Prehistoric Tailoring? 13,000-Year-Old Bone Needles Show How Ice Age People Sewed Winter Clothes

Although we take the sewing of our clothes for granted, it may have been one of the factors that led to the spread of early North American humans to colder climates thousands of years ago, according to a new study.

Archaeologists in Wyoming have revealed that, about 13,000 years ago, Paleoindians in North America used wool bones to make needles, which helped them knit together warm clothing. The animals also included small species, such as rabbits or hares, big cats, such as rabbits and mountain lions. The team’s findings, published today in PLOS ONEsuggests that such a development would have been an important factor in enabling Paleolithic people to migrate north to colder climates and eventually colonize the rest of the Americas.

“Our study is the first to identify the organisms and materials from which Paleoindians made eye needles,” the researchers wrote in the study. “Despite the importance of bone needles to explain the spread of people today around the world, archaeologists have not identified the tools used to make them, thus preventing new understanding of this culture,” he added.

The needles come from the La Prele Mammoth site, an archaeological site in Wyoming that preserves the record of Paleoindians who killed Columbian mammoths about 13,000 years ago. Archaeologists too he recovered the oldest known necklace in America from this site.

The team, including Wyoming State archaeologists and researchers from the University of Wyoming, studied 32 pieces of bone using mass spectrometry (the measurement of atoms and molecules), micro-CT scanning (a 3D imaging technique), and analysis bones of medicine. In short, they compared the amino acid chains found in the bones of animals that lived in North America 13,500 to 12,000 years ago. According to their results, the foragers made needles from animal bones including wolf; rabbit or rabbits; and big cats such as bobcats, mountain lionslynx, and possibly the now extinct American tiger.

The new research suggests that early North American people trapped these animals and used their bones to make needles that could turn their fur into highly woven clothing.

“With such clothing, modern humans had the ability to extend their journeys to places that were previously excluded due to the risk of hypothermia or death from exposure,” the researchers explained. Although the artifacts point to this development in some way, the study still represents “some of the most detailed evidence that has been found on Paleoindian clothing.”

It is worth noting that in 2016, archaeologists found a 50,000-year-old man. needle—the oldest known to scholars—in Siberia. Paleoindians he came down from people who migrated to North America from Siberia during the last Ice Age, meaning that these early people may have used needles to make warm clothes much earlier than the time indicated by the bone fragments in Wyoming. Expertise, however, can be lost and then regained.

However, these artifacts serve as a reminder that people ate food used by animals not just food, as described in this study. However, one would expect that the inhabitants of modern-day Wyoming 13,000 years ago were also enjoying the warm stew of rabbits sewing their winter coats.