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If this pans out, I wonder what the conspiracy nuts who claim HIV and AIDS were created to wipe out non-white races will do. Of course, the anti-evolution folks will ignore all this since evolution — even in viruses which would imply all organisms up to humans — doesn’t exist.
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) responsible for most of the AIDS cases in the world infected people approximately 100 years ago, more than 20 years earlier than previously believed, according to findings presented here this week at the Evolution 2008 meeting. Its lesser known cousin, HIV-2, jumped into humans decades later, from a monkey species that carried the virus for just a couple of hundred years, not the millions of years researchers had assumed, according to other research presented at the meeting.
Researchers are trying to pin down the origins of both HIVs to understand how often new human viruses emerge. Both arose from simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs) of other primates.
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By comparing the two sequences with more recent ones, Gemmel was able to show that HIV-1 first entered humans about 1908, not 1931, as earlier analyses with just the 1959 sample found. Her analysis also indicates that the virus existed in low levels in humans until the middle of the 20th century. “That matches the rise of population centers,” Gemmel explained, suggesting that urbanization around that time paved the way for the AIDS epidemic.
