Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Europe Didn't Get Syphilis From The New World

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

"gewg_" writes:

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.)

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Europe Didn't Get Syphilis From The New World | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 19 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 2) by CoolHand on Wednesday November 25 2015, @07:24PM

    by CoolHand (438) on Wednesday November 25 2015, @07:24PM (#268103) Journal
    Reaallly???? A lot of "evidence" may have not survived the centuries, but a lot of scholars disagree... (even though some stories have in fact been discredited) http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/spring04/warfare.cfm [history.org] http://academic.udayton.edu/health/syllabi/Bioterrorism/00intro02.htm [udayton.edu] https://www.umass.edu/legal/derrico/amherst/lord_jeff.html [umass.edu] https://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/smallpox1.html [fordham.edu]
    --
    Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2  

  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 25 2015, @07:49PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 25 2015, @07:49PM (#268112) Homepage Journal

    Respect to Armelagos and his team for this statement: ""The origin of syphilis is a fascinating, compelling question," Zuckerman says. "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.""

    I gotta confess, I'm not intimately familiar with syphilis, or any other venereal diseases. When I read the title of this submission, I thought something like, "That's just stupid, Mediterranean sheep herders have been poking their sheep for forever, and spreading syphilis around." DERP-A-DERP - the article is about syphilis, not gonorrhea.

    --
    Hail to the Nibbler in Chief.

  • (Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Wednesday November 25 2015, @08:11PM

    by wisnoskij (5149) <{jonathonwisnoski} {at} {gmail.com}> on Wednesday November 25 2015, @08:11PM (#268120)

    Yes, but they knew so little about diseases back then, they did not actually get it right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Fort_Pitt#Biological_Warfare_was_Ineffective [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @11:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2015, @11:13PM (#268173)
    However, in order to do biological warfare correctly you have to know what you're doing. It wasn't until the time of Louis Pasteur that anyone really understood the true nature of diseases like those. Until then most of the world still largely believed that diseases were caused by evil spirits or divine curses. Any attempts at deliberate biological warfare in those days would have been a crapshoot at best.