### Bedbugs Thrived with the Rise of Early Human Cities, Study Reveals

Researchers have found that bedbugs, which withstood the mass extinction that eliminated the dinosaurs, experienced a population surge with the rise of human cities. Genetic analysis reveals that these blood-sucking pests flourished as humans began to congregate in larger settlements.

Dr. Warren Booth, an urban entomologist at Virginia Tech, explains that the bedbugs' symbiotic relationship with humans significantly boosted their numbers around the era when the first urban centers were formed. "When we started to live in cities, we brought all these people together, and they all had their own bedbugs with them," Booth stated. "As civilisation spread across the world, the bugs spread with them to the point where they're now ubiquitous in human society."

The study closely examined the DNA from 19 bedbugs collected in the Czech Republic. Nine of these were associated with humans, while the rest were found in bat roosts. Interestingly, the findings indicated that both groups’ populations were declining around 45,000 years ago, coinciding with the last glacial period. However, the human-associated bedbug population rebounded approximately 12,000 years ago and experienced a sharp increase about 8,000 years ago. This timeline correlates with the emergence of the first urban settlements.

Cities like Çatalhöyük in modern-day Turkey and Uruk in ancient Mesopotamia marked significant milestones in human social history, dating back 9,000 and 5,000 years, respectively. These densely populated areas provided an effective breeding ground for bedbugs, which originally evolved over 100 million years ago.

Prof. Michael Siva-Jothy from the University of Sheffield emphasizes the long history shared between humans and bedbugs. "We know that the evolutionary history of humans and bedbugs has been intertwined for a long time," he said. However, Siva-Jothy acknowledges the limitations of the study, which is based on a relatively small sample size from one country. He also suggests that other parasites, such as head lice, which arose over a million years ago, could also claim the title of the first urban pest.