Syphilis microbe's family has plagued humans for millennia | Hacker News Reader

Syphilis microbe's family has plagued humans for millennia

nature.com

57 pointsHooke34 comments

"Remains of people who lived on the eastern coast of South America nearly 2,000 years ago have yielded the oldest known evidence for the family of microorganisms that cause syphilis1. The discovery, reported today in Nature, casts further doubt on the already shaky idea that Christopher Columbus’s crew exported syphilis to Europe."

Can someone explain this to me? Why would this cast doubt? Wouldn't this just be more evidence to the export theory?

Maybe the idea is that if it had been there for vastly longer, it would likely have spread up the coast to North America > Asia > Europe over that time?

Near the end of the article it states:

'The discovery of bejel-causing Treponema in Brazil 2,000 years ago doesn’t directly disprove the idea that syphilis came back with Columbus, the researchers say. But the previous evidence for diverse Treponema strains in fifteenth century Europe and the revised evolutionary timescale for T. pallidum makes it even more unlikely. “All this points in the direction that they are not being imported from the Americas,” says Schuenemann.

One possibility is that treponemal diseases emerged even earlier in Eurasia or Africa, and reached the Americas with the first humans to migrate there at least 15,000 years ago.'

> The researchers found that the T. pallidum genomes recovered from the bones were most similar to those of the modern subspecies that usually causes bejel — a disease that is not typically found in the Americas today. The ancient genomes were less similar to those of the strains usually associated with yaws or syphilis, which are both found in South America. This implies that the current distribution of T. pallidum subspecies differs from that of the past.

TA basically describes that the story is a whole lot more complicated than a single spread in one direction. Together with the quote from a sibling comment it rather seems that a syphilis strain evolved in Europe replaced American strains.

The authors have new evidence, but are so politically correct that they can not reason.

I wonder how this microbe influenced human morality. Is the moral idea that promiscuity is bad a vestige of some healthy recommendation to avoid multiple partner to not get or propagate syphilis?

You answered your question, undoubtedly this was a huge factor, similar to food and other taboos.

Not syphilis specifically but all STDs. Even today promiscuity can leave you with incurable STDs even if you wear a condom.

Not to mention that some STDs are antibiotic resistant now.

So imagine life before this. Sleeping around is going to leave you with constant green discharge or worse.

Moralizing aside, which ones specifically can infect you even if you wear a condom?

https://www.cdc.gov/condomeffectiveness/brief.html

Notably herpes, hpv and syphilis can still be transmitted

"The most reliable ways to avoid transmission of STDs are to abstain from sexual activity, or to be in a long-term mutually monogamous relationship with an uninfected partner"

Sounds very much like some Christian agenda bring pushed here.

50% of the population gets herpes and syphilis gets cured with antibiotics. HPV has a vaccine.

The article itself says you won't get anything if you use a condom properly.

But hey -- don't leave the house for fear of a car accident type thing...

"Sounds very much like some Christian agenda bring pushed here."

You must be kidding. You are accusing the CDC of using a scientific fact (that is pretty obvious) of "Pushing a Christian agenda"?

First of all, you are using HSV1 stats, which aren't the ones we are talking about, we are talking about Genital Herpes, which among adults affects only about 13%.

https://khealth.com/learn/herpes/statistics/#:~:text=is%20le....

And "syphilis Gets cured with antibiotics" isnt that accurate either. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9785152/

If you have the money for antibiotics, which many don't and you catch it early enough, which some don't, then yes it can be cured. However, as that link shows there are emergent antibiotic resistant strains that can absolutely destroy your life.

As far as HPV goes there are huge sections of the population who don't have the HPV vaccine, some can't afford it even.

People can do what they want, but objectively being promiscuous is dangerous to your health. It's less a question of it, but rather when.

No no, you have it wrong, the person you're replying to is clearly just more comfortable with the topic of sex than you, and therefore we are expected to infer, better at it than you. This is the actual message of their comment, and all that are like it.

I've noticed a lot of comments like theirs whenever STD's come up. It's just strange to me that people value choice over their own health. Like yeah you have a right to jump off a cliff to spite others who tell you it's dangerous, but ultimately you are the loser there... idk

It's strange to me people would jump out of perfectly working planes.

Yet they do

The only STDs reliably prevented through condoms are probably HIV and trichomoniasis.

You can get all of the following (probably 99% of all relevant STD cases recruit from those) via kissing (and blowjobs) alone:

Syphilis, Gonorrhoea, Chlamydia, urea/myco-plasma, crabs, HPV, HSV, several borderline-STD bacteria like H. parainfluenca.

Prior to the germ theory of disease, that connection was somewhat tenuous. Ancient moral strictures around promiscuity were based more on paternity uncertainty.

STI's almost certainly played a role in establishing that social strategy, but also I believe that monogamous-ish represents a equilibrium state in terms of social stability.

The reality is that people are biased towards their own biological children (on average), and men would in generally really prefer to raise their own child, rather than someone else's (on average). Raising a child requires an immense amount of resources.

If you presume that men who discover that their partner have slept around, and their child is not theirs, and worse, they've sunk like 3 years of resources in keeping this kid alive, are even just slightly more likely to be liabilities to society, then you could see why such a societal strategy might emerge.

The converse situation (men sleeping around) is somewhat different (though obviously related). The reality is that if you want to retain an approximately balanced gender balance in a population (perhaps because uh... you might need to compete in raiding/warfare), then you -cannot- have even a significant minority of men having exclusive access to more than one female without having significant societal stability issues. Combine this with men like knowing that their child is theirs, quickly settles you into "monogamous-ish".

And it's "ish" because there are always exceptions.

There is a hum bio lecture on this topic in apes by robert sapolski. Regarding herram vs nonherram ape species and how that has rippled out into many other physical differences between males and females. emergent sexual dimorphism. check it out. its from stanford. on youtube

Monogamy is somewhat recent as a norm in human societies. DNA analysis shows that in ancient times, far more women than men had offspring. Many of the men died young and/or were kept as slaves. This type of society can be stable for a long time — until the slaves revolt.

https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success

I would not argue that such a society cannot persist for a long time. I would argue that monogamy(ish) is more stable, hence its success.

This paternity worry seems to be a leftover of agrarian societies where it is important to ensure inheritance. In tribal societies, as we lived for millenia, it was much less of a worry as raising the kids was a tribal concern.

There is a famous quote from a Montagnais Native American to a Jesuit priest that tries to tell him that he should prevent his wife from having other relationships or he would risk bringing up another mans child: "Thou hast no sense. You french people love only your own children; but we love all the children of our tribe" - https://sexgendersoc.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/4-montagnai...

> You french people love only your own children; but we love all the children of our tribe

It's not just about loving your children, but also about feeding them. Children can't survive on love alone.

I guess the point here is that the tribe feeds the children. It is not up to the parents alone.

Tribal or not, Paternal worry is also fundamental genetic strategy if you spend any resources caring for your children, as many mammals do.

The person who raises only others children is not longer expressed in the gene line

If the tribe is closely related, it can be a good strategy as a large part of their genes would still spread

sure, but the returns quickly diminish with relatedness. A child is worth two nephews/nieces, 8 first cousins once removed, or 32 second cousins once removed.

https://isogg.org/wiki/Autosomal_DNA_statistics

That's assuming none of your nephews or first cousins never reproduce with each other down the line. Also consider it's not exactly your dna you are trying to pass on but your families. Then you are someone's child and nephew etc and those people want there genes passed on just as much as you do. So by raising others in the local community you help pass on your father's or uncle's DNA.

This gets brought up to explain why homosexuality is partially genetic and the math just does not work out.

This all sounds great as a “just so” story but then you have species like Bonobos that are one of humanity’s closest relatives and they are pretty much the opposite of monogamous. So clearly it’s not naturally inevitable that intelligent species with complex social structures end up with monogamy as the norm.

Bonobos might be intelligent, but they haven't yet been on the moon as far as i know. You kind of need a bit more intelligence to pull this one off.

Interestingly, due to the promiscuous mating behavior of female bonobos, a male cannot be sure which offspring are his. As a result, the entirety of parental care in bonobos is assumed by the mothers.

It is also worth noting that while they aren't monogamous, Females are still selective, mating primarily with high status males with more to offer.

IMO it’s a lot more complex than paternity. Concerns about sexual propriety are actually fairly symmetric and not at all one-sided. Men are also penalized by potential mates if they have a reputation for sleeping around. My hunch is that both sexes invest a lot of whatever resources they have (money, time, effort, etc.) into a relationship and they want that relationship to be stable and long lasting. And sexual propriety is a strong indicator of whether someone will be a stable long term mate.

wonder how many nations it's pummled with it's clinical effects

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