Benjamin Carr, Ph.D. 👨🏻💻🧬The origin story of #syphilis goes back far longer than we thought
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.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/01/the-origin-story-of-syphilis-goes-back-far-longer-than-we-thought/
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.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/01/the-origin-story-of-syphilis-goes-back-far-longer-than-we-thought/
