The Gorilla's Gift to Mankind: Pubic Lice

A new study blames prehistoric gorillas in our past for the scourge of just about every college campus: crabs, also known as pubic lice. The little buggers only feast on humans and are usually transmitted thorugh sex.

The blog known as The Loom helpfully breaks down the research from BMC Biology for us: "We did not get pubic lice from other hominids. We got them from the ancestors of gorillas."

And that's not all. According to the blog, the research suggests that gorillas and hominids may have lived together. And:

…then there is the matter of where the lice live. Today, lice live on little islands of hair on an ocean of hairless human skin. They are clearly adapted to our relatively hairless bodies. The authors suggest that their results may mean that hominids were already losing hair 3.3 million years ago. The gorilla lice needed an empty ecological niche--pubic hair--that they could occupy in order to survive. If hominids had full-body hair, the lice that already lived on it might have been able to outcompete an invader.

Question of the Day: How Do You Get Crabs From A Gorilla? [The Loom]