Laura is a science news writer, covering a wide variety of subjects, but she is particularly fascinated by all things aquatic, paleontology, nanotechnology, and exploring how science influences daily life. Laura is a proud former resident of the New Jersey shore, a competitive swimmer, and a fierce defender of the Oxford comma.
Reviled the world over for making our scalps itch and rapidly spreading in schools, lice have hitched their destiny to our hair follicles. They are the oldest known parasites that feed on the blood of humans, so learning more about lice can tell us quite a bit about our own species and migratory patterns. A study published November 8 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE found that lice likely came into North America in two waves of migration.
This distinct group of lice appears to be the result of a mixture between lice that were descended from populations that arrived with the people who crossed the Bering Land Bridge into North America and those descended from European lice. Researchers found genetic evidence that head lice mirrored both the movement of people into the Americas from Asia and European colonization after Christopher Columbus's arrival in the late 1400’s.
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