I understand that you get lice from person to person contact.Eventually there was a beginning, a patient zero, a start. Not just generational growth
In: Biology
There are other louse that infect other animals. Humans started wearing clothes about 100K years ago, and at that point in time we formed a new ecologic niche for the head louse. In the intervening time, the head louse evolved to live exclusively on humans, their hats and hair brushes.
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Lice, like all living beings, evolved from a prior species. That “proto-lice” to call it something simple, eventually had generations of baby bugs that had mutations. One mutated enough to be officially a new species, that we call a louse or lice for multiple. That mutation was advantageous so it procreated and boom, a successful species. Like all evolution basically. Most mutations do nothing or hinder the survival and dead-end the trail of evolution, but if a mutation works enough to allow for reproduction, then evolutionarily that is successful and will continue.
>Eventually there was a beginning, a patient zero, a start
The earliest fossil we have of an insect that is recognizably a louse is from roughly 100 million years ago. Their anatomy suggests that they were already parasites; scientists found some of them on fossilized feathers, suggesting that they were parasitizing feathered dinosaurs.
We have also found louse-like fossils from roughly 150 million years ago which seem to have partially-parasitical anatomy. Thought it’s possible that there were already fully parasitic lice then: after all, parasitic and nonparasitic lice both exist today. Apparently completely non-parasitic lice have been found as far back as ~300 million years.
So, probably some time between 150 and 100 million years ago, lice became parasitic. They hung out on feathered dinosaurs, using the feathers to keep warm like they use modern hair (and earlier clothes lice used clothes).
How exactly animals become parasites is complicated but seems to happen quickly; it’s especially interesting because the “ancestral lice” we’ve found don’t even seem to be predators.
The earliest fossil we have that we think has fur is from ~250 million years ago. So probably at some point a furred proto-mammal was hanging out with a feathered dinosaur (or had some contact, perhaps by stealing eggs or chicks from a nest) and some lice figured out that mammals are fine to parasitize too.
Presumably various strains of lice evolved with some line of mammal over the eons, and when humans evolved, our little buddies had been with us every step of the way.
It’s possible that alternatively humans evolved from a louseless population and later got “infected” by lice from different mammals. Hell, we could even have been infected directly from birds! But scientists have tracked lice and compared human lice with chimpanzee lice and are pretty sure we’ve had lice since at least before we split from chimps.
In addition, there are many kinds lice and mites on our bodies that specialize in different areas, eye brow mites, eye lash mites.
Like aphids, there are thousands, so eventually one type will find itself somewhere else and find they can deal with the different environment and future generations adapt.
From what I understand, crabs from the ocean are just large lice. Revenge is dish best served any way you like, cold on a salad, freshly steamed, hot off the griddle as a crab cake.
First off, lice are a huge and.varied family of their own. Lots of animals have lice. The ancestors of modern lice lived alongside, and on, the ancestors of modern mammals, way back when dinosaurs lived. And their ancestors before that.
So, there has probably never been a time when animals with fur didnt have some type of lice, or their ancestors. Thats just co-evolutuon. Some little blood-feediing insect finds mammal fur very suitable to live in, and the rest is history.
Meanwhile, when primates eventually showed up, some of these lice became specialized to live on primates. Different monkeys pass them around, both within and between species.
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/human-pubic-lice-acquired-from-gorillas-gives-evolutionary-clues/
This should blow your mind. Humans have two types of lice, because we don’t have full body fur. We have head lice and pubic lice, which are distinct. Human ancestors picked up our strain of pubic lice from gorillas’ regular lice, over 3 million years ago.
Head lice have actually been discovered in Egyptian Mummies so they have been around for a very long time.
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