In 2014 I posted on syphillis and the peopling of America. Since then, research and genetic analysis has advanced and new information is available. A paper published in Dec. 2024 in Nature (Ancient genomes reveal a deep history of Treponema pallidum in the Americas) sheds new light on the subject.
Now we know, thanks to genetic studies, that yaws is much younger than previously thought. This paper summarizes its findings as follows:
"This study confirms the presence in the Americas of deeply derived lineages for all three known T. pallidum subspecies prior to the first Columbian expedition in 1492. Consideration of these broad data in two different molecular dating approaches has yielded an upper bound of around 9000 bp for emergence of the most recent ancestor common to all T. pallidum. This post-dates both current genetic estimates for the initial divergence of Indigenous American populations from East Asians43 and archaeological estimates for human arrival in the Americas44. Our data thus support a scenario in which all genomically typed ancient and modern T. pallidum stem from an origin in the Americas during the middle Holocene epoch, possibly as a zoonotic infection from an unidentified host."
In my posts, I mentioned the genetic clock used to time the clades, and the mutation rate. This paper uses (6.7 × 10-8 and 8.4 × 10-8 substitutions per site per year) similar to the rate used in the studies commented in my previous posts. So my comments still stand.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall ©
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