When And Where Fruit Flies First Bugged Humans

"The next time you swat a fruit fly in your kitchen, take heart from the fact that people have apparently been struggling with these fly infestations for around 10,000 years."

"A study published Thursday suggests Drosophila melanogaster first shacked up with humans when the insects flew into the elaborately painted caves of ancient people living in southern Africa."

"That's according to a report published Thursday in the journal Current Biology."

"Scientists say the flies would have been following the alluring smell of stored marula fruit, which were collected and stored by cave-dwelling people in Africa. This tasty yellow fruit was a staple in the region in those days — and was also the fruit that wild flies apparently evolved to depend on in nearby forests."

"The humble fruit fly now lives with humans all over the planet and is one of the world's most studied creatures. For more than a century, biology and medical laboratories have depended on this fly — one scientist notes that at least nine times, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded for research on Drosophila. One of those prizes was won by Thomas Hunt Morgan of Columbia University, whose fly research in the early 1900s plucked this species from obscurity and transformed it into a mainstay of genetics."

"'It's small; it's cheap to raise; it has interesting genetics,' explains Thomas Kaufman, a biologist at Indiana University in Bloomington. '"We think that flies are quite charismatic. They're wonderful. They're beautiful little animals, and we love them. Seriously.'"