Lice are nice!

At least useful. When they are dead. Really dead, like 170,000 years dead.

A university of Florida study of lice reveals that humans started wearing clothes 170,000 years ago. The wearing of clothes allowed people to migrate and populations to advance to parts of the world outside Africa.

David Reed, from the Florida Museum of Natural History, UF campus, studies lice to better understand human evolution. His latest study tracks the DNA sequencing calculating when head lice became clothing lice. The study appears in Molecular Biology and Evolution.

“We wanted to find another method for pinpointing when humans might have first started wearing clothing,” Reed said. “Because they are so well adapted to clothing, we know that body lice or clothing lice almost certainly didn’t exist until clothing came about in humans.” Nice deductive reasoning.

Data shows than man started wearing clothes about 70,000 years before migrating and he began moving around the planet 100,000 years ago. Archaeological artifacts don’t survive that long and couldn’t be used to prove the numbers. But lice DNA apparently is as hard to get rid of as lice and is around today to tell the story. The study also revealed that that humans started wearing clothes long after losing their fur. That mean man was running around mostly naked for centuries before figuring out clothing.

“It’s interesting to think humans were able to survive in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years without clothing and without body hair, and that it wasn’t until they had clothing that modern humans were then moving out of Africa into other parts of the world,” Reed commented.

Source: Molecular Biology and Evolution, ScienceDaily