Two small pieces of animal hide recovered from an ancient dwelling place within a cave in Oregon could represent the earliest known evidence of sewing among America’s early inhabitants.
The remarkably well-preserved artifacts include portions of hide stitched together with handwoven cord and believed to have been crafted more than 12,000 years ago.
If confirmed, this possible evidence of sewn materials could offer archaeologists a rare look at the emergence of complex technologies employed by America’s early inhabitants to ward off the extreme temperatures that still prevailed during the final years of the last Ice Age.
A Discovery at Cougar Mountain Cave
The discoveries were made within Cougar Mountain Cave, an ancient rock shelter in Oregon’s Great Basin. This vast region is best known for its arid landscape and sagebrush valleys, which lie between isolated mountains that have helped craft the very unique ecosystems that were home to significant prehistoric human activity.
An international research team, led by Richard Rosencrance of the University of Nevada and Katelyn McDonough of the University of Oregon, reported their discovery of what appears to be cordage, bone needles, and wooden artifacts alongside remnants of botanical materials in a recent paper featured in Science Advances.
The discovery of artifacts made from such materials that date to this early period of North American occupation is extremely rare, since they are highly perishable, leaving many questions about what kinds of garments and cordage were employed by some of the earliest arrivals in the New World.
“The sparse material record of those myriad technologies limits our ability to formulate nuanced models about this critical period in human history,” Rosencrance and his co-authors write.
Now, the rare discoveries at Cougar Mountain Cave provide archaeologists with an unprecedented opportunity to examine such rare materials, revealing clues about the techniques and approaches behind the assembly of garments that shielded these ancient Americans against the often unforgiving environment of Pleistocene-era Oregon.
Analysis of a Rare Archaeological Discovery
In their analysis, the team examined these unique perishable technologies with the aid of radiocarbon dating, as well as zooarchaeological methods, the implementation of mass spectrometry, and other approaches to help with the identification of the materials retrieved from both Cougar Mountain Cave and another site in Oregon known as Paisley Caves.
“These data include 66 radiocarbon dates on 55 items made from 15 different plant and animal taxa, including the oldest known physical remains of sewn hide,” the study’s authors write.
Based on their analysis, the team has concluded that the bone needles included in these collections are some of the best-preserved samples of such ancient technologies that are known, describing them as being “among the finest bone needles made in the Pleistocene.”
While researchers cannot say for certain whether the stitched portions of hide recovered from Cougar Mountain Cave represent clothing, let alone what specific kind of garments they might have held together, the evidence the team has uncovered nonetheless points strongly to their use in tailored construction.
The Younger Dryas Connection
The period to which the artifacts have been dated is also significant, as it roughly coincides with the onset of the Younger Dryas, a mysterious period during which Earth’s climate returned to colder temperatures for several centuries after the Earth had already begun to warm at the end of the Pleistocene.
The resulting colder and drier conditions that prevailed between roughly 12,900 and 11,700 years ago no doubt influenced human behaviors in a variety of ways, not least among them the kinds of clothing they would have worn.
In addition to offering a glimpse at the types of materials that were being used in the creation o these ancient, tailored items, their sources were also discernible from the data Rosencrance and the team obtained, thanks to evidence in the form of bones predominantly belonging to rabbits. This also matches known practices such as communal rabbit drives in which the creatures were captured using long nets for mass harvesting.
Additionally, some of the wooden artifacts from the Oregon sites could represent small triggers that would have been used in traps made for capturing small mammals like rabbits.
Intriguingly, evidence of bone needles appears to fall off after around 11,000 years ago, which is suggestive of changes toward the use of woven plant textiles—a shift that may also have been driven by the gradually warming climate.
This could mean that the stitched hides from Cougar Mountain Cave may represent more than the earliest known sewing: they might also help to capture a moment when technology, environment, and culture were converging, and changing. Fundamentally, the team’s discoveries offer a unique look at the ways early Americans adapted to one of the harshest climates humans had yet faced.
The team’s recent paper, “Complex perishable technologies from the North American Great Basin reveal specialized Late Pleistocene adaptations,” appeared in Science Advances on February 4, 2026.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.