Given that this disease is spread by behavior forms which are, with rare exceptions, voluntary, certain demographic segments among the Native Americans were safe from the illness. Nonetheless, the death toll was large, preventing some tribes from stabilizing at more advanced levels of civilization, forcing other tribes back to lower levels, and nearly exterminating still other tribes.
Christopher Columbus, of course, knew nothing of this. He did not realize that he was entering into a dangerous area when, in 1492, he first made contact with the Native Americans. Other people in Europe, however, soon realized what the "Indians" had given to Columbus: a deadly disease. At first, scientists disputed whether syphilis, which soon killed large numbers of people in Europe, had actually come from North America. Some thought it came from another part of the world; others thought that it had been in Europe, unrecognized, all along. But in January 2008, Scientific American magazine wrote that
the Italian adventurer and some of his crew contracted the disease during their voyage to the New World — and unwittingly introduced it to the old one circa 1493.
If, in fact, this is true, then we have evidence that Columbus's men, or perhaps even Columbus himself, engaged in the wrong type of activity. Certainly, neither the captain nor his crew were properly married to any of the Native Americans! Not only did they pay the price for their unwise judgment, but others in Europe may have paid the price as well, when the crew returned to the Iberian Peninsula.
Researchers from Emory University in Atlanta report in the online journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases that they used phylogenetics — the study of the evolutionary link between organisms — to study 26 geographically scattered strains of a family of bacteria known as Treponemes, which are behind the sexually transmitted disease syphilis as well as related nonvenereal infections such as yaws. They found that the venereal syphilis-causing strains arose relatively recently in humans and are closely related to an ancient infection isolated in South America that gives rise to yaws.
In other words, the strains of syphilis which spread across Europe descended from Native American bacteria.
"That supports the hypothesis that syphilis — or some progenitor — came from the New World," said lead study author Kristin Harper, an Emory molecular genetics researcher.
Although the new evidence is persuasive, suggestive, and convincing, the case is still not entirely closed. It is conceivably possible, although unlikely and unimaginable, that syphilis did not come to Europe from America.
According to the researchers, the origin of syphilis has been hotly debated since the first recorded epidemic of the disease in Europe in 1495. Most of the scientific evidence in recent years had been gleaned from the bones of members of past civilizations in both the Old and New worlds; bones were considered credible markers since chronic syphilis causes skeletal lesions. But skeletal analysis was hobbled by an inability to accurately determine bone age and a lack of supporting epidemiological evidence.
Another piece of evidence is the pattern of narratives among the Native Americans about epidemics which swept through the Americas before any European explorers arrived.
Scientists say the study is significant because of the large number of strains analyzed, including two species of yaws found in isolated inhabitants of Guyana in South America.
We have, then, another example of the - unintended - results of Europe's discovery of America. Along with tobacco, syphilis was part of the wave of death unleashed not only upon Europe, but the rest of the world, as the misery in which the American "Indians" had long lived escaped into the other continents. Disease and tobacco, along with various plants having hallucinogenic and narcotic effects, may explain the otherwise unexplained fall of significant Native American civilizations before the arrival of Europeans. Unknown to the Europe, to Asia, or to Africa, Native Americans had been living for centuries in a nightmare of epidemics, tobacco-related deaths, and the effects of mood-altering addictive plants.
