Tuberculosis Got to South America Through … Seals?

Back in the 1990s, Felipe Cárdenas-Arroyo came across a collection of human vertebrae, excavated near Bogotá, Colombia, that were pockmarked with tiny holes. To him, this looked like tuberculosis, which can in rare cases spread from the lungs to infect the adjacent bones of the rib cage and spine. So Cárdenas-Arroyo, an anthropologist at the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History, sent them along to a colleague, Jane Buikstra, who had long been interested in the mystery of tuberculosis’s presence in the Americas. Twenty years passed and nothing much happened with these bones until 2018, when Buikstra realized that they might in fact hold some of the answers.

The conundrum that Buikstra and others had been puzzling through was this: In North and