Pants Were Optional, 100,000 Years Ago

RobertB-DC writes "German scientists have used differences in the DNA of lice to determine when humans started wearing clothes. It seems lice are highly specialized -- head lice lay their eggs only on hair, while body lice hide theirs in the folds of clothing. Using the differences in the two species' DNA and a "standard" mutation rate, the scientists determined when clothing-specific lice (and by extention, clothes) came into existence. No comment, though, from Calvin Klein."

Comments

Sadly...

[danratherfan]

washing clothes wasn't invented until 5,000 years ago.

Huh?

[BladeMelbourne]

Pants are still optional, depending upon where you like to [let it] hang out.

Re:Huh?

[macdaddy357]

Yeah! It's no shirt and no shoes that will get you no service. They don't mention pants.

Re:Huh?

[MoonBuggy]

Yeah! It's no shirt and no shoes that will get you no service. They don't mention pants.

Unfortunately that theory was put to the test and disproved on Jackass the movie.

Re:Huh?

[UWC]

Mainly because pants are required by law, unlike shirt and shoes. That's why stores have to have that policy. I guess everyone knows this, with the possible exception of the jackasses on Jackass.

For follow-up research

[devphil]

Determine the first "casual Friday" and follow its migration around the country.

Re:For follow-up research

[jazir1979]

And it's migration to every other day of the week :p

Re:For follow-up research

[spectral]

I'd be more interested in finding out whe dressing up became the norm. I don't see why what I look like matters as much as my ability to do the job and do it well.

Re:For follow-up research

[Mad Marlin]

I don't see why what I look like matters as much as my ability to do the job and do it well.

You must be a programmer.

Re:For follow-up research

[radtea]

"Dressing up" became the norm (that is, for normal people, as opposed to the extremely rich or aristocratic people) about two hundred years ago, when industrial technology made cheap clothing available to the normal people.

--Tom

Re:For follow-up research

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

Simple: because people are shallow, lazy idiots.
If you judge a person just on looks, you don't have to go through the trouble of actually talking to the person, evaluating him and forming a well thought oppinion about him.
I just don't get why people believe that wearing overpriced shoes, that are a result of childlabour, are a sign of being a intresting person. I find it a sign of being a easy-to-con idiot.
But that's just mine opinion as an outsider.

Re:For follow-up research

[questamor]

I find it a sign of being a easy-to-con idiot.

And there's a reason to hang around those kinds of people. Sure as anything you'll find you're able to extract all kinds of goodies from them, and disappear weeks later without a trace.

Not that I'm a con artist. No, really.

We naturists...

[n1ywb]

We naturists have known for some time that pantsless is the way to go. No news to us.

Pants ARE Optional...

[the darn]

right here & right now, baby...

furs?

[zenyu]

If specialization is as important as they state this only indicates that sewn cotton clothes with seams originated in the last 200,000 years. It doesn't tell us when Lama/Wool sweaters were first worn or when furs were first worn or even when we started wrapping ourselves in decorative blankets...

It seems like all of those would serve the same sexual and political purposes as tailored slacks.

"Dude, she's wrapped in a purple blanket! Choice!" -- da Caveman speaks...

"i c u'r wearing a lion skin, let's make babies" -- da Cavewomyn speaks...

Re:furs?

[ravenousbugblatter]

I doubt sewn cotton clothes have been around anywhere near that long (200,000 years), as that requires both a spinning wheel and a loom of some sort. I suspect we were wearing hides up until probably 10,000 years ago, if not later. Seems doubtful that writing and language would develop that far behind the ability to make cotton fabric.

Hrm...

[asdfx]

They're not optional now? That probably explains a few things...

This...

[FreeMath]

comes as no supprise to CmdrTaco, as he has long known that:

Pants are optional, but recommended for you.

Atricle has flawed logic IMO

[Captain Kirk]

The logic in the link is that since we can prove lice that live on clothes evolved 100,000 ago, then clothing must have emerged about 100,000 ago.

Wrong - evolution is _slow_. It could as easily have taken a million years for the lice to make the jump from hair to cloth. In the intervening period, man would have had clothing without clothing-specific lice. So the 100,000 guessat at in the article cannot be right.

Re:Atricle has flawed logic IMO

[Robb]

I think they overstate their case but it is not entirely flawed.

Evolution may be slow but it can express itself in a population very quickly. An adaptation that provides no specific advantage may spread through an isolated group (keep in mind this is happening in a huge number of groups). Then at some point in time it does become an advantage so the population of this group explodes as it expands into the newly created niche.

The fossil record provides strong evidence that changes in populations occur very quickly (i.e. tens of thousands of years) even if it provides no direct evidence on the speed of evolution.

Re:Atricle has flawed logic IMO

[Lars Arvestad]

This is what the actual paper in Current Biology by Kittler et al says:

A critical assumption is that the origin of body lice reflects the origin of clothing; it is possible that clothing existed for some time before lice exploited this new ecological niche, in which case the origin of clothing could be much more ancient than the origin of body lice. While we cannot exclude this possibility, the colonization of a new ecological niche usually occurs rapidly after it becomes available. Since modern humans and archaic humans such as Neandertals diverged about 250,000-500,000 years ago, in order to associate clothing with archaic humans, clothing would have had to exist for hundreds of thousands of years before the origin of body lice, which seems improbable. Moreover, archaeological evidence does not contradict an association of clothing specifically with modern humans, as the only tools that can be definitely associated with clothing, such as needles, are only about 40,000 years old.

So they certainly address the issue. These guys are not naive---The last author, Mark Stoneking, is a very experienced and respected investigator.

Their dating is actually 72000 +- 42000 years btw.

Re: Atricle has flawed logic IMO

[Black Parrot]

> The logic in the link is that since we can prove lice that live on clothes evolved 100,000 ago, then clothing must have emerged about 100,000 ago.

> Wrong - evolution is _slow_. It could as easily have taken a million years for the lice to make the jump from hair to cloth. In the intervening period, man would have had clothing without clothing-specific lice. So the 100,000 guessat at in the article cannot be right.

Antibiotic resistance happens pretty fast. We've only had antibiotics for about half a century, but we've already got lots of ABR strains, and more keep coming.

Your argument appears to be based on a mistaken assumption about the speed of evolution.

You might also want to consider how many generations of cooties have lived in the past ~70K years.

Re: Atricle has flawed logic IMO

[bpowell423]

antibiotic resistance need not come from mutation. If we kill off all the non-resistant bacteria, then only the resistant are left to propagate, but they haven't developed any new DNA or anything. No evolution, no mutations, so, yes, it happens very quickly. (As soon as you kill off all the non-resistant bacteria.)

Re: Atricle has flawed logic IMO

[Black Parrot]

> antibiotic resistance need not come from mutation. If we kill off all the non-resistant bacteria, then only the resistant are left to propagate, but they haven't developed any new DNA or anything. No evolution, no mutations, so, yes, it happens very quickly. (As soon as you kill off all the non-resistant bacteria.)

Yes, but you can compare the DNA of the resistant strain to your samples of earlier strains and see whether the resistant strain is merely a subset of the old or is actually something new.

Re:Atricle has flawed logic IMO

[Alsee]

Ah, the punctuated equilibrium myth, to replace the slow and gradual myth. What's next, Easter Bunnies you'll pull out of a hat?

Given a choice between an Easter Bunny theory and "some invisible guy did it" I'll take the Easter Bunnies :)

-

Re:Atricle has flawed logic IMO

[Alsee]

Harvey the Invisible Pink Easter Bunny exists outside our time-space dimensional framework, which is of course how He could have created it.

Just because you can't wrap your mind around the infinite nature of Harvey the Invisible Pink Easter Bunny does not mean He doesn't exist. Just that human thought can't encompass Him.

-

Re:Atricle has flawed logic IMO

[Robb]

There are two issues here.

The first issue is population dynamics and how variation within a population may allow some variants to quickly exploit a new niche. The amount of scientific evidence to back this up is phenomenal and nobody with even the slightest clue doubts this. The classic example is the white/black moths in the UK.

The second is the appearance of new variations in a population. There are plenty of theories but all of them have major problems since no one has come up with a credible explanation for this process that is subject to verification.

Most people, when talking about evolution, do not make a distinction between these two issues. This lack of precision allows some people to claim there is no scientific proof and others to claim that there is overwhelming scientific proof.

Re:Atricle has flawed logic IMO

[Alsee]

While you believe in an insubstantial God, I believe in Harvey the Invisible Pink Easter Bunny who has proven time and again, through fulfilled prophecy, his inerrancy.

Where does God fit in to that scale? Here.

-

Re:Atricle has flawed logic IMO

[Alsee]

And when I looked though Google what I saw was pretty representative of the weak and shoddy scholarship involved in most inerrantry sites, such as inerrantists using bad translations of ancient hebrew.

So far Harvey the Invisible Pink Easter Bunny has just as much fulfilled prophecy as you've presented. I'd say Harvey is winning.

Ancient fiction about some Bethlehem girl getting knocked up and blaming it on God is about as exciting as ancient fiction about some Greek girl getting knocked up, blaming it on Zeus, and naming the kid Hercules. Arguing with a True Beleiver about it is less entertaining than arguing with a Trekie about the combination on Kirk's safe in episode number whatever.

If we can set aside ancient boring mythology and get back to the original point - which was evolution - not only can I cite reams of scientific data, I testify to what I have seen with my own eyes. I'm a programmer and I have witnessed punctuated equlibrium spontaneously appear in my own projects starting from just the rule that "genes" for the next "generation" are randomly mixed from the pervious generation and that there is some effect causing certain genes to become more common than others. Given a large enough population you don't even need mutations at all, random genetic crossover is enough. The effect is particularly pronounced when you add in some sort of competition which targets the most common genetic patterns, which is exactly the effect caused in biology by viruses, bacteria, parasites, and predators. They evolve to target the most common hosts/prey.

I have watched a single pattern dominate a population, slowly "diversify" its "junk genes", and after a while it can spontaneously split or shift a radically different pattern. Even without a change in external factors. Any sudden change in the enviornment would just multiply this effect. Yeah, it's just a simulation, but it wasn't programmed to do that. It works based on the simplest rules of how genetics actually works. Just mix genes and have some of them fail - that's all you need.

The common focus on mutation is a red-herring. The real power is in the genetic recombination. It has been mathematiclly shown to be exponentially more powerful than mere mutation. If you are at all mathematically inclinded I can dig up a for you if you like.

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Re:Atricle has flawed logic IMO

[Alsee]

However offensive your remarks about Mary might be

Interesting how it's only offensive when it's about your religion. I said the exact same thing about Alcmene (Hercules' mother). I'm sure someone somewhere still worships the Greek/Roman pantheon. Just how seriously would you take it if they complained about about my "offensive Alcmene remarks"?

fulfilled prophecies in the Bible

That's not exactly a unique claim. The Koran and other holy books also have "inerrant fulfilled prophecy". Bible "proofs" like the supposed prediction of the formation of Israel in 1948 are just as bogus as any of the Nostradamus prediction proofs.

And bible prophesy generally means you are talking about old testament, and if you go to old testament that means you're talking about a pretty evil god. A mean, nasty, petty, vengeful god who orders armies to slaugher innocent children.

Evolution:
I looked at a lot of links, but I couldn't find one that was clear, easy and complete. Here is one, and here are lot more, but maybe it will be better if I try explaining it myself. Appologies if I over-explain something, without immediate feedback it's usually better err in that direction than to risk underexplaining and confusion.

First I have to introduce the concept of a schema (plural schemata). A schema is a sub-pattern. For example look at the words "TRACE" and "PRICE". They both have a second letter of R, a fouth letter of C and a last letter of E. If we use a questionmark as a wild card character we can write that schema as "?R?CE". Both "TRACE" and "PRICE" contain that sub-pattern.

Now look at the words "INTRODUCING" and
"INTERFERING". They both have the schema "INT?????ING". But that is merely the biggest schema they share, there are actually 64 schema they share. Here are a few:
??T????????
I???????I??
IN?????????
INT?? ???I?G
????????ING
I?T?????IN?

If you string together 12 random letters it is absurdly unlikely to make a word, but if you include valuable building blocks your chances go way up. For example the schema ?????????ING is a particularly high value building block. A group a letters ending in ING is much more likely to be meaningful.

The word "BUG" has 8 schemata: BUG, BU?, B?G, B??, ?UG, ?U?, ??G, and ???. Usually valuable schemata have letters clustered close together, but look at the schema B?G. It has a hole in the middle, but it is a valuable schema: BAG, BIG, BEG, BOG, BUG. A hole in the middle of a schema of a neurotransmitter gene can be good because filling in that hole in different ways can make a variety of related neurotransmitters, or even a similar protine with an entirely different function.

Any 3 letter word has 8 schemata (2^3 = 8), but any string of 20 letters has over a million schemata (2^20). DNA is a string of billions of base pairs with a near infinite number of schemata.

The power of evolution lies in implicit parallelism. Normally when you think of evolution you think of individuals being "tested" and multiplying or dying. But instead look at the whole population and the frequency of every schema in that population. When you "test" an individual to see if he survives and reproduces you are actually testing every single schema within that individual simultaneously. That is the implicit parallelism. If course it's not as good as pure test of each schema individually, it is a weighted mix of all of them. Many schema are meaningless and have no effect, some are important and have a big effect. Across a large population any schema which has even a minimal benefit will become slightly more common in the next generation and any schema that is even slightly harmful will become a little less common.

Mathematical analysis sho

How accurate is this really?

[gooru]

Using the differences in the two species' DNA and a "standard" mutation rate, the scientists determined when clothing-specific lice (and by extention, clothes) came into existence.

The article states that the "scientists" calculated one metronome per 30,000 years and thus concluded that body lice branched off from head lice about 72,000 years ago. What?!?!? How likely is it that mutations really occur on average without much of a deviation from the mean that regularly? For all we know, mutations occur in leaps and bounds. It might be very similar to those annoying studies of amortized cost in my algorithms classes. Sure, great, probability theory is great and all, but what about reality?

Re:How accurate is this really?

[Lars Arvestad]

Not very accurate at all and the authors of the original research paper says that too. The estimate the present is actually 72000+-42000 years.

Re: How accurate is this really?

[Black Parrot]

> The article states that the "scientists" calculated one metronome per 30,000 years and thus concluded that body lice branched off from head lice about 72,000 years ago. What?!?!? How likely is it that mutations really occur on average without much of a deviation from the mean that regularly?

You do have to be careful about that sort of thing. For example, attempts to apply the same logic to language (glottochronology) are not generally accepted by linguists because so much of language change is driven by social factors rather than blind mechanistic processes.

> For all we know, mutations occur in leaps and bounds. It might be very similar to those annoying studies of amortized cost in my algorithms classes. Sure, great, probability theory is great and all, but what about reality?

I'm certainly no expert on this, but there are several things that appear to be working in favor of using mutations as a biological dating system. For one the molecular mutations that form the basis of the method do appear to be the result of blind mechanistic processes - at least if you can avoid the error of measuring parts of the genome that are subject to pressures for or against preservation or change. For another you've got the Law of Large Numbers working in your favor, both in terms of the size of the DNA molecule and the number of generations. Unless we're missing something these factors should conspire to give us an expected value for the mutation rate and an opportunity to average it over a very large number of events (length of DNA * number of generations), allowing us to apply standard statistical methods to calculate an expected value for the number of mutations and a confidence range for it.

Also, we live plenty long enough to measure mutation rates between generations of organisms today, including humans as well as lice and other species. It should be pretty easy to calculate an expected value of number of mutations per unit length of DNA per generation, and see how much variance there is in that number today, and compare that to what our calculations suggest for the evolutionary timescale. (I'm not familiar with the literature on the actual numbers but I know at least some of it has been done, because a few years ago I read something about the typical number of mutations observed in human babies. I'm not citing the number because I don't trust my memory on it. But the fact that they could even name a number goes far toward establishing the kind of model you need for this kind of dating.)

A big problem for the method would be if mutation rates have changes significantly over time, e.g. due to radiation or environmental chemistry, and this kind of stuff is hard to check directly. However, science is "convergent" in the sense that we expect our various theoretical approaches to give the same answer if they are in fact correct, so the fact that this study produces a number that matches the previously established number for when our ancestors left Africa and moved into regions where clothes would be necessary, all adds up to a satisfyingly consistent model of what happened to cause all the relevant observations.

There is of course the epistemological problem of the inability to prove anything in the empirical sciences, but since that problem is unsurmountable we more or less ignore it and take our supportable results as "true" - but not as "Truth" - so long as the explanation seems to work and converges with all our other models for what's going on in the universe. If we discover later that we did something wrong we simply have to revise our results when that time comes, but that's an unavoidable risk we have to take; the only other alternative is to throw up our hands in despair and not try to understand the world at all.

If you want a more expert analysis of any of this you might want to post it as a question on talk.origins, which is inhabited by all manner of biologists, mathematicians, etc., who can daze you with more than you want to know about virtually any topic.

OT: Ad on site..

[geggibus]

Oh, i see Lockheed Martin have an ad on "a small diameter bomb with pnav", could be handy for a terrorist like me.. , or against lice to stay somewhat on topic...

Huh, huh

[elite lamer]

100,000 years ago totally ruled, man.

pants have their advantages

[Ender Ryan]

1. not accidentally cooking part of yourself
2. not getting part of yourself caught in a belt sander
3. preventing wind/sunburn
4. hiding it when it's cold

Re:pants have their advantages

[3waygeek]

You forgot the biggest benefit of pants -- pockets.

Re:pants have their advantages

[Ender Ryan]

Oh yeah! That's a good one.

Fashion in Ancient History

[Alliante]

If I recall correctly (I'm no historian), skirts/kilts were more popular due to the ease of fabrication back then.

I would think that it would make sense that these types of lice could infest the nether-regions as if they were pantless.

Re:Fashion in Ancient History

[Zachary Kessin]

Well up to about 200 years ago you have to remember that fabric was *VERY* expensive. If you were to go to the fabric store today you could find a lot of fabric for under $10/yd (and the major inustreal types pay less) but back in the day when you had to do it all by hand it may have been like $100 a yard for fabric. As such you are going to make garments to have as little waste as posible.

Another educational Slashdot comment

[Futurepower(R)]

Slashdot has everything! Including a list of the benefits of wearing pants. LOL!

Evolution in long-lived creatures

[phorm]

Evolution in longer-living creatures is often slow. I don't believe lice actually live very long, therefore in a human lifespan you'd probably have many many louse lifespans.

Wasn't this one reason some tests were done with flies? Because evolution/change in the flies would occur faster due to the more rapid birth/reproduction/death cycle?

That, and we're talking hundreds of thousands of years... being off by a few centuries (which would be a lot of louse generations I would expect) wouldn't be a bad margin of error.

Well, this should be a cinch to test

[roystgnr]

antibiotic resistance need not come from mutation.

It does if you start your culture with only one bacterium. This is such an obvious experiment that surely someone has tried it at some point; does anyone happen to have any references?

Still

[ChopSocky]

I still consider pants optional. Especially while naked.

Tom and Crow had it right...

[MarkusH]

Pants... Pants... Sing the praises of Pants...

Nothing better shows my taste
Than what I wear below my waist

Pants... Pants... Sing the praises of Pants...

They help me suck in my gut
They always cover up my butt

Pants... Pants... Sing the praises of Pants...

Wear them and you're a cool guy
As long as you zip up your fly

Pants... Pants... Sing the praises of Pants...

That's right, ladies and gentlemen. Consider the pant. You know, the Pant Association urges you to wear your pants at least three times a day. The great men of our time have all worn pants. Roosevelt, Churchill, de Gaulle, Ghandi... well, almost all of them.

Dolphins. One of the smartest mammals on Earth. Do they wear pants? No, but they wish they did. That's how smart they are!

A scenario

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Lice could have made the jump from fur to clothing many times. If the last time it happened the lice were so successful they displaced the previous species we'd only see one recently jumped species today. You really need a lot of caution with this data even if you do assume that evolution rapidly fills new niches.

Re:ObSimpQuote

[xTown]

I have misplaced my pants.

or...

[jefu]

Just more interested in other things than in aping (so to speak) the expensive and seriously phallic menswear styles now in style.

Not to forget

[Compact Dick]

that pants are certainly not optional for me :-(

He had me in mind

[Compact Dick]

you insensitive clod!