For decades, the origin story of syphilis and related treponemal diseases has been tangled in debate, folklore, and partial evidence. Now a small fragment of bone from a rock shelter in central Colombia has added an unexpected chapter. From a single tibia, researchers have reconstructed1 the oldest known genome of Treponema pallidum, pushing the genetic record of this bacterial group back more than three millennia and anchoring treponemal infections firmly in the prehistory of the Americas.
The individual lived around 5,500 years ago, in a landscape of mobile hunter-gatherer communities, long before agriculture reshaped the region. There were no skeletal lesions that would have tipped off a paleopathologist. Yet deep sequencing, originally aimed at studying human ancestry, pulled a different signal from the data: the genetic traces of a pathogen that would later become infamous.
