Shiloh
Editor, Senior Moderator
Source: http://www.economist.com/news/scien...as-first-carried-america-pinnipeds-seals-doom
Seals of doom
Tuberculosis was first carried to America by pinnipeds
Aug 23rd 2014
WHEN a few intrepid humans crossed the Bering land bridge from the Old World to the New, to populate the Americas 12,000 years ago, they left many things behind. Among them were several diseases?including smallpox, malaria and tuberculosis?that remained unknown to their descendants until a larger human influx began to arrive in 1492. Or rather, in the case of tuberculosis, remained almost unknown. For a few pre-Columbian skeletons bear unmistakable signs of the infection, creating a mystery that has puzzled anthropologists for decades.
Anne Stone of Arizona State University and Johannes Krause of the University of T?bingen now think, as they report in Nature, that they have solved this mystery. In doing so they have added a new example to the list of human infections which come from wild animals?as Ebola fever, now in the news, came from bats and HIV came from chimpanzees. For New World tuberculosis, they suggest, came from seals...
Seals of doom
Tuberculosis was first carried to America by pinnipeds
Aug 23rd 2014
WHEN a few intrepid humans crossed the Bering land bridge from the Old World to the New, to populate the Americas 12,000 years ago, they left many things behind. Among them were several diseases?including smallpox, malaria and tuberculosis?that remained unknown to their descendants until a larger human influx began to arrive in 1492. Or rather, in the case of tuberculosis, remained almost unknown. For a few pre-Columbian skeletons bear unmistakable signs of the infection, creating a mystery that has puzzled anthropologists for decades.
Anne Stone of Arizona State University and Johannes Krause of the University of T?bingen now think, as they report in Nature, that they have solved this mystery. In doing so they have added a new example to the list of human infections which come from wild animals?as Ebola fever, now in the news, came from bats and HIV came from chimpanzees. For New World tuberculosis, they suggest, came from seals...