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Page: Use in Archaeogenetics
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Lice are also important in the field of Archaeogenetics. Because most "modern" human diseases have in fact recently jumped species from animals into humans through close agricultural contact, and also given fact that Neolithic human populations were too scattered to support contagious "crowd" diseases, lice (along with such parasites as intestinal tapeworms) are considered to be one of the few ancestral disease infestations of humans and other hominids. As such, analysis of mitochondrial lice DNA has been used to map early human and archaic human migrations and living conditions. Because lice can only survive for a few hours or days without a human host, and because lice species are so specific to certain species or areas of the body, the evolutionary history of lice reveals much about human history. It has been demonstrated, for example, that some varieties of human lice went through a population bottleneck about 100,000 years ago (supporting the Single origin hypothesis), and also that hominid lice lineages diverged around 1.18 million years ago (probably infesting Homo erectus) before re-uniting around 100,000 years ago. This recent merging seems to argue against the Multi-regional origin of modern human evolution and argues instead for a close proximity replacement of archaic humans by a migration of anatomically modern humans, either through sexual contact, fighting, and/or cannibalism.
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