So the spillover had occurred by 1908? That’s much earlier than anyone suspected, and therefore the sort of discovery that gets into an august journal such as Nature. Publishing in 2008, a century after the fact, with a list of coauthors that included Jean-Jacques Muyembe, Jean-Marie Kabongo, and Dirk Teuwen, Worobey wrote: Our estimation of divergence times, with an evolutionary timescale spanning several decades, together with the extensive genetic distance between DRC60 and ZR59 indicate that these viruses evolved from a common ancestor circulating in the African population near the
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