The tale your face mites tell about human history [video]
Posted by staff / December 27, 2015
Yes, we said face mites, the ones living on that killer complexion of yours right now.
Here’s a quick glance at our ever-present buddies from a report back when DNA testing of mites was just beginning:
Now that researchers have delved deeper into the issue, they’ve found that those little creatures have evolved parallel to humanity, and our own ancestry can be traced through what kind of mites live on our faces.
Overall they found four distinct groups, or “clades,” of mite mitochondrial DNA. The results suggest that your ancestry seems to determine which mite clades live on your body, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. People of African descent, for example, had a mixture of all the different types, whereas people of European descent tended only to have mites from one group.
Palopoli et al., PNAS (2015)
Who would have guessed such tiny creatures held so much information?
Full story at Science Magazine.
Graphics credit: Canva
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