Seals brought tuberculosis to South America long before Columbus sailed to the New World, a new study shows.
An analysis of tuberculosis DNA recovered from three 700- to 1,000-year-old Peruvian skeletons reveals that the strain of TB in the ancient bones doesn’t match the strain brought to the New World by European explorers. Instead, it closely resembles one that infects seals in the Southern Hemisphere, an international group of researchers reports August 20 in Nature.