The origin of human pathogens

Abstract

Modern human infectious diseases are thought to have originated in domestic animals during the Neolithic period or afterwards. However, recent genetic, phylogeographic and molecular clock analyses of microbial genomes point to a much older Paleolithic origin (2.5 million to 10,000 years ago) and suggest that many of these pathogens coevolved with ancestral hominids in Africa. Another group of human pathogens seems to have derived recently from non-human hominids.