'Lice are like living fossils we carry around on our own heads':
Reviled the world over for making our scalps itch and rapidly spreading in schools, lice have hitched their destiny to our hair follicles. They are the oldest known parasites that feed on the blood of humans, so learning more about lice can tell us quite a bit about our own species and migratory patterns.
A study published November 8 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE found that lice likely came into North America in two waves of migration. First when some humans potentially crossed a land bridge that connected Asia with present day Alaska roughly 16,000 years ago during the end of the last ice age and then again during European colonization.
[...] Lice are wingless parasites that live their entire lives on their host and there are three known species that infest humans. Humans and lice have coevolved for thousands of years. The oldest louse specimen known to scientists is 10,000 years old and was found in Brazil in 2000. Since lice and humans have a very intertwined relationship, studying lice can offer clues into human migratory patterns.
[...] Researchers found genetic evidence that head lice mirrored both the movement of people into the Americas from Asia and European colonization after Christopher Columbus's arrival in the late 1400's.
"Central American head lice harbored the Asian background associated with the foundation of the Americas, while South American lice had marks of the European arrival," Ariel Toloza, a study co-author and insect toxicologist at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnica (CONICET) in Argentina, tells PopSci. "We also detected a recent human migration from Europe to the Americas after WWII."
The evidence in this study supports the theory that the first people living in the Americas came from Asia between 14,000 and 16,000 years ago and moved south into Central and South America. However, other archaeological evidence like the 23,000 to 21,000 year-old White Sands footprints and Native American tradition suggests that humans were already living in the Americas before and during the last ice age. Some potentially 30,000-year-old stone tools were discovered in a cave in Central Mexico in 2020, which also questions the land bridge theory.
[...] "The world is full of a lot of plants and animals that are reviled or despised," says Reed. "You never fully [know] what role they play in the environment or what their true value might be. So, be curious and see what stories the lowliest of animals might have to tell."
Journal Reference:
Ascunce MS, Toloza AC, González-Oliver A, Reed DL (2023) Nuclear genetic diversity of head lice sheds light on human dispersal around the world. PLoS ONE 18(11): e0293409. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0293409
(Score: 3, Funny) by Hartree on Monday November 13 2023, @06:15AM (2 children)
They tell you that if you're a human and have them, you need to migrate yourself over to the drug store and get some anti-lice shampoo!
(Score: 3, Touché) by Freeman on Monday November 13 2023, @08:00PM
All well and good, if you have a drug store aka pharmacy. Though, I assume most people that would be reading this would have access to one.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by kazzie on Tuesday November 14 2023, @06:23AM
A good, thorough coming with a lice comb tends to get better results with our kids.
Our little red-head seems to be a magnet for them at school, and then periodically shares them with their siblings at home.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Monday November 13 2023, @08:28PM
What about the possibility that there were earlier humans in America, and yet humans came over the land bridge from Asia? It would just be that those Asian humans largely replaced the former native Americans.
As of the lice, maybe the original Americans just didn't have lice, and the Asians brought them in?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.