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.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Micah Dunthorn Ph.D. who collaborated in the edition of this chapter and the support of Universidad San Francisco de Quito. My thanks also go to Ricardo Vásquez Bsc. identification useful here) for the figure.
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Trueba, G. (2014). The Origin of Human Pathogens. In: Yamada, A., Kahn, L., Kaplan, B., Monath, T., Woodall, J., Conti, L. (eds) Confronting Emerging Zoonoses. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-55120-1_1
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