Posted on 01/06/2011 1:54:04 PM PST by decimon
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A new University of Florida study following the evolution of lice shows 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 UF 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.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study is available online and appears in this month’s print edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution.
“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.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.ufl.edu ...
I’ve got a couple pairs of underwear that are at least that old so I can confirm.
Holey Shorts!
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Hmm. Why do they think there's any connection between skin coloration and body hair? Why did they hyphenate "skin-coloration?" Why do they think people would go about naked for over 800,000 years?
Anybody who could make shoes would also make other clothes, the same day never mind the same millennium. Hominid ancestors of the Neanderthals were in Europe well before 170kyo, were they not? They didn't get there without shoes. Having gotten there, they'd have needed more clothes; when did THEIR clothes harbor lice? ("I saw the harbor lice...")
How do we know that the lice were not on hairy Neanderthal. Now that we know that modern humans have from 1 to 4% Neanderthal DNA, might they not also have gotten Neanderthal body lice. I always thought my husband had some Neanderthal blood. Red hair, pink skin, heavy bones, short legs, slight brow ridges, weak chin,extremely hard almost crystaline teeth, volatile temper. He was also very hairy on the chest and back and even one shoulder.
He came back from an assignment out of town where he stayed at a YMCA for more than a month. When he came home he brought body lice. I asked him if he had been doing something naughty. He swore he had been a good boy. There were no lice “down there”, but they were all over his chest and belly, and even one in his eyebrows, so I believed him. ;-)
Shows how stupid too much of so called science is these days.
The only thing good that comes out of Gainesville is I-75!
The Tasmanian aborigines didn’t wear clothes, and neither did the Tierra Del Fuego Indians, even though both lived in extremely cold Winter climates. They would lather grease all over their bodies, like long distance swimmers, to keep warm when it got too cold.
Maybe they hated lice more than cold.
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander Freiherr von Humboldt commented about two groups of humans who lived at Tierra Del Fuego when he visited there by ship.
One group was short, heavy set and wore few clothes and made their living from the sea. The other people were tall and thin, wore animal skins and made their living on land.
I always hated Barney. He was a little weasel that was always getting Fred into trouble, yet tried to pretend he was the mature member of the pair.
>> Tasmanian aborigines didn’t wear clothes
Well they can go to the devil. ‘Cause that’s just wrong!
HIS hand is behind HER hand, making the ‘phreaky’ peace sign.
Yes, it is a lousy study.
:-)
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