
Lice DNA suggests when people first wore clothes - robg
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/04/body-lice/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
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Vivtek
"Homo sapiens originated about 200,000 years ago." That figure keeps changing,
and it's so _fascinating_ \- fascinating enough that I wish they'd given a
little more than the bald assertion of the current estimate as though it were
long-established fact.

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hugh3
Aren't species boundaries pretty fuzzy when you start trying to look at them
across time? A species is defined as a closed set of organisms which can breed
with one another. I could breed with someone ten years older, they could breed
with someone ten years older than them, and so on into the past until we have
an unbroken chain of "could breed with" leading back to reptiles, amphibians,
fish and invertebrates with whom I could most definitely not breed (and
probably wouldn't want to). But there was no dividing line between "homo
sapiens" and "something else" as we go up the chain; there couldn't possibly
have been.

I get the impression that palaentologists define species by macroscopic
features in the fossils, but that they are forced to do so in a fairly
handwavey way, so any date when "homo sapiens" really first appeared is pretty
arbitrary.

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Vivtek
Yeah, but it's really germane to (what I consider) the real question, which
is: "When did our path to history start?"

I mean, it's a big difference if we had 150,000 years of prehistory, or a
million, or 50,000.

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hugh3
I really don't see what you mean by "our path to history"

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hugh3
_It’s possible for body lice to have evolved from head lice in only a few
generations, according to laboratory studies, Kitchen said. No evidence
indicates that head lice can evolve from body lice._

This seems like an odd statement. Can anyone provide insight into what this
means?

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nopassrecover
The interesting thing for me here was the assertion that mitochondrial DNA was
inaccurate for deducing evolutionary timescales. This has important bearings
for our current understanding of human evolution which as I understand it is
based heavily on mitochondrial data.

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kissickas
>Though well suited to gauging the timing of evolutionary events

I think you may have misread that.

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nopassrecover
I don't think so - they claim it is well suited but simultaneously claim it
was wrong by 271% when compared to mitochondrial + nuclear DNA samples because
mitochondrial DNA "is a relatively small part of the genome". I thought the
advantage of mitochondrial DNA was its stability but if it leads to that
margin of error it makes me curious about the reliability of other
evolutionary work.

