Episode 68. Pandemics: Leslie Reperant
Science History Podcast
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The Evolution of Lice and Hominins
Lice are ectoparasides. That means they are parasites that live on the surface of their hosts. For example, we have lice in most primates all over the world. You can really trace back the splitting of lice of for example, old world primates from Eurasia from Eurasian Africa and new world primates in the Americas. And those splitting of the species correspond to the splitting of their host species. It is estimated our species split from the branches that gave the great apes. We also know quite a bit about the co-evolution of the vector of the disease in humans. So we also have examples where we know quite a lot about the co.-evolution of
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