The split between head lice and body lice symbolizes the time when humans began to wear clothes and thus allowed them to move to places with a colder climate * This date corresponds to the estimates regarding the spread of man from Africa towards Asia and Europe
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Man began wearing clothes 70 years ago - at least that's according to the analysis of the genome of the lice. This was the time when the body louse (Pediculus humanus humanus) evolved from the head louse (P. humanus capitis), says Mark Stoneking and his colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The split had to correspond to the time when the habitat of the body louse began to spread - the clothes.
The invention of clothing made it possible for our ancestors to spread to places where the climate was cold. The archaeological and genetic evidence indicates that modern man left Africa 50 to 100 thousand years ago. "It fits remarkably well with the origin of the body louse," Stoneking said.
It's all coming together very nicely – this is exactly when you expect humans to get dressed." said evolutionary biologist Blair Hedges of Pennsylvania State University. The first signs of weaving tools, mainly from clay, mark the beginning of clothing, and date back to 27 years ago. The needles The oldest are 40 thousand years old.
The first clothes were probably animal skins. However, today's lice live in woven fabrics, and it is not clear whether they ran in fur coats, says lice expert Chris Lyall from the Natural History Museum in London. "If lice can live on fur they could adapt to clothes right after we started putting them on our bodies." saying.
Stocking's team compared DNA sequences of head lice and body lice. The greater the difference between the two sequences, the earlier the splitting is done. The researchers set the clock by comparing the lice that live in humans versus their counterparts that live in chimpanzees. It is estimated that they stopped interbreeding when their hosts separated - 5.5 million years ago.
The African lice show greater genetic variation than anywhere else, and therefore, like humans, the species originated in Africa. Also, head lice show greater genetic variation than body lice, which shows that it is an older group.
There is also a third type of lice that bothers humans: the cancer louse or the pubic louse, which clings to the body hair. Stoneking's team is also now examining pubic louse genes in hopes of discovering when our ancestors lost their body hair, thus splitting this downy louse from its relatives.
For information on Nature's website
They know evolution - the rise of man
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