Lice have been bugging humans for as long as our species has been around, and the insects’ genes record the story of their hosts’ global voyages, a study finds.
Lice DNA suggests that the scalp stowaways rode humans to the New World at least twice — once from Asia many millennia ago, and again much more recently via European colonists, researchers report November 8 in PLOS ONE.
Head lice (Pediculus humanus capitis) can’t jump or fly. They can disperse only by crawling, leaving them closely tied to the movements of their human hosts, says Marina Ascunce, an evolutionary geneticist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service in
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