The History of Lice Infestation

November 30, 2017 Unknown 0 Comments

Ever thought of how the lice came to attack the hair?
Many of us ponder over this question and fail miserably to find an answer to it. It may seem to you that the lice magically appeared on your head and in your frustration, you try to get a grasp on how you got those creepy bugs and where do they come from!
The most obvious answer to it is that you picked up those bugs from another person. The overwhelming majority of cases are contracted from a head-to-head contact. Of course, there is a small possibility that you sat in a chair that had a live bug still on it or used a comb or hat where a louse was.

HISTORY OF LICE:
The fact that head lice have been prevalent for so long tells us that humans have been dealing with head lice for a very long time and might as well continue to face this problem for years to come. It is generally thought that human head lice evolved from head lice on chimpanzees over 5.5 million years ago. They have historically evolved over 120,000 years.
There was a significant contraction in the population of humans as they migrated from Africa. This resulted in the reduction in the pattern of head lice also. One type of head lice was found only in North America and the other was found in other places including Africa.
The actual egg of a head lice was discovered 10000 years ago in the hair of a buried mummy, in northeast Brazil. Following that discovery, head lice were discovered on a hair on a skull in Negev in Northern Israel.

EARLY WITNESS:
We have often used lice combs to get rid of the lice in our hair. Combing your hair, is one of the most constructive ways to eliminate it.
Lice combs were found in the Egyptian tombs proving that the method to eliminate lice i.e. combs has remained unchanged. As time continued, lice were discovered in lice combs that were dug up from archaeological sites in Israel.
Consecutively, in the first century AD, a comb with a louse attached was excavated from a site in Cumbria, England. A nit was discovered on a hair shaft of a female whose body was preserved in the lava of the Mt. Vesuvius volcanic eruption. It is thought that Rome had quite a prevalence of head lice at that time.  Head lice were also common among people and in the schools of Brookville, Pennsylvania in 1840. “The only cure for lice was to ‘rid’ out the hair every few days with a big coarse comb and crack the nits between the thumbnails. The itch was cured by the use of ointment made of brimstone (sulphur) and lard. This was supposed to be a preventive.