Pre-Columbian mycobacterial genomes reveal seals as a source of New World human tuberculosis

Three 1,000-year-old mycobacterial genomes from Peruvian human skeletons reveal that a member of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex derived from seals caused human disease before contact in the Americas. Mycobacterium tuberculosis has a long history as a human pathogen, but how and when this unfortunate relationship began is not clear. Although the strains found in the Americas today are closely related to those in Europe, archaeological...