A hundred thousand years ago, our human lice diverged,
For that’s when what we know as head and body lice emerged.
Our head lice grow in hair, we know, our body lice in clothes,
Implying we got furless then; that’s what our science shows.

Those pesky lice diverged into three species that we know;
On head or pubis, or in clothing, that’s where these three grow.
The sequences of DNA show their relationships.
We timed their separation by the number of their snps.

Sequencing the genomes of our body lice,
Tells us when we got naked; we learned this from lice.
When we walked out of Africa, some louse crawled in our clothes,
A hundred thousand years ago, that’s what its sequence shows.

Gorillas share our pubic lice; we share head lice with chimps.
Oy! Such activities implied, when we were hairy imps.
Each ape kept just one kind of louse once we went separate ways.
But we kept both; the stories coded in their DNAs.

Sequencing the genomes of our body lice,
Tells us when we got naked; we learned this from lice.
When we walked out of Africa, some louse crawled in our clothes,
A hundred thousand years ago; that’s what its sequence shows.

A hundred thousand years, a hundred thousand years,
Yes, we’ve been wearing clothes, a hundred thousand years.
When we walked out of Africa, we put on travellin’ clothes.
They weren’t designed by Calvin Klein but we were wearing clothes.

We started out with just a skin, then wool, then cotton we could spin,
And we were wearing clothes!