EXARC Award Project Update: Neanderthal Footwear

Neanderthal clothing is something that’s being discussed more and more by archaeologists at the moment, with people now generally agreeing that clothing was needed by many of these early people to survive the often-harsh environmental conditions at the time. Unfortunately, we don’t have much evidence to tell us what this clothing might have looked like – with most clothing likely made of organic material such as animal skins, it has long disappeared.

This has meant that looking at clothing has often been limited to thinking about relatively basic questions, like how much or little of the body would need to be covered to survive. Footwear, however, was likely an important element of clothing for some of these people. Footwear can help protect the foot from the ground, from the cold and/or from other hazards like parasites. 

However, like clothing, there is little conclusive evidence to say whether Neanderthals did or didn’t have footwear. Addressing whether footwear was needed by Neanderthals was the focus of my master’s dissertation research, which used environmental, archaeological and biological/ anatomical data to look at this question.

This data helps reveal that the past assumption that Neanderthals did not wear footwear may be incorrect, leaving us with a question: for Neanderthals that might have used footwear… what could it have looked like?

With our Neanderthal Footwear project, we ended up with 5 different designs, varying from simply wrapping an animal skin round the foot to a drawstring bag, to a multi-pieced pattern. 

These were made from reindeer skins as the literature suggests that these are some of the most common animal bones associated with clothing found at Neanderthal sites and they are still used by many cold weather communities today. They were cut out using stone flakes, and ‘threaded’ using a bone awl and pre-made leather cord. Eyed needles were avoided because of the lack of evidence for them in Neanderthal contexts. 

Whilst testing these designs, we wanted to look at both their mechanics and their thermal protectiveness and so we decided first to walk in each of them for half an hour, taking readings with a thermal camera every five minutes. This helped weed out two ‘designs’ which fell apart almost immediately upon walking, and the thermal imaging produced some beautiful assessments about how the footwear was functioning, and raised interesting questions about where heat was leaking across each of the designs.

Because these mechanical tests could only provide limited thermal evidence (moving around outside in the footwear did not control our variables enough), we then decided to take them into the lab for more testing. This second experiment involved putting a water bottle full of heated water inside each piece of ‘footwear’ and measuring how long it took to cool down. Whilst a deliberately simple set up, this second round of experiments raised some very interesting questions for the study of Neanderthal clothing more broadly, revealing that often the ‘simpler’ designs performed just as well as the more ‘complex’ ones. 

The full results and ensuing discussion are currently being prepared for publication and should hopefully soon be available to read in the EXARC journal. Thank you again for your generous funding, without which these experiments would not have been possible.

Post submitted by Phoebe Baker.