🧫 🦴Columbus may be guilty of many things, but it turns out that bringing syphilis to Europe is probably not one of them.⁠
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A new study of ancient DNA in coastal Brazil has confirmed the presence of the disease in South America at least 1000 years before Columbus set sail for the New World, suggesting that it had already spread globally in pre-contact times or emerged on the American continent. ⁠
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ICTA-UAB researcher Dr. Luis Pezo-Lanfranco, who studies the diet and oral health of Sambaqui populations in Brazil, was part of the international team to anaylze the human bones found in shell mounds in Santa Catarina, Brazil. Published in Nature, it is the first study to reconstruct and analyze genomes of T. pallidum bacteria from an ancient American context.⁠
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So how did syphilis originate? It's still a mystery, but one possibility is that the Treponoma family of diseases emerged much earlier in Eurasia or Africa, reaching the Americas via the first humans to migrate there at least 15,000 years ago.⁠
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