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History of clothing revealed in lousy study

By Maggie Fox

August 20, 2003

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Adam and Eve may have put on fig leaves in the Garden of Eden, but a study that looked at the most intimate of pests - body lice - suggests humans started wearing clothes 70,000 years ago.

The genetic study of lice strongly suggests they - and clothing - arose soon after modern Homo sapiens began moving out of Africa and into the cooler regions of Europe.

Lice provide a unique insight into the development of clothing, according to researchers working in Germany.

Mark Stoneking and colleagues Ralf Kittler and Manfred Kayser, all of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, report their findings in this week's issue of the journal Current Biology.

Experts are eager to know when people first started to wear clothes. But while stones, tools and other evidence of human behaviour survive for millennia, clothing does not.

Dr Stoneking, an American, thought of a way to figure it out when his son came home with a teacher's note.

"It was one of those notices where they let parents know some kid in the classroom has come down with head lice," he said. "One of the points it made was that you only get head lice from other humans... you can't get them from your dog, your cat, etc. And lice cannot survive more than 24 hours away from the human body.

"It occurred to me then that if that is really true, that the spread of human lice around the world would have been driven by humans."

Experts agree body lice probably evolved when people started to wear clothing.

Dr Stoneking's team looked at mitochondrial DNA found in body lice cells. This is inherited virtually intact from the mother, with changes happening through mutation alone. The rate can be calculated and by comparing the DNA to that of a cousin - chimpanzee lice - researchers were able to date it to about 70,000 years ago. This, Dr Stoneking said, fitted with growing evidence that modern humans evolved in Africa and migrated about 100,000 years ago.

As with people, lice found in different parts of Africa are more different from one another than an African louse is from a European louse.

- Reuters









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