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A new study offers compelling genetic evidence that head and body lice are the same species. The finding is of special interest because body lice can transmit deadly bacterial diseases, while head lice do not. The study appears in the journal Insect Molecular Biology. Scientists have long debated whether human head and body lice are the same or different species. The head louse (Pediculus humanus capitis) is a persistent nuisance, clinging to and laying its eggs in the hair, digging its mouthparts into the scalp and feeding on blood several times a day. The body louse (Pediculus humanus humanus) tends...

A new University of Florida study following the evolution of lice shows modern humans started wearing clothes about 170,000 years ago, a technology which enabled them to successfully migrate out of Africa. Principal investigator David Reed, associate curator of mammals at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus, studies lice in modern humans to better understand human evolution and migration patterns. His latest five-year study used DNA sequencing to calculate when clothing lice first began to diverge genetically from human head lice. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study is available online and appears in this...

Humanity's bug-infested past might be why we have more allergies today (Image: James Gathany/ Center for Disease Control and Prevention, USA) It is well established that intestinal parasites dampen mammalian immune reactions. But in a surprise result, scientists have found that another kind of parasite – the body louse – does too. That means the epidemic of allergic disorders in modern, urban people might be due to our having rid ourselves of lice and worms.

Nothing against fossils, but when it comes to tracing the story of human evolution they’re taking a back seat lately to everything from DNA to lice, and even the DNA of lice. A few years ago scientists compared the DNA of body lice (which are misnamed: they live in clothing, not the human body) to that of head lice, from which they evolved, and concluded that the younger lineage split off from the older no more than 114,000 years ago, as I described in a cover story last year. Since body lice probably arose when a new habitat did, and...

Lice from mummies provide clues to ancient migrations By John Noble Wilford Published: February 6, 2008 When two pre-Columbian individuals died 1,000 years ago, arid conditions in the region of what is now Peru naturally mummified their bodies, down to the head lice in their long, braided hair. This was all scientists needed, they reported Wednesday, to extract well-preserved louse DNA and establish that the parasites had accompanied their human hosts in the original peopling of the Americas, probably as early as 15,000 years ago. The DNA matched that of the most common type of louse known to exist worldwide,...

Pubic lice leapt from gorillas to early humans 18:26 07 March 2007 NewScientist.com news service Roxanne Khamsi A genetic analysis of pubic lice suggests the parasites were transferred between early humans and gorillas about 3.3 million years ago. Researchers say the findings suggest close contact between our ancestors and gorillas. But they claim it is far more likely that early humans caught the lice from sleeping in abandoned gorilla nests than from having sex with gorillas. Pubic lice – also known as crabs – can leave irritating spots on the skin when they feed on the blood of their hosts....

Humans caught pubic lice, aka "the crabs," from gorillas roughly three million years ago, scientists now report. ADVERTISEMENT Rather than close encounters of the intimate kind, researchers explained humans most likely got the lice, which most commonly live in pubic hair, from sleeping in gorilla nests or eating the apes. "It certainly wouldn't have to be what many people are going to immediately assume it might have been, and that is sexual intercourse occurring between humans and gorillas," explained researcher David Reed of the Florida Museum of Natural History. "Instead of something sordid, it could easily have stemmed from an...

<p>Human body lice appear to owe their origin to the invention of clothing, and the types that reside on our bodies appear to have hitchhiked along as modern humans migrated out of Africa about 100,000 years ago.</p> <p>Mark Stoneking and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, made the connection between the origin of clothing and the rise of human body lice by checking so-called molecular clocks found in the cells of all living creatures.</p>

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. STATESBORO, Ga. - Like a tiny gilded menagerie, 3,000 gold-covered ticks stand upright in active positions on dime-sized platforms. Nearby is one of the most complete repositories of written knowledge on the tick, dating back to Homer, 800 B.C. Hundreds of thousands more of the bloodsucking creatures are tucked away in government-issue metal filing cabinets. The Smithsonian's little-known U.S. National Tick Collection is stored in a former home-economics demonstration house at Georgia Southern University. The collection's curators, the world's foremost authorities of tick identification, are in charge of more than 1...

...People were already making finely worked bone needles 20,000 years ago, probably for embroidery as much as sewing animal skins, like the thousands of ivory beads and fox teeth that covered the bodies of a girl and a boy buried at Sunghir, Russia, around 28,000 years ago. This was some serious bling, representing years of accumulated work. And -- caveman stereotypes aside -- stone age clothes weren't just animal skins. We've known since the 1990s that people were weaving fabric back then, revealed by impressions in baked clay from the sites of Pavlov and Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic....

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A new University of Florida study following the evolution of lice shows modern humans started wearing clothes about 170,000 years ago, a technology which enabled them to successfully migrate out of Africa. Principal investigator David Reed, associate curator of mammals at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus, studies lice in modern humans to better understand human evolution and migration patterns. His latest five-year study used DNA sequencing to calculate when clothing lice first began to diverge genetically from human head lice. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study is available online and...

Using DNA to trace the evolutionary split between head and body lice, researchers conclude that body lice first came on the scene approximately 190,000 years ago. And that shift, the scientists propose, followed soon after people first began wearing clothing... sheds light on a poorly understood cultural development that allowed people to settle in northern, cold regions, said Andrew Kitchen of Pennsylvania State University in University Park. Armed with little direct evidence, scientists had previously estimated that clothing originated anywhere from around 1 million to 40,000 years ago. An earlier analysis of mitochondrial DNA from the two modern types of...

One of the more embarrassing mysteries of human evolution is that people are host to no fewer than three kinds of louse while most species have just one. Even bleaker for the human reputation, the pubic louse, which gets its dates and residence-swapping opportunities when its hosts are locked in intimate embrace, does not seem to be a true native of the human body. Its closest relative is the gorilla louse. (Don’t even think about it.) Louse specialists now seem at last to have solved the question of how people came by their superabundance of fellow travelers. And in doing...

Extinct humans left louse legacy By Paul Rincon BBC News Online science staff The evolutionary history of head lice is tied very closely to that of their hosts Some head lice infesting people today were probably spread to us thousands of years ago by an extinct species of early human, a genetics study reveals. It shows that when our ancestors left Africa after 100,000 years ago, they made direct contact with tribes of "archaic" peoples, probably in Asia. Lice could have jumped from them on to our ancestors during fights, sex, clothes-sharing or even cannibalism. Details of the research appear...

Illustration by Michael Rothman Before An Australopithecus, sporting full-bodied fur about four million years ago. After An archaic human walked fur-free about 1.2 million years ago, carrying fire on the savanna ONE of the most distinctive evolutionary changes as humans parted company from their fellow apes was their loss of body hair. But why and when human body hair disappeared, together with the matter of when people first started to wear clothes, are questions that have long lain beyond the reach of archaeology and paleontology. Ingenious solutions to both issues have now been proposed, independently, by two research groups analyzing...