No One Eats Each Other’s Lice Anymore These Days

I came down with a bad case of head lice on Thursday. One minute I was just going about my business, putzing around picking up toys and loading and unloading laundry, and the next I was thinking, Damn, my scalp itches like hell.

About once a week, there’s a message from someone in the mommy group chat for my daughter’s preschool about “les poux” (lice, in French). So-and-so’s mom will announce that so-and-so has lice, so check your kids! It seems to always be the same couple of kids, and it’s hard not to be a little judgmental about that, especially since the father of one of them comes to school to drop off his child barefoot every morning. It’s all I can do not to look him in the eye and be like, “you know, I don’t think the organic home remedies are working.” Instead, I just tell my daughter never to let that kid touch her hat. Ever.

I have thus far prided myself on the fact that we have not had any battles with lice, a fact I attributed to my eminently wise decision to use tea tree oil shampoo to wash everyone’s hair (look, I’m not above organic home remedies either), but which is probably just down to the fact that my children still speak shitty French and therefore have no friends. Apparently, my daughter made a friend last week, and as a sign of their commitment to one another, they traded hats. Bam, game over.

As a result, I found myself sitting in the garden on a plastic chair last Thursday, wearing only a bath towel, dripping wet from the shower with loads of slimy conditioner coating my hair, waiting for my husband to patiently comb through it, section by section, in search of living proof of the colony of tiny insects that had taken up residence on my scalp.

Obviously, I was grumpy. I am working on an important book, you know, and I have other things to do besides sit around while my husband searches my scalp for bugs. But the longer we sat there, with the birds tweeting away in the trees, the warm sun shining on my back, feeling my husband’s rough hands parting and combing and parting and combing and stopping every now and then to examine a little speck of something he found, I started feeling, despite my best efforts to the contrary…really good.

When he announced that he had found something with legs — the proof we needed — I was honestly a little bit bummed. “You better keep going just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke,” I told him. He dutifully continued and I closed my eyes and enjoyed it. Unfortunately, within the next five minutes he had managed to amass an incontrovertible quantity of hard (squirmy) evidence that I was, in fact, dreadfully infested, and the ritual ended.

The take-away here is that while I don’t enjoy having head lice, I really enjoyed having my husband pick them out of my hair.

Am I a weirdo, or am I just a primate?

The two are not mutually exclusive, you know, but although I have many bizarre qualities as a human, I am going to venture that I am squarely in the norm on this one.

Allow me to try convincing you. Whether or not you have recently had the pleasure of waiting for a loved one pick through your hair for lice and nits, you almost certainly have had the experience of having your hair washed at the salon. And I am willing to bet you liked it, even though, by objective measures, it should be miserable. The experience as a whole doesn’t really have a lot going for it. First of all, the whole place smells like chemicals, leading you to wonder whether your time there (1, 2, even 3 hours) might somehow lead to an unnatural early death. Then they outfit you in that black smock that makes you look like a floating head, and I don’t care how pretty you are, after they put you in that you start thinking, Shit, there’s no haircut that can save me now. Then they escort you to the back of the salon where there’s a chair and a sink with a little cut-out in the side where you’re supposed to put your neck, and it’s always so fucking uncomfortable. Does anyone actually feel like lying their head in those things is comfortable? But then — then they turn on the warm water and pick up their little hand-held shower and start running it over your head, and massaging the crap out of your scalp with truly copious amounts of shampoo, and despite the fact that your neck hurts like hell you’re just thinking, “ahhhhhhh, please never stop doing this.”

I only do that once, maybe twice, in a year, if I’m feeling plush, and apart from that, and this odd moment last Thursday in the garden when my husband was picking through my hair with a fine-toothed comb looking for live bugs, nobody ever really touches my scalp. Which is not just a shame, it’s probably one of the most glaring cases of evolutionary mismatch in modern society. Where are all the academic papers on the lack of social delousing in industrialized nations? If we want world peace, we had better start eating each other’s nits, and fast.

Virtually every primate species on the planet spends a huge amount of time grooming each other. Some primate species spend as much as 20% of their daily activity budgets on grooming, which would be the equivalent of us spending about three and a half hours, every single day, searching each other’s hair for bugs.

Grooming among wild primates has an immediate practical purpose: it helps the animals maintain decent hygiene by regularly removing one another’s ticks and lice, just as my husband was doing for me. In wild baboons, for instance, individuals that received more grooming had fewer ticks, lower parasite loads, and better health (source). Baboons with higher tick loads had lower packed red cell volume, which is apparently a very legit primate health measure. I trust the experts.

But the benefits of grooming extend far beyond simple hygiene. Grooming is a way for primates to maintain long-lasting social bonds and group cohesion. Multiple studies have shown that grooming reduces anxiety and stress, as measured by lower heart rate, cortisol, and self-scratching (source). And it stimulates the release of endorphins (happy hormones) and activates other neurological reward systems, which is why it feels so good when your hairdresser gives you that warm shampoo (source).

Primates trade grooming favors like currency, up and down the hierarchy, in exchange for support in their various coalitions. For males, the amount of grooming an individual receives is generally a function of their place in the dominance hierarchy: higher ranking males get groomed more, and lower ranking males get groomed less. One of the main reasons for being at the top of the dominance hierarchy (apart from hopefully passing along more copies of your genes) is that more people are willing to eat bugs out of your hair. And the guys at the top of the heap need a lot of grooming, because they tend to be violent motherfuckers, and grooming keeps them relatively calm and happy.

This is also true of humans. There are a lot of violent motherfuckers out there with way too much power who are badly in need of a little grooming. If only the UN would organize an emergency meeting so that Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Mojtaba Khamenei could sit in a circle and comb one another’s hair (Trump, Putin and Netanyahu have very little hair left, but that is beside the point). When they are done grooming one another, they need to have regular groomers on staff who come in to calm them down when they feel the itch to hit the nuclear bomb button. Oh, and ideally, they would hold an especially calm and cute baby while they are being groomed (that’s part of the baboon success formula).

If you think I am being facetious here, then the joke’s on you, because many researchers believe that our propensity to find and eat one another’s head lice may be the secret to our health and well-being as social primates, and humans definitely count as social primates (source). We’ve probably been eating one another’s head lice for millions of years, and we’ve only stopped in the last 1% of human history.

Take, for instance, the observations of Frank Marlowe, the legendary Hadza anthropologist, who wrote the following in his book The Hadza Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania:

“Most of us do not engage in grooming the way our primate relatives do. We probably used to though, back when we had plenty of leisure time each day and lived in small groups out in the open. Hadza grooming is very reminiscent of that of other primates. They pick lice out of each other’s hair and eat them. Women often groom women and other children. Men do not groom or get groomed as much as women and children do, but sometimes a wife grooms her husband or a man grooms a child…”

Image from The Hadza Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania by Frank Marlow

See? It’s a hunter-gatherer human norm too. Which means it was probably a norm for all humans for most of our history as a species, before modernity came along and messed it all up.

And as far as I can tell, finding and eating each other’s bugs is a win-win-win. It keeps the lice away (without reliance on icky chemical products like the ones I shampooed my whole family’s hair with on Thursday), it feels good and lowers stress, and it is a highly affordable and sustainable source of protein. Hunter-gatherers didn’t waste free protein just because it had lots of little legs and an exoskeleton. These days, my son won’t even eat white pasta if I buy the wrong shape. What a bunch of softies we’ve become…

I’ll end with a call to action. If we know what’s good for us, then we need to rekindle this ancient practice. Change starts today, and it starts with you. Forget about your breast cancer marathon or your Alzheimer walk. Why waste billions of dollars on far-flung research initiatives when the secret to world peace and human flourishing is already well known and highly accessible to all?

Great activists lead by example, so I’ll tell you what I am planning on doing:

Last year I moved with my family to a rural part of the Southwest of France - a region where my husband (who is French) has always dreamed of living, but where we know exactly no one and have no family and no friends. How am I supposed to start from scratch in this new place, at the ripe age of 37, when my interest in meeting new people and making new friends is at an all-time low? And when I spend most of my days alone, in a tiny room, writing words for cash?

Before my bout of head lice this week, I was beginning to feel that the situation was hopeless. As an American, I simply cannot make friends with people who don’t like peanut-butter and jelly, eat cheese so rank it makes you want to vomit, and don’t own a single pair of sweatpants.

But now I have the answer. I will start a de-lousing group. It’s clear that we need it. There have been so many cases among my fellow moms this month that the pharmacy ran out of Pouxit. But why should we resign ourselves to lathering our scalps (and those of our children) with toxic shampoo, alone in our single-family homes, when we have this amazing opportunity for social bonding and free protein? I am confident that once we get to work eating each other’s nits, we’re gonna be besties for life. Maybe I’ll even throw out my sweats and try the cheese.