Through genetic analysis, the researchers from Virginia Tech found that populations of both bat-related bed bugs and the ones that jumped over to humans continued to decline till the last ice age, about 20,000 years ago.
That’s where the two lineages begin to diverge.
The bat bed bug species fell away, the study said.
The study of demographic patterns provides “compelling evidence that the human-associated lineage closely tracked the demographic history of modern humans and their movement into the first cities,” researchers added.
The earliest human civilizations emerged around 10,000 years ago and provided ideal conditions for the “spread of commensal urban pests,” Miles and Booth wrote in their findings, adding that this raises questions about whether commensal relations between humans and other pests could have also emerged earlier.
“As they say, don’t let the bed bugs bite.”. “”.
However, a recent study suggests that the insects may be the “first true urban pest” because they have been nipping humans since they first appeared in caves some 60,000 years ago. “”.
According to a study published Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters, researchers said evidence of our symbiotic relationship with the blood-sucking parasites could now inform predictive models for the spread of diseases and pests as cities grow in population.
The Virginia Tech researchers used genetic analysis to discover that until the last ice age, some 20,000 years ago, populations of bed bugs—both those related to bats and those that jumped over to humans—continued to decline.
At that point, the two lineages start to diverge.
The study’s lead author, Lindsay Miles, a postdoctoral fellow in Virginia Tech’s entomology department, stated in a news release on Wednesday that “the really exciting part is that the human-associated lineage did recover and their effective population increased.”.
The study found that bed bugs, which live in furniture and feed on blood, were more common in homes than rats and cockroaches some 12,000 years ago when people started constructing large settlements that spread into cities like Mesopotamia.
According to the study, the bat bed bug species vanished.
“Compelling evidence that the human-associated lineage closely tracked the demographic history of modern humans and their movement into the first cities” is what the study of demographic patterns offers, the researchers said.
There is less genetic diversity in that human-associated lineage because “there were bed bugs living in the caves with these humans, and when they moved out they took a subset of the population with them,” said Warren Booth, an associate professor of urban entomology at Virginia Tech and one of the study’s authors.
“Because that can tell you what’s been happening in their past,” Miles explained, the team wanted to examine how the “effective population size,” or the number of breeding individuals contributing to the next generation, changed over time.
According to Miles and Booth’s findings, the “spread of commensal urban pests” flourished with the advent of the earliest human civilizations some 10,000 years ago. This raises the question of whether commensal relationships between humans and other pests could have also developed earlier.
