A 5,500-year-old skeleton from the Americas has yielded the oldest genetic evidence yet of a bacterium closely related to the ...

We often tell ourselves a comforting story about the history of disease: it’s the price of civilization. For most of human ...

A previously unknown strain of syphilis bacteria has been discovered in human remains in Colombia, dating back 5,500 years.

Treponema pallidum, a microorganism that can cause a deadly sexually transmitted disease in humans, may have a far more ancient lineage than scientists once thought ...

The discovery, led by evolutionary genomics researcher Davide Bozzi, pushes back the evidence for treponemal diseases, as ...

Scientists recover DNA from a 5,500-year-old burial in Colombia, revealing ancient syphilis-related bacteria and reshaping disease history.

Researchers recovered ancient DNA from a 5,500-year-old skeleton in Colombia and reconstructed a genome related to Treponema pallidum. The lineage predates known syphilis strains by ~3,000 years, ...

Learn how ancient DNA from human remains revealed that syphilis circulated in the Americas thousands of years earlier than ...

What began as a study of human population history quickly evolved into a groundbreaking ...

A newly sequenced genome of the bacterium that causes syphilis, Treponema pallidum, highlights the deep antiquity of treponemal diseases in the Americas. The findings, based on a 5,500-year-old ...

Over 40 years, experimenters watched as hundreds of Black Americans went blind, suffered from organ failure, and died of a ...