Lice Speciation and Primate Speciation

Today on /r/DebateEvolution a post showed a curious piece of evidence for human - primate common ancestry - the molecular clock dating for the human - chimpanzee split matches that of the split between human lice and chimpanzee lice!

Ie, the lice speciated because we speciated.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/comments/od0n1u/creationists_explain_this_evidence_for_common/

What is the creationist explanation for this curious coincidence?

Phylogenetic and cophylogenetic analyses suggest that the louse genera Pediculus and Pthirus are each monophyletic, and are sister taxa to one another. The age of the most recent common ancestor of the two Pediculus species studied matches the age predicted by host divergence (ca. 6 million years), whereas the age of the ancestor of Pthirus does not. The two species of Pthirus ( Pthirus gorillae and Pthirus pubis ) last shared a common ancestor ca. 3–4 million years ago, which is considerably younger than the divergence between their hosts (gorillas and humans, respectively), of approximately 7 million years ago.

Original BMC biol paper

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I’m itching to find out.

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Boy you sure do know how to pick 'em!

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Lice try, Dan.

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You just can’t fleas some people.

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Scratch one potentially interesting conversation.

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This conversation is getting lousy.

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I can’t believe this paper only has two references …

Seriously, just a pair of cites!

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Mary had a little lamb with fleas as white as snow. This was apparently a very effective evolutionary adaptation because it made the fleas difficult to see on white wool.

(Notice how I kept my post semi-relevant to parasite speciation. I didn’t want to tick off anyone.)

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The moderators are really scratching their heads over what to do with this topic.

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Stop nitpicking y’all.

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