A team of 13 archaeologists and scientists from universities in Oregon and Nevada have successfully dated a cache of animal hide clothing to the Late Pleistocene era, making it the oldest known sewn clothing in the world.
The stitched-together hides were originally excavated, along with other materials (braided cords, knotted bark, and other fiber objects), by an amateur archaeologist named John Cowles from Cougar Mountain Cave in western Oregon in 1958, according to the study published in Science Advances. Cowles kept his findings until his death in the 1980s, at which point they were transferred to the Favell Museum, which collects Indigenous artifacts and contemporary western art, in Klamath Falls, Ore. Some of the objects in the study (wooden and fiber artifacts) were originally discovered in the nearby Paisley Cave.
The group that published the study used radiocarbon and ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) to date 55 object—hides, bone needles, and other tools—to the Younger Dryas, a period that took place between 12,900 and 11,700 years ago and was marked by a return to glacial temperatures, which necessitated different types of clothing technology.
The “well-dated and rare perishable assemblages” discovered in both caves “illustrate the underappreciated technological sophistication and complexity of technologies used by Late Pleistocene peoples that have broader implications for how we envision, model, and discuss early lifeways of the Western Hemisphere,” the authors wrote in their report.
Richard Rosencrance, a PhD student at the University of Nevada, Reno, and one of the authors of the study, told Live Science that while the idea of animal hide clothing from this era isn’t new, no one previously knew what it looked like or how it was constructed as no examples of Pleistocene clothing have previously been identified. It turns out, Rosencrance, notes, that “they were accomplished and serious sewists during the Ice Age.”
