The oldest know tissue sample containing HIV dates from 1959 — it comes from Congo and was described in (wicked, pay-per-view) Nature in 1998. Scientists have since compared different strains of the virus and guesstimated from the divergence between them (and from comparison with the related monkey-version of the virus SIV) when HIV first emerged. They put the date in the early 1930s. Now another sample has emerged, also from Congo, from a woman who died in 1960. Comparison between this and the 1959 sample has turned the clock back three decades. Analysts of the new old sample now say they think HIV emerged around 1900.

Should that change how we think about HIV? Not really. It is a virus that emerged in the forests of Congo at a time when Leopold, King of the Belgians, was wreaking his uber-hypocritical havoc in the region. (Anyone with the slightest interest in the cynical pursuit of personal enrichment would do well to read Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost. It turns out that political lobbying by foreign powers in Washington is as old as HIV.) Leopold’s oversized ego was blown up with rubber tapped from the forests — tappers were sent in large numbers into areas that had not previously been much visited, and it is probably this that allowed the virus to cross from simians to humans. They then carried their wares back to cities and had sex, and so began the spread of HIV. Belgians were not, however, very efficient colonists. Infrastructure in Congo remains poor to this day, population density is relatively low and travel is difficult. Not surprising then, that the virus was slow to emerge. Not surprising, either, that when it did filter out, it did not begin to spread in earnest until it found its way into pools of people who had a high turnover of partners and relatively risky sexual practices. In other words, gay men celebrating their sexual emancipation in the bars and bathhouses of the west.

No coincidence either that in the African epidemic, where HIV is spread largely in unprotected sex between men and women who each have more than one partner on the go in any two or three month period, the virus spread fastest in the countries with the best infrastructure — South Africa, Botswana and (until the recent meltdown) Zimbabwe. The possibility that HIV existed at low levels in other countries long before it reached a critical mass makes me think twice about early accounts of untreatable patients. Check out, for example, Paul Theroux’s account of his work in a leper colony in Malawi, published in Granta 48. If AIDS wasn’t described in Africa until it had been identified in San Francisco, it was probably because it went unnoticed against a background thick with mysterious bugs and early death.

How is it that people get so uptight about these simple facts? To judge from some of the early readers’ comments on the Nature news pages (now also disgracefully charging for content) scientists cannot describe infection in Africa without being called racist. Some samples:

“HIV is older than your great-grandparents, uh-huh! And I’ll bet that the US bio weapons effort is just ecstatic about this deflection. So now these members of science play to the bio-jackboot population controllers with this ‘revelation’ that those sex-crazed Africans of course just couldn’t stop themselves from pulling chimpanzees (I thought the original scientific theory was “green monkeys”) out of the trees for a quickie. ”

“This is one of the most stupid discovery I have ever heard. You will blame every single human plague on Africa, This is against all the Theories of evolutionary biology where The descents of the people that lived in the area might have developed a kind of resistance instead of being vulnerable to a new strain of the Virus. This is very disturbing, what about all the Slaves you moved around to the Western Hemisphere? What about all the sailors and rapist colonial administrator? How come they did not bring it back to Europe and spread it all over Europe? Please stop insulting our intelligence.”

All I can say is, with intelligence like that…

One of the interesting things about this paper was the forensic epidemiology work it describes. The sample was pretty mashed up, but new technology allowed useable bits of virus to be extracted from abused tissue locked up in paraffin. For those of you who can’t access the Nature story about the paper (beautifully written by Heidi Ledford) here’s a taste. It includes a quote from Mike Worobey, who led the research, which illustrates the mash-up nicely.

The samples had all been treated with harsh chemicals, embedded in paraffin wax and left at room temperature for decades. The acidic chemicals had broken the genome up into small fragments. Formalin, a chemical used to prepare samples for microscopy, had crosslinked nucleic acids with protein. “It’s as if you had a nice pearl necklace of DNA and RNA and protein and you clumped it together, drenched it in glue and then dried it out,” says Worobey.