[abhijat]

Near the end of the article it states:

'The discovery of bejel-causing Treponema in Brazil 2,000 years ago doesn’t directly disprove the idea that syphilis came back with Columbus, the researchers say. But the previous evidence for diverse Treponema strains in fifteenth century Europe and the revised evolutionary timescale for T. pallidum makes it even more unlikely. “All this points in the direction that they are not being imported from the Americas,” says Schuenemann.

One possibility is that treponemal diseases emerged even earlier in Eurasia or Africa, and reached the Americas with the first humans to migrate there at least 15,000 years ago.'