Lice DNA shows humans started wearing clothes about 170,000yrs ago
By ANIFriday, January 7, 2011
WASHINGTON - A new study following the evolution of lice has revealed that 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 University of Florida 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.
“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.”
The data shows modern humans started wearing clothes about 70,000 years before migrating into colder climates and higher latitudes, which began about 100,000 years ago.
This date would be virtually impossible to determine using archaeological data because early clothing would not survive in archaeological sites.
The study also shows humans started wearing clothes well after they lost body hair, which genetic skin-coloration research pinpoints at about 1 million years ago, meaning humans spent a considerable amount of time without body hair and without clothing, Reed said.
“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 said.
The study is available online and appears in this month’s print edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution. (ANI)
