The oldest victim of syphilis in the world was found among tribal members

The first pre-Columbian genetic evidence

Research in recent years has changed the way we look at syphilis and its history. Research has shown, among other things, that syphilis is only one of four diseases in the bacteria family Spirochetes. The other three diseases – popularly called yaws, yaws and pinta – are not venereal diseases but cause chronic infections of the mouth and skin.

This discovery opened up new possibilities for tracing the origins of syphilis, as researchers and archaeologists in Europe and America could now search for syphilis and the three other diseases associated with it. Among other things, they looked for changes in the skeleton that characterize diseases.

Since 2020, this has yielded 21 findings in bones and teeth in Europe, suggesting that syphilis was present here before contact with South America. The oldest finds are of two children in southern Italy, dating back to 580-250 BC. However, it has not yet been possible to reconstruct the bacterial genome in any of these discoveries.

On the other side of the globe, paleogeneticist Verena Scheunemann of the University of Zurich has found DNA from bacteria T. pallidum is endemic (Bag) in skeletons from the excavation site on the southern coast of Brazil known as Jaboticabira 2. The site was inhabited by tribal people, and thus they have the first genetic evidence of the presence of syphilis diseases in pre-Columbian America.