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Whether Columbus brought syphilis to the New World--or to the Old World--has long been the subject of conjecture. In June 2000, researchers excavating skeletons from an English monastery claimed that the skeletons show signs of syphilis. If the monks did in fact have the disease, they couldn9t have gotten it from Columbus9s voyage, because the skeletons were dated to between 1300 and 1450.
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Carl Zimmer (2001) studied this question.
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