Scientists have discovered DNA from a close relative of the syphilis pathogen in a 5,500-year-old shin bone from Colombia, providing the oldest genetic evidence that the disease originated in the Americas millennia before European contact. The bone belonged to a hunter-gatherer whose remains were found near Bogotá, pushing back the oldest Treponema genome by 3,000 years.
The study, published Thursday in Science, addresses a centuries-old debate about whether syphilis was brought to Europe by Columbus or already existed there. Researchers identified a new Treponema pallidum subspecies and determined that modern disease-causing strains, including syphilis, yaws, and bejel, likely emerged around 6,000 years ago—well before European colonization.
“This adds more information to history that’s been, in many cases, lost or obscured because of colonial agendas,” said Elizabeth A. Nelson, a molecular anthropologist at Southern Methodist University. “This shows that Indigenous people in the Americas were living with and adapting to complex infectious diseases thousands of years before colonization.”
Mississippi State University paleopathologist Molly Zuckerman called the work remarkable, saying: “It’s easy to fall into narratives of where diseases come from, and that plays into geopolitics. But diseases are way more complex than that.” The discovery reveals how pathogens infected hunter-gatherers before agriculture created conditions for widespread disease transmission, though researchers cannot yet determine when it became sexually transmitted.