3,500-Year-Old Skeletons Complicate Syphilis Debate
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- Dr. Melandri Vlok of Charles Sturt University led an international team that identified three children in prehistoric Vietnam whose bones and teeth showed clear evidence of congenital treponematosis dating back roughly 3,500 years.
- The researchers analyzed 309 individuals from 16 archaeological sites spanning 10,000 to 1,000 years before present, with two of the three affected children recovered from the Man Bac site in northern Vietnam.
- The overall infection pattern — concentrated in children and adolescents — points to nonvenereal treponemal disease such as yaws rather than venereal syphilis, a distinction that undercuts the assumption that congenital transmission uniquely signals syphilis.
- Published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, the findings complicate the Columbus-origin debate: skeletal cases previously labeled congenital syphilis may in fact represent yaws or other related diseases.
- Co-lead author Ms. Minh Tran, a PhD student at the University of the Philippines Diliman, noted that ancient DNA is poorly preserved in tropical Southeast Asia, making genetic confirmation of which disease affected these populations extremely difficult.
- Dr. Vlok's team argues future research should examine how treponemal diseases evolved alongside human societies and environments — particularly relevant as yaws is re-emerging due to the climate crisis.
Why it matters: For decades, researchers have used congenital transmission in skeletal remains as a primary marker for venereal syphilis, including in arguments over whether the disease existed outside the Americas before Columbus. With three Vietnamese child skeletons showing congenital transmission by what appears to be yaws, that marker is no longer reliable — meaning past archaeological diagnoses of ancient syphilis may need to be revisited, directly reshaping how scientists reconstruct the evolutionary history of treponemal bacteria.
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