Evolution Of Body Lice Indicate When People Started Wearing Clothing

When Did Humans Start Wearing Clothes?
EMILY UPTON - TODAYIFOUNDOUT.COM
9/12/13

http://gizmodo.com/when-did-humans-start-wearing-clothes-1299154403

From the article:

"Scientists observed that clothing lice are, well, extremely well-adapted to clothing. They hypothesized that body lice must have evolved to live in clothing, which meant that they weren’t around before humans started wearing clothes. The study used DNA sequencing of lice to calculate when clothing lice started to genetically split from head lice.

The findings of the study are significant because they show that clothes appeared some 70,000 years before humans started to migrate north from Africa into cooler climates. The invention of clothing was probably one factor that made migration possible.

This timing also makes sense due to known climate factors in that era. As Ian Gilligan, a lecturer at the Australian National University, said that the study gave “an unexpectedly early date for clothing, much earlier than the earliest solid archaeological evidence, but it makes sense. It means modern humans probably started wearing clothes on a regular basis to keep warm when they were first exposed to Ice Age conditions.”"

 

i didn't even know clothing lice were a thing. they must be way less common than head lice?

 

The invention of clothing?


Kill a woolly mammoth, use a rock to cut up its fur, put it on your back

.....someone "invented" that?