This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagata.

Picture a prehistoric human encampment in a cave.

What do you see?

Maybe some animal hides, bones from last night's dinner, a small fire.

But what you might not picture are the other cave dwellers, like bats, and the bugs that suck their blood.

The bed bugs that we all know and love from hotel rooms and apartments and all that

were originally that parasite.

Martin Adams is an archeo-entemologist with paleo insect research.

It's a private business in Portland, Oregon.

Adams and his colleague Dennis Jenkins analyze the remains of Bedbug cousins,

recovered from one of those prehistoric camps,

the Paisley Caves in eastern Oregon, and they pin the insects to three different species within the Simix genus, the same genus as bedbugs.

Now these bugs are bat parasites, not the species that commonly bite humans, but they

ranged from 5,100 to 11,000 years old, making them the oldest example of blood-sucking

bed-bug relatives cohabitating with humans. The studies in the

Journal of Medical Entomology. As to whether the cave-dwelling humans were as paranoid as

modern humans about the infestation.

The humans living in Paisley Cays probably knew that there were bats living in the caves.

I sincerely doubt that they knew that there were bat bugs infesting the bats. But make no mistake, bat bugs will still suck human blood if need be, which may in fact be the origin of the modern hotel pests.

So don't let the bedbugs bite or the batbugs either.

Thanks for listening.

...