TECHNOLOGY

Clothing, Dated by Lice

~83,000 years ago or more

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Last glacial

Clothes rot; their date has to be stolen from a parasite. The human body louse lives in clothing and feeds on the skin beneath, and it split from the head louse once there was clothing to live in: molecular clocks on louse DNA place that split somewhere between roughly 170,000 and 70,000 years ago, in Africa. Getting dressed, an event no dig can find, left its record in the genome of the animal that moved in with us.

Why it matters

Clothing is the portable microclimate that helped a tropical primate hold ground in cold latitudes, and almost nothing else dates it. The method is the deeper marvel: our history is written not just in our genes but in our companions', lice, dogs, gut microbes, each a witness with its own archive. Few results say more clearly that everything that lives with us remembers us.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

Two teams, two clocks: the 2003 study put the body louse's origin at no more than about 72,000 years, give or take 42,000; a 2010 Bayesian analysis pushed it back to at least 83,000 and possibly 170,000. The date shown here takes the later study's minimum. Both point to Africa and to anatomically modern humans, well before the move into cold latitudes.

Sources

1. Toups et al. (2010), Molecular Biology and Evolution · Origin of clothing lice indicates early clothing use by anatomically modern humans in Africadoi:10.1093/molbev/msq234
2. Kittler, Kayser & Stoneking (2003), Current Biology · Molecular evolution of Pediculus humanus and the origin of clothingdoi:10.1016/s0960-9822(03)00507-4
3. Leo & Barker (2005), Parasitology Research · Unravelling the evolution of the head lice and body lice of humansdoi:10.1007/s00436-005-0013-y

Our species’ history as one day

17:40:346 h 19 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day