Prehistoric Tailoring? 13,000-Year-Old Bone Needles Show How Ice Age Humans Stitched Winter Clothing

While we take the stitching in our clothing for granted, it may be one of the developments that allowed early inhabitants of North America to spread north to colder latitudes thousands of years ago, according to new research.

Archaeologists in Wyoming have revealed that, almost 13,000 years ago, Paleoindians in North America used furred animal bones to craft needles, potentially enabling them to stitch together warm clothing. The animals included smaller species, such as hares or rabbits, as well as big cats, such as bobcats and mountain lions. The team’s findings, published today in PLOS ONE, suggest that such a development could have been a key factor in enabling Paleolithic people to migrate northwards toward colder climates and eventually settle the remainder of the Americas.

“Our study is the first to identify the species and likely elements from which Paleoindians produced eyed bone needles,” the researchers wrote in the study. “Despite the importance of bone needles to explaining global modern human dispersal, archaeologists have never identified the materials used to produce them, thus limiting understanding of this important cultural innovation,” they added.

The needles originate from the La Prele Mammoth site, an archaeological site in Wyoming preserving the traces of Paleoindians who butchered a Columbian mammoth roughly 13,000 years ago. Archaeologists also recovered the oldest known bead in the Americas from this same site.

The team, including Wyoming State Archaeologists and researchers from the University of Wyoming, studied 32 bone fragments using mass spectrometry (to measure atoms and molecules), micro-CT scanning (a 3D imaging method), and by analyzing the bones’ chemical composition. Simply put, they compared the chains of amino acids in the bones to those of animals that existed in North America between 13,500 and 12,000 years ago. According to their results, foragers shaped needles from bones belonging to animals including foxes; hares or rabbits; and big cats such as bobcats, mountain lions, lynx, and potentially the now-extinct American cheetah.

The new research suggests that the early inhabitants of North America trapped these animals and used their bones to make needles with which they could turn their furs into clothing with closely stitched seams.

“Once equipped with such garments, modern humans had the capacity to expand their range to places from which they were previously excluded due to the threat of hypothermia or death from exposure,” the researchers explained. While the artifacts point to this development indirectly, the study still represents “some of the most detailed evidence yet discovered for Paleoindian garments.”

It’s worth noting that in 2016, archaeologists discovered a 50,000-year-old needle—the oldest known to scholars—in Siberia. Paleoindians descended from people who migrated to North America from Siberia during the last Ice Age, meaning that these early inhabitants may have used needles to make warm garments much earlier than the time period indicated by the bone fragments in Wyoming. The technology, however, may have been lost and then rediscovered.

The artifacts nevertheless serve as a reminder of the fact that foragers used animal products for more than just food, as detailed in the study. One can only hope, though, that the people living in modern-day Wyoming 13,000 years ago were also enjoying a hot rabbit stew while stitching up their winter coats.