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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday November 25 2015, @05:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the science-debunks-finger-pointing dept.

El Reg reports

The skeleton of a six-year-old infant unearthed in Austria is challenging the theory that syphilis was imported into Europe from the New World by the ship's crew of Christopher Columbus.

The well-preserved remains (above) were found in a cemetery in St. Pölten, some 65km west of Vienna, by a team from the city's Medical University. Several of the child's teeth display "lesions suggestive of or consistent with congenital syphilis", according to the research published in Anthropologischer Anzeiger.

These include "mulberry molar" and "Hutchinson's teeth". The former is a molar with "alternating nonanatomic depressions and rounded enamel nodules on its crown surface". The latter is where "permanent incisors have a screwdriver-like shape, sometimes associated with notching of the incisal edges".

Critically, carbon dating aged the skeleton to sometime between 1390 and 1440 AD, with a "mean" of 1415 AD. Since Columbus didn't sail off to the New World until 1492, "syphilis was probably not introduced to Europe by Columbus' returning crew", the researchers conclude. The first recorded outbreak of the disease in Europe was in Naples in 1494 or 1495. If the Treponema pallidum bacteria had already been present in the Old World for many years, then this event may ultimately have been attributed to Columbus's men simply because of a co-incidence of date. (They returned from their first voyage in 1493.)


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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday November 25 2015, @08:54PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 25 2015, @08:54PM (#268134) Journal

    Was Syphillis present in the Americas prior to Columbus? What about prior to the Vikings?

    Reports are that there are lots of skeletons in Central America thanks to religion, so this should be checkable.

    If Syphillis wasn't present in the Americas, then it was another Euro-Asian import. If it was present on both continents prior to recorded contact, then a mutated strain should be assumed as the cause of epidemic Syphillis. Ditto if it wasn't present in the pre-contact Americas. Only if it wasn't present in Euro-Asia prior to contacts should the origin site be presumed to be the Americas. But do note that I said recorded contact. There were probably occasional contacts long before any recorded contacts. E.g., there's evidence that the Chinese influenced pre-columbian Peru. It's not proof, but it's plausible. There are arguments that the Phoenicians circumnavigated the world (following coastlines). I don't find them convincing, or even extremely plausible, but plausible. And one wouldn't expect any records of one-way trips (due to, e.g., unexpected storms).

    That said, it's clear that e.g., measles and smallpox didn't make the trip. But those are more blatant.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Wednesday November 25 2015, @09:08PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 25 2015, @09:08PM (#268136) Journal

    Was Syphillis present in the Americas prior to Columbus? What about prior to the Vikings?

    The answer is yes. Syphilis came from yaws [wikipedia.org], which was present in both New and Old World. According to Wikipedia, there are Homo Erectus skeletons with yaws-like damage, meaning it's one of the very few diseases (leprosy being another) which have been with us so long that it predates our own species. As to New World evidence for syphilis, we have this [archaeology.org]:

    Using these criteria, they examined 687 skeletons from archaeological sites in the United States and Ecuador ranging in age from 400 to 6,000 years. Populations to the south (New Mexico, Florida, and Ecuador) proved to have syphilis, while those to the north (Ohio, Illinois, and Virginia) had yaws. By contrast, examination of 1,000 Old World skeletons dated to before contact with the New World revealed no cases of syphilis. This suggests that syphilis was first present in the New World and was later brought to the Old World. Furthermore, the Rothschilds found that the earliest yaws cases in the New World collections were at least 6,000 years old, while the first syphilis cases were at least 800 years old and perhaps more than 1,600 years old. This suggests that syphilis may be a New World mutation of yaws, which has a worldwide distribution. The occurrence of the same mutation giving rise to syphilis independently in the New and Old worlds seems unlikely.

    and

    Syphilis, it seems, developed in the New World from yaws, perhaps 1,600 years ago, and was waiting for Columbus and his crew. The Rothschilds are now examining skeletal collections from the Bahamas to look for evidence of syphilis nearer to Columbus' landfall.