Episode 11: Face Mites
Origin Stories
Meredith Johnson
4.8 • 554 Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2016
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The bad news is that everybody has face mites. The good news is that these tiny cousins of spiders and ticks seem to be harmless for the vast majority of us.
In this episode, entomologist and evolutionary biologist Michelle Trautwein describes how she and her colleagues collected face mite DNA from a variety of volunteers for a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The results of the study were surprising and further confirmed our current understanding of human migration through time.
Listen as we explore the lives of these close personal friends of ours, and learn how they may help us answer new questions about our own evolution.
Learn more and see photos if you dare, on The Leakey Foundation blog.
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Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation. The Leakey Foundation advances human origins research and offers educational opportunities that cultivate a deeper, collective understanding of what it means to be human.
For a limited time all donations to The Leakey Foundation will be matched by an anonymous donor. Give today at Leakeyfoundation.org/donate.
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Links:
Origin of Clothing Lice Indicates Early Clothing Use by Anatomically Modern Humans in Africa
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast. |
| 0:10.5 | I'm Meredith Johnson. |
| 0:12.7 | All right, are you ready? |
| 0:14.3 | Yeah, I'm ready. |
| 0:15.9 | Here you go, and just scrape as hard as you can without hurting yourself. |
| 0:20.2 | Okay. |
| 0:20.7 | Some of there. And then do the other side. |
| 0:24.0 | Okay. |
| 0:25.3 | Does that hurt at all? |
| 0:27.3 | No, I can feel it. |
| 0:29.5 | You might want to scrape a little harder. |
| 0:31.3 | Okay. |
| 0:32.1 | Yeah, should it hurt a little bit? |
| 0:33.8 | I feel like a three on the painted deck. |
| 0:35.2 | This is the sound of me doing something I never expected to be doing. |
| 0:39.5 | I'm in a lab at the California Academy of Sciences, having my face scraped with a little |
| 0:45.0 | metal spatula for science. |
| 0:47.8 | Okay. |
| 0:48.5 | And one more time on both sides. |
| 0:50.0 | Okay. |
| 0:50.4 | We just want to maximize our chance that we're going to get some DNA from you. |
| 0:54.7 | All right. |
... |
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