To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.Maryn McKennaIn the last days of the 1400s, a terrible epidemic swept through Europe. Men and women spiked sudden fevers. Their joints ached, and they broke out in rashes that ripened into bursting boils. Ulcers ate away at their faces, collapsing their noses and jaws, working down their throats and airways, making it impossible to eat or drink. Survivors were grossly disfigured. Unluckier victims died.The infection sped across the borders of a politically fractured landscape, from France into Italy, on to Switzerland and Germany, and north to the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Russia. The Holy Roman Emperor declared it a punishment from God. “Nothing could be more serious than this curse, this barbarian poison,” an Italian historian wrote in 1495.Out of the chaos, several things became clear. The infection seemed to start in the genitals. The pathogen seemed to travel along the paths of mercenary soldiers hired by warring rulers to attack their rivals, and with the informal households and sex workers that followed their campaigns. Though every nation associated the disorder with their enemies—the French called it the Neapolitan Disease, the English called it the French disease, the Russians blamed the Poles, and the Turks blamed Christians—there came a growing sense that one nation might be responsible.It seemed plausible that the great pox, later called Syphilis, might have journeyed with Spanish mercenaries, who represented much of the army of Naples when France attacked that kingdom in 1495. And it might have arrived in Spain with the crews of Christopher Columbus, who returned there in 1493 from the first of his exploratory voyages.For most of the centuries since, a significant historical narrative has blamed Columbus and his sailors for bringing syphilis to Europe. It arrived as a ravaging plague and then adapted to become a long-simmering disease that, before the discovery of penicillin, could cripple people and drive them mad. Investigating what’s called the “Columbian hypothesis” has proved challenging: The symptoms related in old accounts could describe several diseases, and the bacterium that causes it, Treponema pallidum, was not identified until 1905.But for roughly two decades, paleopathologists examining European burial sites have suggested that medieval bones and teeth display signs of syphilis infection, disrupting the belief that the disease arrived there in the 15th century. Now, a team based in Marseille has used ancient-DNA analysis to reveal evidence of Treponema bacteria, and the body’s immunological reaction to it, in a skeleton that was buried in a chapel in Provence in the 7th or 8th century. It’s the best evidence yet that syphilis—or something related to it—was infecting Europeans centuries before Columbus sailed.“To the best of my knowledge, this is the first, proven, strong piece of evidence that the Treponema of syphilis were circulating in the European population before Columbus,” says Michel Drancourt, a physician and professor of microbiology at Aix-Marseille University, who led the work published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. “So far, this was a hypothesis in science and the medical literature, without any strong proof.”Matt SimonDhruv MehrotraMedea GiordanoAmanda HooverOf course, as with anything in science, one finding doesn’t settle the question. It’s clear the historical record describes a catastrophic epidemic coincident with Columbus’s return. And there have always been other diseases caused by subspecies of Treponema bacteria—notably yaws, caused by T. pallidum pertenue, which passes skin-to-skin instead of through sexual contact, and mostly occurs in children. But, at least, the new identification adds narrative strands to the established story of syphilis’s global travel—without quite taking the responsibility off the famous colonizer’s back.“It’s exciting that greater complexity is being introduced progressively by this work, and by some securely dated and accurately diagnosed ancient skeletons that have been published since 2016,” says Molly Zuckerman, a biological anthropologist and professor at Mississippi State University who collaborates on studies of ancient infections. “When we look at modern disease landscapes, we understand that a lot of the time we have co-circulating strains of diseases. If the origin of syphilis hadn’t been set up initially against the backdrop of the Columbian Exchange, we might have recognized that sooner.”It’s important to understand that syphilis is still a serious public health challenge. It has reached record levels in the United States and around the world. Though the arrival of penicillin in 1943 briefly made it seem like a solved problem, the injectable form of the drug now used has been in short supply for months, while cases of congenital syphilis passed from mother to child are rising.It’s equally important to recognize how the original account of syphilis’s arrival in Europe served the aims of the Age of Discovery that Columbus ignited. “Discourses around the American origin of the disease functioned to bolster early modern depictions of Indigenous Americans as ‘savages’ by casting them as sexually libidinous or cannibalistic,” says Kevin Siena, a professor and historian of medicine at Trent University in Ontario and author of a history of syphilis. “This allowed Europeans to depict themselves as pure, invaded by a monstrous disease from a monstrous land that white settlement could tame.”Finally, it’s vital to consider how dramatic the impact of syphilis was on Europe as countries moved from the Renaissance into the early industrial age. Siena has used medical and municipal records to show that more than one in five residents of London in the 1770s was treated for syphilis infection (implying that a larger proportion were infected without seeking treatment). In his Georgian-era diary, essayist James Boswell estimated he had been infected 19 times.All of this, though, occurred long after the life and death of the man who left behind the skeleton that Drancourt analyzed, who was buried in a now-ruined chapel in the village of Roquevaire. Archeological excavations at the site in 1987 unearthed commingled bones that were later identified as the remains of 19 adults and six children. When the bones were examined years later, paleopathologists spotted a pattern of pitting and dimpling on one femur that resembled well-known effects of late syphilis infection. They contacted Drancourt, who has worked for decades on genomic analyses of disease organisms.Matt SimonDhruv MehrotraMedea GiordanoAmanda HooverUsing an unblemished femur from the same burial site as a control, his lab extracted degraded DNA present in the bone, sequenced it, and identified strings of nucleotides that resembled portions of reference genomes for T. pallidum. The group verified the sequences’ identities by generating a kind of family tree that linked the found sequences to known ones. (They did not find intact bacteria.) They also looked for the shadow of the victim’s reaction to the pathogen. After crushing and liquefying a small portion of bone, they hunted for antibody proteins that would have been produced in response to infection and then carried into the bone by the bloodstream, a process they dubbed “paleoserology.”“For me, it was not enough to prove that this femur contained some pieces of Treponema pallidum,” Drancourt says. “It was necessary to prove that the guy did develop, centuries ago, an inflammatory immune response against this Treponema. And when you have both, then you have the disease.”Not everyone agrees. “Although the publication frequently implies that their findings are about syphilis, that is not true. Their findings relate to treponemal infection,” Sheila Lukehart, a syphilis expert and emeritus professor of medicine and global health at the University of Washington, told WIRED by email. “It is quite possible, maybe likely, that the organism in their examined femur is a pertenue rather than a pallidum subspecies.” (If so, it would mean that the victim suffered from yaws, not syphilis.)Though the possibility of syphilis being present in Europe so early could change the scientific understanding of the disease, it might not rewrite its competing histories. At least, not yet. “Historians look at texts,” Siena says. “There's a whole host of historians who are uneasy even talking about syphilis before the age of blood tests, because they don't want to do retro-diagnosis—this notion that you could diagnose a disease hundreds of years after the fact based upon descriptions.”When historians look at the archival record, they cannot find evidence that syphilis epidemics resembling those of the late 1400s occurred before that date. If the organism was in Europe then, or imported periodically by traders, did it create lesser symptoms? Were infections masked by being attributed to another more-feared disease, such as leprosy? Did the bacterium adapt as towns grew larger and people migrated from the countryside, changing the ways they lived and interacted sexually?Or did Columbus, in a twist on the established story, in fact carry something home—not an entirely new disease, but a variant of an existing one, more lethal and more reproductively fit? Today, it’s understood that syphilis infection does not create durable immunity; someone who has been infected once can become infected again. Even if Europeans had been exposed to an earlier strain of the disease, that might not have protected them against a fresh, virulent version.In that scenario, both versions of the history of syphilis—one that begins before Columbus and one that starts after—can simultaneously be true. And in that scenario, Columbus and his Spanish sponsors do not evade responsibility for infecting Europe, something that could be viewed as the Americas’ revenge for their exploitation.He may not have escaped their revenge anyway. “There is some thought that Columbus had syphilis,” says Erin Stone, an associate professor of history at the University of West Florida who studies colonial Latin America. “In his fourth voyage, he writes a very long journal entry about how the world is not round, but pear-shaped, with a nipple at the center, and he has sailed around it. A lot of documents point toward him not being in his right mind toward the end of his life.”Columbus died in 1506, at age 54, after years of attacks of fevers and joint pains that left him temporarily blind and occasionally bedridden. He has been diagnosed retrospectively with gout, autoimmune conditions, and reactive arthritis, which is caused by a foodborne illness or several sexually transmitted infections. Where his bones lie is disputed. They have never been tested for disease.📩 Don’t miss our biggest stories, delivered to your inbox every dayUnhinged conspiracies, AI doppelgangers, and the fractured reality of Naomi KleinInsiders reveal major problems at lab-grown-meat startup Upside FoodsThese prisoners are training AIThe twisted eye in the sky over Buenos AiresHow to take back control of your photo and video storage🌲 Our Gear team has branched out with a new guide to the best sleeping pads and fresh picks for the best coolers and binocularsEve AndrewsJordana CepelewiczCharlie WoodMatt SimonDhruv MehrotraAnna LagosAnna LagosEmily MullinMore From WIREDContact© 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. 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