ates of when humans began wearing clothes vary from 40,000 to as many as 3 million years ago. A study in 2003 suggested humans were wearing clothing at least 100,000 years ago from evidence about lice. Human body lice cannot live outside of clothing, dying after only a few hours without shelter. This strongly implies that the date of the body louse's speciation from its parent, Pediculus humanus, can have taken place no earlier than the earliest human adoption of clothing. This date, at which the body louse (P. humanus corporis) diverged from both its parent species and its sibling subspecies, the head louse (P. humanus capitis), has been estimated to between 40,000 to 170,000 years before present. However, recent transcriptome analyses cast doubt on whether lice provide a means to date the origin of clothes since they have found that "body and head lice were almost genetically identical. Indeed, the phenotypic flexibility associated with the emergence of body lice, is probably a result of regulatory changes, perhaps epigenetic in origin, triggered by environmental signals." Dating with direct archeological evidence produces dates consistent with those of lice. In September 2021, scientists reported evidence of clothes being made 120,000 years ago based on findings in deposits in Morocco. The development of clothing is deeply connected to human evolution, with early garments likely consisting of animal skins and natural fibers adapted for protection and social signaling. According to anthropologists and archaeologists, the earliest clothing likely consisted of fur, leather, leaves, or grass that was draped, wrapped, or tied around the body. Knowledge of such cloth