The Neanderthals had a good run. They were around from at least 200,000 years ago to about 42,000 years ago, only a couple millennia after they began to interbreed with modern humans. After that window, all physical traces of them disappeared
Throughout that period, though, Neanderthals would have certainly experienced some cold weather — so much that it’s unlikely they would have walked around completely naked. In fact, some research has shown that the temperatures were likely too cold in parts of Europe during certain eras for any inhabitants to have survived without wearing clothes or making use of shelter, like sleeping under fur bed covers.
The trouble is, clothing isn’t made from materials that typically last very long, even tens of thousands of years before the rise of fast fashion. And evidence like needles has yet to be found in association with Neanderthals.
“The archaeological record is very poor in this case,” says Abel Moclán, an archaeologist at the Regional Archaeological Museum in Madrid.
That record is so poor that some research suggests Neanderthals didn’t wear clothes at all. Scientists studying the DNA of body lice, which live in clothing but feed on humans, found that the insects only originated about 72,000 to 42,000 years ago, when modern humans migrated out of Africa. This may suggest clothing wasn’t around beforehand.
