When Was Fashion Born ? Lice DNA Holds The Clue.

If your a regular reader to PTB you know that posts like this aren't unusual. I too write this post with squirmy feeling to say the least. Going to a public school just outside of Boston, I was made aware of Lice the usual way. The school nurse comming to your classroom with a box of combs and Tongue depressers. Some poor kid going home with a note pinned to there jacket. While everyone stayed a distance away to avoid catching cooties as children called them. I have never had them or a tick even . Misqutoes don't discriminate they are all about me in the summer. Funny thing body chemistry men , paracites seemed to be repelled by mine. ( I am joking of course)

So on too the topic at hand this little parasitic freeloader have given insight into the age old question. When did we start wearing clothes? After reading the many articles out there about this today. I was fascinated too learn that we ran around for the most part for an estimated 100,000 years in our birthday suites. Anthropologists estimate  we have only been fashionistas for just 180,000 years . So were to the Lice factor into all of this . I've provided an excerpt from the article


The key to the study by David Reed and colleagues, which appears in Molecular Biology And Evolution, is that there are two kinds of lice that hang around humans: the head lice that live on our scalp, and the body lice that live in our clothes. At one point in the past these two shared a common ancestor, Reed reasoned, and the body lice would have split off and become a separate group once they had human clothing in which to live.


The genomes of the two kinds of lice split somewhere between 83,000 and 170,000 years ago, which means that humans ran naked for hundreds of thousands of years without body hair or clothing. Clothing probably arose during an Ice Age, and eventually enabled humans to leave Africa to explore colder parts of the world. Link



Sorry the video was campy an fun. Wonder what Ice Age fashion looked like ?  Were there trends to follow ?  Your frock is so last Ice Age darlink . So there you have it how the dreaded little paracite of school children everywhere. Gave us an idea of when we all started getting into this crazy little thing called fashion.