ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Controlled fire use in early humans might have triggered the evolutionary emergence of tuberculosis.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Investigating human lung resilience, its evolutionary history and its relation to COPD.American journal of physiology. Lung cellular and molecular physiology · 2026Review
- Transgression of planetary boundaries and the effects on child health through an infectious diseases lens.Current opinion in pediatrics · 2025Review
- Decoding the tuberculosis puzzle: mechanical factors driving disease progression.Frontiers in tuberculosis · 2025Article
- How cultural innovations trigger the emergence of new pathogens.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Community-Wide Active Case Finding for Tuberculosis: Time to Use the Evidence We Have.Tropical medicine and infectious disease · 2024Review
- A smooth tubercle bacillus from Ethiopia phylogenetically close to the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Comparative physiological anthropogeny: exploring molecular underpinnings of distinctly human phenotypes.Physiological reviews · 2023Review
- Review
- The Origin and Maintenance of Tuberculosis Is Explained by the Induction of Smear-Negative Disease in the Paleolithic.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Structure ofeLife · 2021Article
- The genetic proteome: Using genetics to inform the proteome of mycobacterial pathogens.PLoS pathogens · 2021Review
- Diagnosis of latent tuberculosis infection is associated with reduced HIV viral load and lower risk for opportunistic infections in people living with HIV.PLoS biology · 2020Article
- Evaluation of the performance of an in-house duplex PCR assay targeting the IS6110 and rpoB genes for tuberculosis diagnosis in Cameroon.BMC infectious diseases · 2020Article
- Origin of tuberculosis in the Paleolithic predicts unprecedented population growth and female resistance.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Tuberculosis in migrants - screening, surveillance and ethics.Pneumonia (Nathan Qld.) · 2020Review
- THE EXPOSOME IN HUMAN EVOLUTION: FROM DUST TO DIESEL.The Quarterly review of biology · 2019Article
- Ecology and evolution of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2018Review
- Modelling heterogeneity in host susceptibility to tuberculosis and its effect on public health interventions.PloS one · 2018Article
- Global Environmental Nontuberculous Mycobacteria and Their Contemporaneous Man-Made and Natural Niches.Frontiers in microbiology · 2018Review
- From Evolutionary Advantage to Disease Agents: Forensic Reevaluation of Host-Microbe Interactions and Pathogenicity.Microbiology spectrum · 2017Review
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Tuberculosis (TB) is caused by the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC), a wildly successful group of organisms and the leading cause of death resulting from a single bacterial pathogen worldwide. It is generally accepted that MTBC established itself in human populations in Africa and that animal-infecting strains diverged from human strains. However, the precise causal factors of TB emergence remain unknown. Here, we propose that the advent of controlled fire use in early humans created the ideal conditions for the emergence of TB as a transmissible disease. This hypothesis is supported by mathematical modeling together with a synthesis of evidence from epidemiology, evolutionary genetics, and paleoanthropology.
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