A STUDY of lice living on humans reveals that people began wearing clothes as long as 72,000 years ago. This suggests that clothes helped our ancestors conquer colder climes as they left Africa. “There’s a very distinct possibility that clothing was one of the factors allowing the spread of humans,” says Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
His team reached its verdict after comparing DNA from head lice, which only grow on the scalp, with that from body lice, which live in clothes and feed on the body. From rates of mutation…
