"Once we adjusted for the marine signature, all of the skeletons that showed definite signs of treponemal disease appeared to be dated to after Columbus returned to Europe," Harper said, findings detailed in the current Yearbook of Physical Anthropology.
"What it really shows to me is that globalization of disease is not a modern condition," Armelagos said. "In 1492, you had the transmission of a number of diseases from Europe that decimated Native Americans, and you also had disease from Native Americans to Europe."
"The lesson we can learn for today from history is that these epidemics are the result of unrest," Armelagos added. "With syphilis, wars were going on in Europe at the time, and all the turmoil set the stage for the disease. Nowadays, a lot of diseases jump the species barrier due to environmental unrest."
"The origin of syphilis is a fascinating, compelling question," Zuckerman said. "The current evidence is pretty definitive, but we shouldn't close the book and say we're done with the subject. The great thing about science is constantly being able to understand things in a new light."
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8 Comments
Add CommentI believe that Columbia is the source of wormwood. Ironic , if true.Wormwood is predicted to kill a third.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are two interesting papers on the subject, one in Virchows Arch, 2011, by Ortner, DJ, and other by Rotschild, BM in Clin Infect Dis, 2005. However, chronicles from the spaniards that first arrived to the americas, told about one of the symptoms of the disease, they call "Bubas", and linked the disease to a local idol, the natives called "El bubosito". "The little bubous one". Unmarried sex, and even sometimes supposedly safe sex, has always involved some risks, both moral and medical, and the discovery of Penicillin just was a short lived break, some ethnic and social groups considering sex as a danger and a deadly activity in itself, a belief surely coming from the experiences of pre-antibiotic ages. I remember, during a 1986 visit to Paris, a man, obvioulsy suffering from Tabes, a late neurologic complication of syphillis, that while trying to pickpocket my wallet, offered me to introduce me to "some women". The history sounds a sad black joke, but it's real. Hope nobody accepted his offer. Salut +
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat is interesting and in hindsight, perhaps not that suprising. Europeans transfered many deadly diseases to the 'new world', seems reasonable that the new world would thank the old world in kind.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisQuestion: so, do the 'new world' indigenous populations have some immunity to syphilis? (similar to malaria, some percentage (was it 1/3?) of the indigenous population in those areas can harbor the parasite yet not get ill from it.
Not being updated with parasitology, I would expect treponema species to be more abundant in geographic areas (humans are the most widely spread mammal, and quite anomalous in range compared to others. This leads to symbionts generally being localized outside of our own species) where the disease was first prevalent or actually arose.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSuch evidence would add strongly to the Western Hemisphere origination hypothesis.
gmperkins:
a consideration in your question would have to be the evolutionary time available for our species (K-selected long-lived with low reproductive rate and slow maturation) to evolve resistance.
A factor increasing the time necessary to evolve resistance in our own species is the cultural evolutionary handing down of medication curing, arresting, or slowing of symptoms or disease.
There was only a probable maximum of 13,000 years, and in certain areas of the Americas less than 8,000 known years of habitation. During part of that time, populations might have been too small for either medical discovery or sufficient proliferation of the parasite to gather attention or momentum.
There are other cultural variances as well as geographical/cultural events or variables which would have significant effects on transmission in certain groups and areas, changing the demographics on these continents. (I give as support the severe, severe penalties imposed within numerous South Asian tribes upon premarital sex. Explore these and other such limiters)
Another psychological/cultural one is hinted at : You will remember that those who were not Italian called it the "Italian disease", not Spanish calling it the "Spanish disease", and so on.
Human propensity to avoid blame and assign it to others affects everything, including such occupations as scientific inquiry and more & less informed comment. It is up to individuals to assess these and other factors in seeking answers.
I enjoyed your comment, supposing it to be ironic. (It's getting hard to tell.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlease try to use complete sentences. If you are referring to the Biblical account it is an angel named Wormwood that poisons a third of the water. It is not a plant. The Wormwood plant does not grow in Columbia, it grows in Eurasia and Africa.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOnce again, pretty much your entire post was wrong and/or nonsense.
If you find advanced lifeforms so terrible then why not "simplify" yourself and prove that you really believe that. Hypocricy isn't a convincing arguement and while you are still alive you are clearly a hypocrite.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn Spain syphilis received the name "Morbo gallico", -the french disease-, in France it was atributed to spaniards. Currently, syphilis incidence has a cycle, in waves of high and low number of cases, such in a sinusoidal curve, and this may have no connection with changes in sexual behaviour or other people-related elements, it's just this way. Salut +
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