Shrews

The oldest surviving sentence ever written in the first alphabet is inscribed on an ivory comb found in the ruins of the Canaanite city of Lachish in what today is Israel. Dating back around 3,700 years, it offers the owner a blessing of sorts: ‘May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.’ As Dino J. Martins points out in his marvellously entertaining tour of the netherworld of parasites, the comb (the design of which is almost indistinguishable from the plastic ones we use for the same purpose today) speaks of the depth of the human relationship with lice – creatures that have travelled with us, fed on us and multiplied with us for millions of years. Martins is the perfect guide.