the-origin-story-of-syphilis-goes-back-far-longer-than-we-thought
-
Maybe this should be in the "mildly interesting" forum thread. LOL
When King Charles VIII of France occupied Naples in 1495, his army of nearly 20,000 mercenaries became the ground zero of the “Great Pox,” the first massive venereal syphilis pandemic in Europe, which went on to cause up to 5 million deaths. For a long time, the siege of Naples was considered the first time syphilis entered European accounts and culture. “But the evolutionary history of Treponema pallidum, the lineage of bacteria including the one that causes syphilis, goes way deeper in time,” says Elizabeth Nelson, an anthropologist at Southern Methodist University.
Nelson and her colleagues found a 5,500-year-old Treponema pallidum genome in an individual excavated from a rock shelter in Colombia—a discovery that shows pathogens causing treponemal diseases like syphilis, bejel, or yaws are several millennia older than we thought. And this means we might have been thinking about the origins of syphilis in an entirely wrong way.
