Parasitical Pube Pests, Evolution thereof

Ever wonder if one could gain clues to human evolution/dispersion from examining the DNA of crab lice?



From this article:

Like their common name suggests, pubic lice are crab-shaped, with wide-reaching legs that help it to move between widely-spaced hairs. They look very different from our lemon-shaped head lice. In fact, early entomologists put human head lice and human pubic lice in two separate genera, grouping each with lice from other apes. Pubic lice, in fact, look a lot more like lice found on gorillas than they look like human head lice.

The scientists set out to recover the evolutionary tree of pubic lice, just as they had done with head lice. They analyzed DNA from human head lice, human pubic lice, as well as other species from the same genera that live on chimpanzees and gorillas. They also analyzed DNA from lice that live on monkeys and on rodents so that they could get a better sense of how pubic lice had evolved from a common ancestor with other species. The scientists not only drew branches for each species, but also estimated when those branches split over the course of history.

Science fun!


There once was a girl named Louise
Whose pube hairs hung down to her knees
The crabs in that twat
Tied the hairs in a knot
And constructed a flying trapeze!