<P> Consumption, phthisis and the White Plague are all terms used to refer to tuberculosis throughout history . It is generally accepted that Mycobacterium tuberculosis originated from other, more primitive organisms of the same genus Mycobacterium . In 2014, results of a new DNA study of a tuberculosis genome reconstructed from remains in southern Peru suggest that human tuberculosis is less than 6,000 years old . Even if researchers theorize that humans first acquired it in Africa about 5,000 years ago, there is evidence that the first tuberculosis infection happened about 9,000 years ago . It spread to other humans along trade routes . It also spread to domesticated animals in Africa, such as goats and cows . Seals and sea lions that bred on African beaches are believed to have acquired the disease and carried it across the Atlantic to South America . Hunters would have been the first humans to contract the disease there . </P> <P> Scientific work investigating the evolutionary origins of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex has concluded that the most recent common ancestor of the complex was a human - specific pathogen, which underwent a population bottleneck . Analysis of mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units has allowed dating of the bottleneck to approximately 40,000 years ago, which corresponds to the period subsequent to the expansion of Homo sapiens sapiens out of Africa . This analysis of mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units also dated the Mycobacterium bovis lineage as dispersing approximately 6,000 years ago, which may be linked to animal domestication and early farming . </P>

Consumption was the former name of which disease