A new study shows how the annoying little louse has hitchhiked around the world with humans and has much to teach us about history.
Lice have irked humans for many centuries. In this 1497 woodcut printed in Strasbourg, Germany, a man is de-loused.
Ascunce's mom's generation battled with lice, too. As did her grandmother's generation. In fact, head lice have been clinging to human hair for as long as there've been humans — and likely even before that to the hair of our hominid ancestors. The first thing she needed was a bunch of lice. So she teamed up with collaborators who collected them from 25 places around the world and sent their corpses to her in Florida.
After she and her colleagues analyzed all that lice DNA, they found further evidence that lice operate as mini recorders of human history. In this case, she says she detected two distinct genetic clusters, which suggest that human head lice arrived in the Americas twice.First, some 15,000 to 35,000 years ago, when humans crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Asia into North America, there were likely lice gripping their hair, along for the ride.
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What head lice can tell us about human migrationLaura is a science news writer, covering a wide variety of subjects, but she is particularly fascinated by all things aquatic, paleontology, nanotechnology, and exploring how science influences daily life. Laura is a proud former resident of the New Jersey shore, a competitive swimmer, and a fierce defender of the Oxford comma.
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