Debate about the origins of syphilis has continued for nearly 500 years, ever since early sixteenth-century Europeans blamed each other, referring to it variously as the Venetian, Naples, or French disease. One hypothesis assumes a New World origin, and holds that sailors who accompanied Columbus and other explorers brought the disease back to Europe. Another explanation is that syphilis was always present in the Old World but was not identified as a separate disease from leprosy before about A.D. 1500. A third possibility is that syphilis developed in both hemispheres from the related diseases bejel and yaws. New studies by paleopathologists Bruce and Christine Rothschild favor a New World origin.
I'll stick with my descriptor of mutthomed, it takes me to a happy place.
Rothschild does point to Africa and Asia as the origin of yaws and of bejel (endemic syphilis). I’m not a scientist so I’m not sure if either would be considered ‘congenital’ syphilis in the case of the Pompeii twins??
From Rothschild’s paper:
http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/10/1454.full
“Treponemal disease appears to have originated in East Africa with late transmission to England, perhaps as a complication of the slave trade. The original treponemal disease apparently spread from Africa through Asia, entering North America. Approximately 8 millennia later, it mutated to syphilis. Presence of skeletal evidence of syphilis at the site in the Dominican Republic where Columbus landed suggests the route by which it was transmitted to the Old World.
...It is perceived that bejel represented an early mutation of yaws as it passed through northeast Africa [51]. Confidence in diagnoses of bejel and yaws through time is high because the reproducibility of findings in these diseases in general [27, 31, 32] and for treponematoses in particular [4, 26, 50, 51] through time and geography has been clearly demonstrated. Curiously, continental Europe stayed free of treptonemal disease until it was contaminated by Columbian syphilis [34, 35]. Even the British Isles remained free of treponemal disease until the 13th century A.D., when yaws appeared [42], possibly related to initiation of a slave trade from yaws-afflicted West Africa.