Human Body Lice Indicate the Historical Age of Clothing

摘要

There are no surviving examples, or contemporary depictions, of clothes that are more than a very few thousand years old. More durable artefacts, such as scrapers and sewing needles, provide indirect evidence that humans may have worn some kind of animal-skin based clothing for tens of thousands of years, but it is not possible to say when or where clothing first developed. Now, a new approach to help resolve these questions has being developed, based on analysis of the DNA of modern body lice.