Human history through lice

This animation focuses on primate sucking lice and how they co-evolved with their hosts for over 25 million years, as they cannot live off the host and complete their life cycle on a single host. The human head louse, Pediculus humanus capitis, has undergone evolutionary changes that are synchronous with demographic changes of its human host. We now know that host-specific human parasites, especially lice, contain information about when and where archaic and modern human contact happened.