In 1958, an amateur archaeologist unearthed an array of fiber, wood, hide, and more from Cougar Mountain Cave, Oregon. The collection remained in his possession until the 1980s and was then passed over to the Favell Museum, also in Oregon. Decades later, when archaeologists finally managed to date the artifacts, they were in for a huge surprise.
Among the 55 items revisited for inspection, researchers identified two pieces of sewn animal hide. Radiocarbon dating revealed that these hides were at least 12,000 years old—making them the oldest known pieces of sewn clothing in the world. They could have been “quite possibly a fragment of clothing or footwear,” the researchers hypothesize in a recent Science Advances paper on the discovery.
Surviving the cold with style
Wooden and fiber artifacts from the recently analyzed collection. © Rosencrance et al., 2026Many items in the collection, including the sewn hides, were dated to the Younger Dryas, or the most recent period of sudden cooling that gave rise to Ice Age-like conditions.
This implies that Indigenous Americans utilized advanced—for the times, at least—fabrication skills to protect themselves from harsh conditions.
“We already knew they did, we just had to assume and guess what they were like,” Richard Rosencrance, the study’s lead author and a doctoral researcher at the University of Nevada, Reno, told Live Science. “They were accomplished and serious sewists during the Ice Age.”
The hide fragments are “definitely sewn, because we have cordage sewn into a hide that comes right out and goes into another piece of hide,” Rosencrance added in an interview with Science News. The team also found stone tools and bone needles possibly used by the ancient seamstresses.
A treasure trove of history
Braided fiber from the recently revisited collection. © Rosencrance et al., 2026Remarkably, the artifacts were primarily made of perishable materials. So it’s impressive how well-preserved they are, especially since most of the items aren’t more than a few inches wide, the researchers noted.
For instance, there were many braided cords and pieces of knotted bark in the collection, which the team believes were likely parts of baskets or portable shelters. These, too, are made from organic yet fragile materials, such as sagebrush or juniper.
This highlights the “complexity and sophistication of perishable technologies” that are “overlooked or underrepresented in investigations of the deep past,” the paper concluded.
“Being able to get a glimpse of what those things are really like and confirming what raw materials, what plants and animals they used to make these things, is hardly ever attainable,” Rosencrance told OPB.
“This is kind of chronicling almost 12,000 years of shared technological knowledge,” he added.
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