and covering.

But humans love decorating themselves. Early hominid finds nearly always include beads and jewelry and bits we tied around ourselves.

So the start of clothing is most likely an embellishment not *just* a need for protection from the environment. The fact that shells with holes drilled through them dating to 150,000 years ago, shows exactly how much early humans cared for decorating themselves. These shell beads have been found in at least 5 caves throughout northern Africa, allowing experts to speculate about communication, trade, and the very human desire to adorn in the extremely early world.

Dating has shown that shortly after the caches of beads were lost or left behind, humans were skinning animals. They could have used their skins merely in their beds, but knowing that we already adorned ourselves, is it unlikely to see us adorning our bodies with skins? A strange and possibly uncomfortable way to track the use of clothing- something that rarely lasts anytime as long as shell and bone- is to track the evolution of lice.
Humans have suffered from head lice for a very very long time. Long enough that the lice that like living on human heads evolved to be a different louse than is its closest relative on our closest relatives— the chimpanzees and the bonobos. Pretty much the same is true for pubic lice.
Body lice, also known as ‘clothing lice’, is *specific to humans* and tracing the genes of body lice and when they split from the other lice can basically tell us when humans started to wear clothing. And what that tells us is that, about the same time we were drilling holes in shells to adorn ourselves, we were decorating our bodies with coverings. While even Africa can have inclement weather humans wanted to protect our bodies from, the history of the body louse shows that we were consistently wearing body coverings before any one left Africa to explore the other parts of the world.