The paper, Out-of-Africa migration and Neolithic coexpansion of Mycobacterium tuberculosis with modern humans, which just came out recently, has naturally been making a splash. As the title implies the paper concludes that humans and tuberculosis have been each other’s “partners,” after a fashion, for the whole existence of modern humanity.
The main method here is somewhat brute force and straightforward, by sequencing 259 tuberculosis strains from all across the world they managed to make relatively robust phylogeographic inferences. Throwing data at a question usually resolves something. The correspondence between human and pathogen strains is qualitatively uncanny, and there is plenty enough statistical footwork to confirm it more rigorously within the body of the text.
Read the full, original story here: We have been “consumed” for ~100,000 years
