Because syphilis showed up in the Americas and Europe around the same time, in the late 15th century, there has long been debate about the direction this disease traveled just before it ravaged both the Old and New Worlds. Since its appearance coincided with the voyages of Columbus, it has been possible to create scenarios that have the disease moving from Europe to the Americas on his ships, or moving in the other direction following Columbus’s return.
This debate has now been ended, as a result of a new analysis of 15th century DNA that proves conclusively that this insidious disease developed in the Americas, not in Europe. The first definite outbreak of the disease in Europe took place during the Italian campaign of King Charles VIII of France in 1495, and it is clear that the bacterium that causes syphilis was only in circulation in Italy at that time because the earliest European colonizers, led by Christopher Columbus, had brought it back with them from the other side of the Atlantic.
Bacterial DNA Solves the Mystery
As was revealed in a new article just published in the journal Nature, It was a team of genetic researchers led by members of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany has finally solved this lingering mystery.
Using the latest in DNA technology in archaeology, the researchers were able to recover intact samples of syphilis genomes from five skeletons excavated in Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Peru, all of which were from people who had died sometime before Columbus’s arrival. While none of the forms of syphilis measured is exactly identical to the ones in circulation today, there was enough of a similarity to conclude that they were ancestors of the modern forms of the disease.
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“While preservation posed some analytical challenges, we were able to confidently determine the relationships between these extinct forms and the strains that impact global health today,” said microbiologist and study co-author T. Lesley Sitter, in a Max Planck Institute press release.
The syphilis samples were obtained from bone lesions found in the centuries-old skeletons, the result of runaway infections that resulted in a high fatality rate among sufferers. Before the study began the researchers couldn’t say for sure that what they’d found was syphilis, since other diseases could have caused the degradation of bone tissue.
Pieces of hip bone taken from pre-1492 indigenous skeleton recovered in Latin America that produced DNA samples of bacteria that caused syphilis. (Max Planck Institute).
“We’ve known for some time that syphilis-like infections occurred in the Americas for millennia, but from the lesions alone it’s impossible to fully characterize the disease,” stated paleopathologist and study co-author Casey Kirkpatrick.
When analyzing the pathological DNA, however, the research team found what they described as “extinct sister lineages” for the most common modern forms of disease associated with the spread of the bacterium known as Treponema Pallidum, including syphilis and the less-known tropical diseases bejel and yaws. It was the ancient form of syphilis that did the most damage on the European continent, in a series of epidemics that occurred in many countries throughout the 16th century. This was a period of rapid European colonial expansion, and the travel and human trafficking (the movement of slaves) associated with this phenomenon made it easy for the disease to spread to vulnerable populations
“The data clearly support a root in the Americas for syphilis and its known relatives, and their introduction to Europe starting in the late 15th century is most consistent with the data,”said Max Planck archaeogeneticist Kirsten Bos, the lead author of the new study. “While indigenous American groups harbored early forms of these diseases, Europeans were instrumental in spreading them around the world.”
In their study, the genetic researchers learned quite a bit about the infamous T. Pallidum bacterium that causes syphilis and related disorders. They found that this microbe first appeared in the Americas around 9,000 years ago, during the middle Holocene period. It split up into a variety of subspecies at that point, many of which were capable of causing serious diseases in humans.
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The disease would have mutated and changed its form many times over the course of the centuries. It appears that the version of syphilis that ravaged and terrified Europe may have come into being shortly before the first Europeans arrived in the New World, which is why it showed up in both Europe and the Americas around the same time as an apparently unique condition.
The Strange and Complex Travels of Microbes and their Diseases
Even though the DNA evidence shows that the syphilis outbreaks that plagued Europe in the 16th century came from the Americas, the true story of the development of syphilis might be more complex.
Sea routes traveled by Christopher Columbus on his travels back and forth between Europe and the Americas, 1492-1504. (Simeon Netchev/World History Encyclopedia).
If the disease existed before the development of the T. Pallidum bacteria, for example, it might have been caused by an ancestor of that microbe, one that could have been carried by the people who first populated the Americas after migrating from Asia. Should this be the case, it is possible that syphilis actually originated in Eurasia 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, and was only making its return to the Eurasian land mass when Columbus brought it back in the late 1490s.
What can be said for sure is that unlike smallpox and measles, syphilis was not brought to the Americas by Europeans and did not contribute to the depopulation of the New World by killing millions who had no immunity to it. In this instance it was European populations that were reduced by the arrival of an unfamiliar disease, although the devastation caused by syphilis pales in comparison to what indigenous Americans experienced after colonization.
Top image: Christopher Columbus taking possession of the lands of the New World on behalf of Spain after landing on the island of Hispaniola, 1492.
Source: L Prang & Company.
By Nathan Falde
