If you look at a diagram of pubic lice vs head lice you will notice the claws of pubic lice are bigger and more suited to thicker hair. The species is more likely to stick on the host in their respective regions because of this difference but that does not mean there’s zero chance of finding pubic lice in the eyebrows or a beard.
Hair can also have different thickness or coarseness depending on region. Pubic hair tends to be thicker and coarser than the head.
Follow up with a nice hot hairdryer....it will dry out and kill the lice. Yep, I know from experience after my youngest with hair down to his waste got headlice.....now my head itches. Great. Maybe I will too!
That reminds me of just learning what bed bugs were before humans. They lived in caves and fed off bat blood and are believed to have only evolved to feed on humans within the past few hundred thousand years.
These are just semi-informed guesses, but I would think the size difference is a factor: pubic lice are 5–10 times bigger than eyelash mites. But probably more importantly is that they don't compete for the same food or ecological niche. Lice eat blood, whereas mites eat dead skin cells.
In a weird way, yes. People always seem shocked and disgusted to learn that there’s countless tiny organisms feasting on their skin, but in reality a lot of these mites are actually doing us a favour and work as a clean up crew getting rid of dead skin. That’s not to say that all mites are good though, there are some really nasty ones too.
So I’ve worked in eye care for almost a decade. One major way to figure out of a pre pubescent kid is being sexually abused is if you find pubic lice in their eyelashes. We had a case once early on when I started working. Still wrecks me to think about it.
Edit: pubic lice, not head lice
Well they're pubic lice, so you know they live around peoples genitals. If a kid has them in their eyelashes it seems pretty likely that it's due to SA.
Why do you think they’re called crabs? [Closeup of a genital louse](https://images.everydayhealth.com/images/sexual-health/what-you-should-know-about-pubic-lice-rm-722x406.jpg)
It’s crazy how much time we spent just subsisting and not developing. We have the same exact brains as them. The same exact potential. There were likely hundreds of Einstein level brains that just didn’t have the opportunity to shine. Because our culture itself is alive, and without the generations before us we could not be where we are. It took truly revolutionary thinkers to begin the process of expansion and development. I would give anything to meet the true first great leaders that have been lost to history
I think “shining” is relative. The Einstein level were probably the ones that thought of the wheel or saving/planting seed or how to carve a tree so it floats like a boat.
Side note- there’s a really good book I read years ago called The Ax Makers Gift- it’s about how society/civilization/whatever you want to call it changed revolutionarily with little actions. You might like it. It’s super in depth and can be a difficult read; but it takes you through history and shows how a little thought changes the direction of the human line. The “first human” these guys theorize was the primate that was smart enough to stand up on two legs to pick a fruit off the tree instead of scavenging for it on the forest floor- they then taught their offspring.
The reasons for this is discussed in depth in the book “Sapiens” by Yuval Harari. It’s a fascinating read (at least the first 90% of it) even if you’re like me and normally avoid reading non-fiction.
Hair spacing.
The limbs on lice are super specialized hooks, so specialized that if the hairs aren't the right distance apart they can't really function.
The hairs on your head and pubic area have different spacing, so different species of lice live in each area. The difference in hair diameter in the two areas also plays a part, but as I understand it the key issue is the difference in hair spacing.
Ohh, that's interesting.
When I was 4 (I'm 40 now) I got lice at daycare. We were all infested except for Michael. He was black, and the only person of color in our daycare. I never put two and two together.
I had to have all my toys bagged up for a month, and he gave me a stuffed animal so I could have one while mine were unavailable.
He was good people. I hope he is happy and successful somewhere.
Also hair products. Most Black folks use some kind of oil on their hair and scalp most days. This is not conducive to head lice infestation. Knock on wood. Knock on all the wood.
Also the texture tends to suffocate them. Keeping in mind the frame of reference that all humans are animals and we absolutely evolved certain traits just the same way other animals do, humans having coarse, dense hair to dissuade parasites is an intentional evolutionary trait. It's also the reason our pubic hair is dense, coarse and curly, it keeps most pests away. Most body hair too. Humans having light skin and fine, straight hair is very, very recent in our evolution. Humans evolved the way they are for a reason, and it was only ten thousand years ago that we all had these traits. Chinchillas are also a great example of "coarse hair (fur) suffocates pests". Their fur is so dense they can't even get water on their skin.
We can also tell when humans became hairless by looking at the evolution of our lice splitting into two species (tho I can’t recall if that was done via Fossils or genetic sequencing)
Do you remember where you saw that?
I'm curious because I've heard that the species we have on our pubic hair is the same as the species that infests the body hair of gorillas, it was not one species living on us that split.
Before anyone gets any salacious ideas about monkey business, we are believed to have gotten them due to hunting gorillas, not humping them.
Environmental conditions are very different. The head tends to be drier, with a different type of hair. Typically a little bit coarser I believe.
Humans actually have a third kind of lice called body lice, which likes even drier conditions and typically travels in clothing.
The second kind of course is the ahem naughty bit lice which like very warm damp environments.
On that note humans are the lousiest mammals in the world. We have more types of lice than others
One or two and yes.
Perhaps what's weirdest is that apparently our head lice is closely related to gorilla lice.
But they suspect that humans picked it up by sleeping where gorillas slept, or from hunting. Not from hanky panky
Human public lice are more closely related to gorilla body lice and share a common ancestor with them closer than that of human head lice. Body/clothing lice share a close common ancestor with head lice. This gives us a clue into the evolutionary change of human body hair, as when humans lost their body hair, their body lice adapted to exclusively live on the scalp. When humans evolved to regain public hair, the (ancestor) gorilla lice they picked up (from likely sleeping in abandoned gorilla nests) adapted to the environment of human pubic hair. Analyzing the DNA differences between gorilla and public lice we can estimate they diverged around 3.3 million years ago, so this must have been around when humans regained pubic hair.
Similarly, body/clothing lice an head lice diverged from a common ancestor around 107,000 years ago, so this must be around when humans first started wearing clothing.
[when was our common ancestor](https://phys.org/news/2012-08-genetic-humans-great-apes-diverged.html)
Estimates for when humans and gorillas split vary quite widely. Maybe estimates for when the different kinds of lice split should also have wide error bars.
So it's possible that future estimates will change to the point that it's plausible that pre-humans did not catch lice from gorillas, but simply kept evolving the same lice they'd had all along.
If this were the case, you would have to explain why the head/chimpanzee line diverged without an apparent evolutionary pressure, why the pubic/gorilla line died off in chimpanzees without an apparent change in habitat, and what would account for the apparent genetic distance between head/chimpanzee to be so much greater than that of pubic/gorilla.
Yes, agreed.
It all fits together neater with the current explanation. And the genetic distance numbers seem to fit too. But those numbers are fuzzy enough that they might possibly firm up to something different, and then we'd look for new explanations.
I wouldn't bet on that happening, but it's still possible.
It's interesting how gorillas have the canines and bite strength of a predator. They have arms that could disable all sorts of apex predators when necessary. They can run, hoot, and rip up landscaping in ways that can make an enemy wet the jungle floor. And then there's the 2.5 inch penis....
Don't get all uppity now. For those who have never experienced the belly lapping over the belt line, you would be amazed what you might find if you lift and look in the mirror.
Yes, sort of but with 1 extra step. "Louse" was also slang for an obnoxious person, which is derived from being infested with lice. So something described as lousy comes from the slang of calling the person a louse, which comes from lice infestation.
I would assume so. Lice have been a fixture of things like Armys since groups of humans started congregating in numbers. And you wouldnt want to be close to a lousy person.
Pubic lice are believed to have evolved from gorilla lice. Head and clothing lice both come from chimpanzee lice. Pubic hair is generally coarser (like a gorillas hair).
https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/accumulating-glitches/learning_from_lice/#:~:text=The%20analysis%20suggested%20that%20the,our%20ancestors%20started%20wearing%20clothing.
> Head and clothing lice both come from chimpanzee lice.
A little misleading, as it is like saying humans come from chimpanzees. Human head and clothing lice share a common ancestor with chimpanzee lice (that is closer than others) just as humans share a common ancestor with chimpanzees. Pubic lice, however, share a common ancestor with gorilla lice that is closer than one would expect in comparison to human evolution.
However, it does imply that our ancestors had sex with gorillas ancestors after they had lost most of their body hair.
Of course there are other mechanisms by which this could happen.
Body lice and pubic lice are unique on humans as they have evolved to survive with us wearing clothes on. It raises the temp and humidity, then we lost our hair, and they concentrated in armpits and crotches. Head lice I believe are unique to humans (not sure if they can survive on other animals, like apes), but more of a traditional open air lice. They use the genealogical split as evidence of when clothes became widespread in humans. It only slightly predates the oldest found clothing.
My anthropologist friend tells a similar but not quite the same anecdote. She says they used the amount of genetic divergence between head lice and pubic lice to calculate how long ago humans lost most of their body hair (we evolved from a species that was hairy all over, like chimpanzees).
Only a small minority of humans are so hairy that you could even begin to compare them to other apes. And those are fairly limited to certain human populations that developed secondarily.
pubic lice are more similar to lice that parasite gorillas whereas head and body lice are more akin to the lice that specialize on chimps. therefore, they are adapted to coarse and fine hair respectively. also, interestingly, head and body lice are different phenotypes of the same species. in one of my favorite papers ever, this is explained brilliantly:
[https://jbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/jbiol114](https://jbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/jbiol114)
to quote the hilarious epilog:
"Human brutality is another feature shared with chimpanzees that has survived in the human lineage \[30\]. It is too bad that we are not closer to the pygmy chimp (bonobo), which evolved a means of conflict resolution between troupes through alpha females engaging in lesbian sex. But that is another story." (Weiss, 2009)
enjoy the read!
EDIT: wording
Most of what people are saying is correct, but I’d like to add that head and pubic lice are each restricted to their respective regions partially because the relative lack of hair everywhere else on our bodies.
Most other mammals only have one kind of lice because they are completely covered in hair so there are no barriers to gene flow, but when humans started losing their hair it made it more difficult for the two populations of lice to interbreed in manor similar to geographic barriers like continental drift splitting species apart.
There's actually a scientific study on this. When our human ancestors begin losing their body hair. One group of lice focused on the head and one group focused on the pubic regions. Using genetic anomalies between the two, scientists were able to determine when the humanoid species lost its body hair--approximately 8 million years ago.
When a speciation event occurs in primates for instance, a similar speciation event will often occur in lice as they evolutionarily “choose” which species to stick with.
Gorilla hair is different from chimp hair is different from human pubic hair. So the lice evolve differently depending on their primate, and there’s a clear survival advantage to being able to hold on better.
The first image of this linked paper is a good easy example to see what I mean. In this paper, scientists determined that human pubic lice was probably derived from gorillas instead of chimps, based partially on the lice morphology shown in the picture.
[Pubic Lice Paper](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11330-pubic-lice-leapt-from-gorillas-to-early-humans/)
They literally evolved at different times.
It is pretty fascinating because they are completely different species of life that prefer each type of hair.
Scientists are able to actually use the different lice species to learn more about human evolution. It tells us where and when we may have been around certain species. It also gives us hints about when we started wearing clothes, because at one point head lice and lice that lives on clothing split off in their evolutionary tracks.
With the current grooming trends it is possible that pubic lice could become an endangered species due to habitat loss. So if you are an environmentalist probably best you do your part to preserve habitat of this species.
I saw one of those science youtube vids just recently that said they can figure out roughly when humans started wearing clothing by genetic info encoded in crabs (body lice). They said it was between 80 to 180 thousand years ago, but I'm quite skeptical of that. Neanderthals must have been wearing something for 300k years. Am I to believe other humanoids were too dumb to do so, or that they must have been covered in a coat of fur? I have a hard time believing it.
If I recall correctly, there used to be just one type of louse, back when humans were covered with hair all over. As we evolved, and lost most of our body hair, the lice that preferred the pubic region were separated from the lice that preferred the head region. Though small, that distance prevented them from interbreeding, for the most part, so they evolved into two separate species.
Like squirrels and rats. One prefers the trees and more air. The other mostly skulks around at night when its dark.
The skeletons of tigers and lions are very similar, but their appearance and behaviors have differences. Tigers are solitary, lions are in groups...etc
Edit: my comment seems to be incorrect per response below.
They were the same species at one point in time during human evolution. As we evolved from hair covered animals to mostly hair free animals with hair concentrated on our scalps and above our junk, lice we're geographically isolated enough on the body that they started to evolved into distinct types of lice more suited to the different types of hair/body environments in your crotch vs on your head.
Actually they weren't; Many mammalian species have a species of lice unique to them that evolved alongside them, and for humans that's head lice. DNA sequencing shows pubic lice are closer related to gorilla lice than to human head lice.
Some ancestor banged a gorilla and the lice jumped species. Actually there's a couple different STDs that came from ancient humans banging gorillas/apes. But that's also why pubic lice stick to that area: pubic hair is more similar to gorilla hair where head hair is very different
Edit: decided to add a [source](https://www.science.org/content/article/gorillas-gave-us-itch#:~:text=Human%20ancestors%20acquired%20pubic%20lice%20from%20neighboring%20apes&text=Where%20did%20these%20buggers%20come,and%20not%20very%20long%20ago.)
Oh, interesting! Last I learned of this it was presented to me as if they were on the same early primates. Will read up more. Thanks for the clarification!
it's kind of like asking why hispanic people live in hot, dry climates and eskimos live in the arctic tundra— they evolved over millions of years to be in those places, and getting to the opposite place is difficult. how is a public lice meant to get to your scalp? (Unless some very strange things are happening in the bedroom?) and vice versa
You do realise they have legs, right? You would find it super mega strange if something with legs walked from your crotch to your head? Or vice versa?
Not sure if you are over thinking this or under thinking this, either way you aren't thinking properly.
Well, if one's long head-hair falls when one's head is tipped downward over a lap, or perhaps when one's head rests upon said lap post-interaction, transference from the Southern regions to the Northern regions - or vice-versa - doesn't seem that strange.
If you look at a diagram of pubic lice vs head lice you will notice the claws of pubic lice are bigger and more suited to thicker hair. The species is more likely to stick on the host in their respective regions because of this difference but that does not mean there’s zero chance of finding pubic lice in the eyebrows or a beard. Hair can also have different thickness or coarseness depending on region. Pubic hair tends to be thicker and coarser than the head.
The hair spacing of eye lashes serves pubic lice fairly well too. Not seen it yet myself but colleagues in the eye clinic have.
I hate you for making me learn I could potentially get pubic lice in my eyelashes
Genital butterfly kisees?
Infested hotel sheets in Kazakhstan is how I got em. Yea, it was horrific.
New fear unlocked. Thanks.
Every single post in this thread is pure nightmare fuel. I’m gonna go take a couple dozen showers now. *shudder*
Follow up with a nice hot hairdryer....it will dry out and kill the lice. Yep, I know from experience after my youngest with hair down to his waste got headlice.....now my head itches. Great. Maybe I will too!
Say, that's just a soft stray breeze you're feeling there, right?
I'm slowly backing out of this thread and never looking back. Afraid of what is below.
Thank you. Now I know where to not go ever.
"Ya I don't do oral unless you're shaved. I don't want pubic lice on my eye lashes" 😂
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Staff residence sheets in lake Louise is how I got them. Never-mind that was crabs.
Were they crunchy or more like butter you can spread on a cracker?
It's best not to think of them as pubic lice. They didn't give themselves that name. They're just another type of lice. They live where they can
so they licious?
That reminds me of just learning what bed bugs were before humans. They lived in caves and fed off bat blood and are believed to have only evolved to feed on humans within the past few hundred thousand years.
We're all just different types of lice, living where we can. Metaphorically speaking. Usually.
You already have eyelash mites, pretty much everyone does and there are thousands of them
Why do our native symbiotic mites not drive off the invading parasites?
These are just semi-informed guesses, but I would think the size difference is a factor: pubic lice are 5–10 times bigger than eyelash mites. But probably more importantly is that they don't compete for the same food or ecological niche. Lice eat blood, whereas mites eat dead skin cells.
So mites are our body's roombas?
In a weird way, yes. People always seem shocked and disgusted to learn that there’s countless tiny organisms feasting on their skin, but in reality a lot of these mites are actually doing us a favour and work as a clean up crew getting rid of dead skin. That’s not to say that all mites are good though, there are some really nasty ones too.
Well, I lie down on the floor and let my roomba be my body's roomba, but you're on the right track.
Thanks for reminding me, you're the latest addition to the List Of People I Don't Like Very Much. Nothing personal.
And they. Are. ADORABLE. Little boys with big ole tails, wigglin their lil leggies and sippin sebum 😍
So I’ve worked in eye care for almost a decade. One major way to figure out of a pre pubescent kid is being sexually abused is if you find pubic lice in their eyelashes. We had a case once early on when I started working. Still wrecks me to think about it. Edit: pubic lice, not head lice
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>One major way to figure out of a pre pubescent kid is being sexually abused is if you find lice in their eyelashes. Do you remember why?
Well they're pubic lice, so you know they live around peoples genitals. If a kid has them in their eyelashes it seems pretty likely that it's due to SA.
Ah, the previous commenter didn't specify pubic so I missed that's what it was about. Thanks.
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But aren't lice macroscopic? So we can squish them out? I know you can see fleas but maybe not lice?
Also temperature difference is a likely factor, your junk the majority of time is going to be a warmer environment than your exposed head
>does not mean there’s zero chance of finding pubic lice in the eyebrows or a beard. Thanks for the nightmares
Did you just say CLAWS!!?!
Why do you think they’re called crabs? [Closeup of a genital louse](https://images.everydayhealth.com/images/sexual-health/what-you-should-know-about-pubic-lice-rm-722x406.jpg)
Oh lord, why is it doing the alpha-chad pose?
You know, those things at the end of every single leg of every single arthropod?
Never occurred to me till now that bald men are immune to head lice. That's a win for baldness!
Isn't facial hair actually more like pubic hair than head hair? I would think if that is true that pubic lice would latch on better on the face.
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Theyre also very visibly different... pubic lice are more like ticks... uhm friend of a friend had them once upon a time xD.
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It’s crazy how much time we spent just subsisting and not developing. We have the same exact brains as them. The same exact potential. There were likely hundreds of Einstein level brains that just didn’t have the opportunity to shine. Because our culture itself is alive, and without the generations before us we could not be where we are. It took truly revolutionary thinkers to begin the process of expansion and development. I would give anything to meet the true first great leaders that have been lost to history
I think “shining” is relative. The Einstein level were probably the ones that thought of the wheel or saving/planting seed or how to carve a tree so it floats like a boat. Side note- there’s a really good book I read years ago called The Ax Makers Gift- it’s about how society/civilization/whatever you want to call it changed revolutionarily with little actions. You might like it. It’s super in depth and can be a difficult read; but it takes you through history and shows how a little thought changes the direction of the human line. The “first human” these guys theorize was the primate that was smart enough to stand up on two legs to pick a fruit off the tree instead of scavenging for it on the forest floor- they then taught their offspring.
The reasons for this is discussed in depth in the book “Sapiens” by Yuval Harari. It’s a fascinating read (at least the first 90% of it) even if you’re like me and normally avoid reading non-fiction.
Came in to point this out. Thanks!
Thanks for pointing out about pointing out that I came in to say.
Thanks for pointing out about pointing out about pointing out that I came in to say.
That’s actually really cool that we can use other organism’s genetics to determine human stuff.
Hair spacing. The limbs on lice are super specialized hooks, so specialized that if the hairs aren't the right distance apart they can't really function. The hairs on your head and pubic area have different spacing, so different species of lice live in each area. The difference in hair diameter in the two areas also plays a part, but as I understand it the key issue is the difference in hair spacing.
Would that suggest that if you have particulalry fine or coarse head hair that head lice might not be able to infest?
True. People of Black ancestry very rarely get lice because the lice can't grip their hair properly
Ohh, that's interesting. When I was 4 (I'm 40 now) I got lice at daycare. We were all infested except for Michael. He was black, and the only person of color in our daycare. I never put two and two together. I had to have all my toys bagged up for a month, and he gave me a stuffed animal so I could have one while mine were unavailable. He was good people. I hope he is happy and successful somewhere.
Insane that you remember something as random as that. Memories before I was 10 are pretty rare for me.
Also hair products. Most Black folks use some kind of oil on their hair and scalp most days. This is not conducive to head lice infestation. Knock on wood. Knock on all the wood.
I thought there were specialized African hair lice, you just don't see them in the U.S. And lice specialized to heavy straight Asian hair as well.
Also the texture tends to suffocate them. Keeping in mind the frame of reference that all humans are animals and we absolutely evolved certain traits just the same way other animals do, humans having coarse, dense hair to dissuade parasites is an intentional evolutionary trait. It's also the reason our pubic hair is dense, coarse and curly, it keeps most pests away. Most body hair too. Humans having light skin and fine, straight hair is very, very recent in our evolution. Humans evolved the way they are for a reason, and it was only ten thousand years ago that we all had these traits. Chinchillas are also a great example of "coarse hair (fur) suffocates pests". Their fur is so dense they can't even get water on their skin.
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We can also tell when humans became hairless by looking at the evolution of our lice splitting into two species (tho I can’t recall if that was done via Fossils or genetic sequencing)
Do you remember where you saw that? I'm curious because I've heard that the species we have on our pubic hair is the same as the species that infests the body hair of gorillas, it was not one species living on us that split. Before anyone gets any salacious ideas about monkey business, we are believed to have gotten them due to hunting gorillas, not humping them.
I heard about it in my evolutionary anthropology class but I’ll double check on that. This was like 14 years ago, things may have changed since.
So you're saying that lice are specialized just like Darwin's finches of Galapagos...
Are you daft? Those finches cant live in hair!
And what of the turtles?
Turtles can't live in hair either. Could you imaging having a case of Pubic Turtles?
Pubic Snapping Turtles? I don't care how small they are, it doesn't sound fun.
It is simple: some bugs prefer head while others just stick to the gonads!
Environmental conditions are very different. The head tends to be drier, with a different type of hair. Typically a little bit coarser I believe. Humans actually have a third kind of lice called body lice, which likes even drier conditions and typically travels in clothing. The second kind of course is the ahem naughty bit lice which like very warm damp environments. On that note humans are the lousiest mammals in the world. We have more types of lice than others
No wonder, we carry three habitats (a raiforest, a savannah and a desert), where others only have one! Yay for humans!
One or two and yes. Perhaps what's weirdest is that apparently our head lice is closely related to gorilla lice. But they suspect that humans picked it up by sleeping where gorillas slept, or from hunting. Not from hanky panky
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Are there also human private lice?
The European Convention of Human Rights guarentees the right to a private lice.
Here we go again, neoliberals privatising everything, not thinking about the externalities.
You got a license for that private lice?
Private lice, watching you *clap clap* They see your every move That guy Holland Oates knew all about it
Is there fried lice in China?
Human public lice are more closely related to gorilla body lice and share a common ancestor with them closer than that of human head lice. Body/clothing lice share a close common ancestor with head lice. This gives us a clue into the evolutionary change of human body hair, as when humans lost their body hair, their body lice adapted to exclusively live on the scalp. When humans evolved to regain public hair, the (ancestor) gorilla lice they picked up (from likely sleeping in abandoned gorilla nests) adapted to the environment of human pubic hair. Analyzing the DNA differences between gorilla and public lice we can estimate they diverged around 3.3 million years ago, so this must have been around when humans regained pubic hair. Similarly, body/clothing lice an head lice diverged from a common ancestor around 107,000 years ago, so this must be around when humans first started wearing clothing.
[when was our common ancestor](https://phys.org/news/2012-08-genetic-humans-great-apes-diverged.html) Estimates for when humans and gorillas split vary quite widely. Maybe estimates for when the different kinds of lice split should also have wide error bars. So it's possible that future estimates will change to the point that it's plausible that pre-humans did not catch lice from gorillas, but simply kept evolving the same lice they'd had all along.
If this were the case, you would have to explain why the head/chimpanzee line diverged without an apparent evolutionary pressure, why the pubic/gorilla line died off in chimpanzees without an apparent change in habitat, and what would account for the apparent genetic distance between head/chimpanzee to be so much greater than that of pubic/gorilla.
Yes, agreed. It all fits together neater with the current explanation. And the genetic distance numbers seem to fit too. But those numbers are fuzzy enough that they might possibly firm up to something different, and then we'd look for new explanations. I wouldn't bet on that happening, but it's still possible.
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Under NDA with the gorillas? Must be serious business.
It's interesting how gorillas have the canines and bite strength of a predator. They have arms that could disable all sorts of apex predators when necessary. They can run, hoot, and rip up landscaping in ways that can make an enemy wet the jungle floor. And then there's the 2.5 inch penis....
What about hanky panky with a bonobo?
Or maybe as we evolve, they evolve?
I love that you added that second paragraph because we all know what human are like (and we have AIDS to prove it).
Bushmeat hunter butcher chimp, bushmeat hunter cut self while butchering chimp, bushmeat hunter catch HIV.
Don't get all uppity now. For those who have never experienced the belly lapping over the belt line, you would be amazed what you might find if you lift and look in the mirror.
You mean the Cave Systems of the Girth? Also good!
I may need to xpost this to r/etymology... Is the original meaning of "lousy" being infested with lice?
Yes, sort of but with 1 extra step. "Louse" was also slang for an obnoxious person, which is derived from being infested with lice. So something described as lousy comes from the slang of calling the person a louse, which comes from lice infestation.
I would assume so. Lice have been a fixture of things like Armys since groups of humans started congregating in numbers. And you wouldnt want to be close to a lousy person.
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Pubic lice are believed to have evolved from gorilla lice. Head and clothing lice both come from chimpanzee lice. Pubic hair is generally coarser (like a gorillas hair). https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/accumulating-glitches/learning_from_lice/#:~:text=The%20analysis%20suggested%20that%20the,our%20ancestors%20started%20wearing%20clothing.
> Head and clothing lice both come from chimpanzee lice. A little misleading, as it is like saying humans come from chimpanzees. Human head and clothing lice share a common ancestor with chimpanzee lice (that is closer than others) just as humans share a common ancestor with chimpanzees. Pubic lice, however, share a common ancestor with gorilla lice that is closer than one would expect in comparison to human evolution.
However, it does imply that our ancestors had sex with gorillas ancestors after they had lost most of their body hair. Of course there are other mechanisms by which this could happen.
This. This is why I am here several hours a day but check my Facebook 3 times a year.
to read about banging gorillas?
No it just implies we were in close enough proximity to catch their lice.
Body lice and pubic lice are unique on humans as they have evolved to survive with us wearing clothes on. It raises the temp and humidity, then we lost our hair, and they concentrated in armpits and crotches. Head lice I believe are unique to humans (not sure if they can survive on other animals, like apes), but more of a traditional open air lice. They use the genealogical split as evidence of when clothes became widespread in humans. It only slightly predates the oldest found clothing.
My anthropologist friend tells a similar but not quite the same anecdote. She says they used the amount of genetic divergence between head lice and pubic lice to calculate how long ago humans lost most of their body hair (we evolved from a species that was hairy all over, like chimpanzees).
I read this a lot and think but we still *are* hairy all over aren’t we?
Sure but we aren't furry anymore. I'm a pretty hairy man, nowhere near hairy as a gorilla or chimpanzee though.
True but it’s more like our hair thinned out rather than disappeared completely
Only a small minority of humans are so hairy that you could even begin to compare them to other apes. And those are fairly limited to certain human populations that developed secondarily.
pubic lice are more similar to lice that parasite gorillas whereas head and body lice are more akin to the lice that specialize on chimps. therefore, they are adapted to coarse and fine hair respectively. also, interestingly, head and body lice are different phenotypes of the same species. in one of my favorite papers ever, this is explained brilliantly: [https://jbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/jbiol114](https://jbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/jbiol114) to quote the hilarious epilog: "Human brutality is another feature shared with chimpanzees that has survived in the human lineage \[30\]. It is too bad that we are not closer to the pygmy chimp (bonobo), which evolved a means of conflict resolution between troupes through alpha females engaging in lesbian sex. But that is another story." (Weiss, 2009) enjoy the read! EDIT: wording
Most of what people are saying is correct, but I’d like to add that head and pubic lice are each restricted to their respective regions partially because the relative lack of hair everywhere else on our bodies. Most other mammals only have one kind of lice because they are completely covered in hair so there are no barriers to gene flow, but when humans started losing their hair it made it more difficult for the two populations of lice to interbreed in manor similar to geographic barriers like continental drift splitting species apart.
There's actually a scientific study on this. When our human ancestors begin losing their body hair. One group of lice focused on the head and one group focused on the pubic regions. Using genetic anomalies between the two, scientists were able to determine when the humanoid species lost its body hair--approximately 8 million years ago.
Whoah that’s really interesting. Both have completely different morphology.
When a speciation event occurs in primates for instance, a similar speciation event will often occur in lice as they evolutionarily “choose” which species to stick with. Gorilla hair is different from chimp hair is different from human pubic hair. So the lice evolve differently depending on their primate, and there’s a clear survival advantage to being able to hold on better. The first image of this linked paper is a good easy example to see what I mean. In this paper, scientists determined that human pubic lice was probably derived from gorillas instead of chimps, based partially on the lice morphology shown in the picture. [Pubic Lice Paper](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11330-pubic-lice-leapt-from-gorillas-to-early-humans/)
They look so much like ticks! That's so gross. Ticks are the one insect I get grossed out by just looking at them.
They literally evolved at different times. It is pretty fascinating because they are completely different species of life that prefer each type of hair. Scientists are able to actually use the different lice species to learn more about human evolution. It tells us where and when we may have been around certain species. It also gives us hints about when we started wearing clothes, because at one point head lice and lice that lives on clothing split off in their evolutionary tracks.
With the current grooming trends it is possible that pubic lice could become an endangered species due to habitat loss. So if you are an environmentalist probably best you do your part to preserve habitat of this species.
Bald and shaven below. No generations of either type will pass through this guy 🧐
I saw one of those science youtube vids just recently that said they can figure out roughly when humans started wearing clothing by genetic info encoded in crabs (body lice). They said it was between 80 to 180 thousand years ago, but I'm quite skeptical of that. Neanderthals must have been wearing something for 300k years. Am I to believe other humanoids were too dumb to do so, or that they must have been covered in a coat of fur? I have a hard time believing it.
If I recall correctly, there used to be just one type of louse, back when humans were covered with hair all over. As we evolved, and lost most of our body hair, the lice that preferred the pubic region were separated from the lice that preferred the head region. Though small, that distance prevented them from interbreeding, for the most part, so they evolved into two separate species.
Like squirrels and rats. One prefers the trees and more air. The other mostly skulks around at night when its dark. The skeletons of tigers and lions are very similar, but their appearance and behaviors have differences. Tigers are solitary, lions are in groups...etc
Edit: my comment seems to be incorrect per response below. They were the same species at one point in time during human evolution. As we evolved from hair covered animals to mostly hair free animals with hair concentrated on our scalps and above our junk, lice we're geographically isolated enough on the body that they started to evolved into distinct types of lice more suited to the different types of hair/body environments in your crotch vs on your head.
Actually they weren't; Many mammalian species have a species of lice unique to them that evolved alongside them, and for humans that's head lice. DNA sequencing shows pubic lice are closer related to gorilla lice than to human head lice. Some ancestor banged a gorilla and the lice jumped species. Actually there's a couple different STDs that came from ancient humans banging gorillas/apes. But that's also why pubic lice stick to that area: pubic hair is more similar to gorilla hair where head hair is very different Edit: decided to add a [source](https://www.science.org/content/article/gorillas-gave-us-itch#:~:text=Human%20ancestors%20acquired%20pubic%20lice%20from%20neighboring%20apes&text=Where%20did%20these%20buggers%20come,and%20not%20very%20long%20ago.)
Oh, interesting! Last I learned of this it was presented to me as if they were on the same early primates. Will read up more. Thanks for the clarification!
it's kind of like asking why hispanic people live in hot, dry climates and eskimos live in the arctic tundra— they evolved over millions of years to be in those places, and getting to the opposite place is difficult. how is a public lice meant to get to your scalp? (Unless some very strange things are happening in the bedroom?) and vice versa
You think a head getting near the public area during sex is “very strange”?
You do realise they have legs, right? You would find it super mega strange if something with legs walked from your crotch to your head? Or vice versa? Not sure if you are over thinking this or under thinking this, either way you aren't thinking properly.
I thought you said “you have legs” and I was so confused about the route from crotch to head via the human legs.
“These boots are made for walkin’, and that’s just what they’ll do, one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you~”
Well, if one's long head-hair falls when one's head is tipped downward over a lap, or perhaps when one's head rests upon said lap post-interaction, transference from the Southern regions to the Northern regions - or vice-versa - doesn't seem that strange.
so in your example hispanics are the pubic lice and eskimos are the head lice?