This BBSRC-funded project aims to unravel early human migration in southern South America using Darwin's Fuegian lice. Lice cannot survive for more than a few hours off their host, so archaic and modern human lineages or species had to overlap in time and space to physically exchange their lice. This physical contact to exchange living head lice is a unique feature. Evidence about contact with no interbreeding, and the time of contact cannot be retrieved from any human sequencing, ancient or modern, only from lice. This project focuses on describing the diversity of human and primate lice and using genome analyses of modern and up to 180-year old lice specimens to identify with which archaic human lineage or species we had physical contact in the past and when.
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