The first known outbreaks of syphilis in Europe began at the turn of the 16th century, but the pathogen’s history in the remote continent of South America goes much further than that.
A 5,500-year-old skeleton found at an archaeological site in Colombia now provides the DNA of this spiral-shaped bacterium Treponema pallidum.
The strain, called TE1-3, is no longer popular, but according to its genome, it belongs to a very ancient clade, or “early divergent sister lineage” of TE1-3. Pallidum.
It appears to have split off before other subspecies causing diseases such as syphilis, yaws, Bayer’s disease and Pinta disease emerged and spread around the world.
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The discovery, led by evolutionary genomics researcher Davide Bozzi, delays known evidence of treponemal disease by approximately 3,000 years.
It also points to syphilis originating in the Americas, not Europe, adding to growing genetic evidence elsewhere in South and Central America.
In Europe, the first syphilis outbreak occurred shortly after the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus returned from his journey to the Americas, so the two events have been historically tied together – a knot tightly tightened by racist and xenophobic ideologies about how the disease spread.
Now, genomic researchers are using ancient DNA to unravel these deep, twisted roots. A growing body of ancient skeletal evidence suggests that syphilis-like diseases were present in the Americas long before they appeared in Europe.
It is unclear whether TE1-3 is spread from person to person through sexual activity (such as syphilis) or through skin-to-skin contact (such as yaws, Beyer’s disease, and Pinta disease). But according to its genome, this ancient strain possesses virulence genes found in modern versions, suggesting it is harmful, or at least has adapted to infecting human hosts.
Based on their results, Bozzi and colleagues estimated that TE1-3 and other Treponema pallidum The lineage emerged about 13,700 years ago—long before the expansion of agriculture in the Americas.
The findings suggest that infectious diseases emerged in hunter-gatherer communities before the rise of intensive agricultural populations in close proximity to domesticated animals.
“Our results show that even a single ancient pathogen genome can change current understanding of pathogen emergence,” the researchers wrote in the published paper.
But just because the oldest known evidence of a syphilis-like disease has been found in South America, that doesn’t mean it’s limited to that continent.
Despite the controversy, a group of European scientists insist that treponemal diseases and strains closely related to syphilis were present in Europe centuries before Columbus set sail for the Americas, suggesting that Treponema pallidum Pre-Columbian on both continents The journey brings the two together.
Additionally, there may even be manifestations of syphilis and other treponemal diseases are Determined by the environment and society. In other words, the bacterium may be present in different populations but begin to spread in different ways, causing variations of the same disease depending on environmental conditions.
This means that the pathogen behind syphilis may not have been a sexually transmitted infection among people in the pre-Columbian Americas; it may have later acquired this mode of transmission—and the stigma associated with it—in 15th-century Europe.
Without more evidence, all these hypotheses remain possible.
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On a related note, anthropologists Molly Zuckerman of Mississippi State University and Lydia Bailey of the National Museum of Natural History, who were not involved in the latest study, argue that the findings “make it possible to move beyond simplistic notions of the geographical origins of disease.”
“Framing Treponema Distinguishing origins through geographic binaries, such as ‘Old World’ versus ‘New World,’ obscures ecological realities,” they continued.
“Far from being static or specific to human groups or environments, pathogens are associated with mobile human and animal hosts and hosts, shaped by human experience, biosocial and environmental conditions, adaptive and global.”
The study was published in science.
