A head louse getting ready to hatch. No one loves a 'nit-picker', but in times gone by such an obsessive eye for detail was invaluable. The need to pluck them out of the hair of our fellow humans has tapered off recently, but lice have been with us for several thousand years. Now an archaeological find in South America pushes the association back even further in time.
Lice turn up in archaeological sites from Iceland to Israel.
Egyptian mummies have been found preserved in their eternal rest along with the lice that shared their lives. More recent Peruvian mummies also boast healthy crops of these 'ectoparasites'. The latest find, a louse egg cemented to a human hair from a site in northeastern Brazil, beats all of these. Radiocarbon dating of the hair and associated artifacts places them at around 10,000 years old. Based on this dating, the egg is the oldest yet found and the first evidence of lice east of the Andes, Karl Reinhard of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and his colleagues report in Parasitology Today 1 .