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CHAPTER 11:
WHERE HAVE ALL THE PUBIC LICE GONE?

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NOTES

  • A while back I had Kees Moeliker on my Instagram show ‘Show Us Your Shit’. He showed some of the dead lice he has, and other bits of his body in jars. Check it out here:

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PHOTOS

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SOURCES

The 2006 paper; 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2564756/

 

Combing through a decade of stuff is from the author’s interview 

 

Mark Stoneking - https://www.nature.com/articles/news030818-7
https://news.ufl.edu/archive/2011/01/uf-study-of-lice-dna-shows-humans-first-wore-clothes-170000-years-ago.html



 

The J Sisters

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2017/09/secret-history-of-the-brazilian-wax-the-naughty-nineties/amp 


Andrew “The Bug Destroyer” Cooke - https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/an-appointment-at-the-house-of-death-the-horrors-of-the-early-victorian-hospital/


 

Chimpanzees and humans share common ancestor with lice 

https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/204678 

https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-015-1843-3 

 

Humans have three types of lice

https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/lice/index.html 

 

Kees Moeliker - butt crack, mallard duck

https://improbable.com/2012/10/02/new-book-the-butt-crack-of-the-tick/ 

 

Ugly animal preservation society / blue thing

https://zephr.newscientist.com/article/mg21829220-300-forget-pandas-ugly-animals-should-be-protected-too/ 

https://uglyanimalsoc.com/

 

Pubic lice from gorillas sleeping in nests 

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070307152957.htm 

 

Lice started wearing clothes 

https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/lice-study-dates-first-clothing-at-170000-years/ 

 

Articles saying lice shouldn’t exist 

https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/lice-study-dates-first-clothing-at-170000-years/ 

 

Wearing clothes out of Africa - though I give the credit to the first person to suss it out, so maybe a change 

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110106164616.htm 

 

Dodo Thrown Out/Burned - https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/museums/2013/09/19/the-best-natural-history-specimen-in-the-world/

 

What most people have been told about this skin is that in 1755 the Museum’s trustees decided it had suffered too much pest damage to display, so they chucked it on the fire. The head and foot were then rescued by a member of staff from the flames. That is all that remains of the dodo today. [Please don’t stop reading at this point].

 

This is the story I had learned (and perpetuated) but the fantastic zoology curator who showed us the specimen told us that THIS IS NOT TRUE. Where does this story come from then? Apparently, there is a Latin word for inspection that is very close to the word for fire (if only I could remember what it was). The records of the University were written in Latin, and this is how the fire was inserted into the dodo’s history.




 

Mark says:

 

I’m not too sure about this one - I struggled to find a Latin word for ‘inspection’ which is similar enough to a word for ‘set fire to’ that the two could be confused, by someone who would in all likelihood be well versed in Latin (this is the zoology department at Oxford after all).

The closest I could come up with were conlustro and combustio - but neither are the more common words for ‘inspection’ and ‘set fire to’.
 

On top of that the “if only I could remember” feels like a bit of a stagey wink to the reader.

 

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