It was long the most feared of venereal diseases, striking Henry VIII, Abraham Lincoln, Vincent van Gogh and perhaps even Adolf Hitler, yet the origins of syphilis have remained a matter of controversy.

This has now been settled by research that offers by far the strongest scientific evidence that the sexually transmitted infection evolved in the Americas and was carried to Europe by the crew of Christopher Columbus.

While this explanation for syphilis’s arrival in the Old World has long been popular, supported by the first recorded epidemic among French soldiers fighting in Italy in 1495, it had been called into question by archaeological discoveries. Skeletons bearing bone damage characteristic of the disease have been found at several European sites that date back before Columbus's first voyage in 1492. This led some researchers to argue that syphilis was not originally a New World disease.

Now a comparison of the DNA of 26 strains of germ that cause syphilis or similar diseases has revealed strong evidence that the sexually transmitted pathogen first evolved in South America. An older strain of treponeme – the kind of pathogen that causes syphilis – may have emerged in Africa long before the Columbian age and become endemic in Europe, but it was not transmitted sexually. This related disease could have been responsible for the bone damage of the skeletons from the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries.

In the study, a team led by Kristin Harper, of Emory University in Atlanta, showed that the treponeme that causes sexually transmitted syphilis, Treponema pallidum, is most closely related to South American treponemes that cause a different disease known as yaws. This causes painless skin ulcers and bone lesions.

The results, published in the journal Public Library of Science Neglected Tropical Diseases,point firmly towards an American origin for T. pallidum and syphilis. Transmission by Columbus’s crew is backed by the documentary evidence of the 1495 epidemic in Naples, and because treponemes that cause venereal syphilis are the most recently evolved members of the group. “That supports the hypothesis that syphilis – or some progenitor – came from the New World,” Dr Harper said.

“When this genetic data is combined with extensive documentary evidence that syphilis appeared in Europe for the first time around 1495 . . . the Columbian hypothesis for syphilis’s origin gains new strength.”

The findings suggest that while the European conquest of the Americas led to the decimation of native populations from diseases such as smallpox, the traffic was not entirely one-way.

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