The origin story of syphilis goes back far longer than we thought
Around 13,700 years ago, humans began populating South America and quickly spread across the continent. And, based on this discovery, the bacteria of Treponema pallidum the lineages were already diverse and capable of infecting people at that point. This Late Pleistocene divergence, the authors note in their study, hints at ancient pan-human distribution. Miscellaneous Treponema pallidum The subspecies were likely our traveling companions that spread globally with the first humans who migrated out of Africa.
But there is still much to learn before the debate over the origin of “Colombian” syphilis is settled.
Beyond Colombian history
Although the Siege of Naples in 1495 remains the moment when syphilis entered the European psyche as a new and terrifying scourge, it was probably just a violent flare-up in human-human relations. Treponema pathogens that span continents and millennia. What we don’t know is when and where the important turning points in this relationship occurred.
We don’t know when and why Treponema pallidum evolved its sexual transmission, so obviously present in the subspecies that caused the Naples epidemic. It is also unclear whether the 1495 pandemic was triggered by a newly imported strain or by a mutation of a lineage already present in Europe. The team hopes that analyzing other ancient pathogen genomes harbored by people from different places around the globe and from different social contexts – hunter-gatherers, farmers, urban dwellers – will answer at least some of these questions.
The problem is that it is difficult to infer the characteristics of a specific pathogen from ancient genomes. “With the data we have today, we cannot say anything about the virulence of this ancient Treponema pallidum subspecies, on the appearance of the symptoms of the disease it caused or on its mode of transmission,” explains Bozzi.
What we do know, however, is that thousands of years ago, Treponema pallidum the lineage was probably much more diverse than it is today. “In the future, we would like to look at broader ecological interactions between humans, animals, the environment and pathogens,” says Nelson. “We would love to explore this diversity further.”
Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.adw3020
