It is said that the community of these chimps resides in Cameroon, according to Beatrice Hahn who led the study. But, the team said that the epidemic took off in Kinshasa, in the democratic republic of Congo. They claimed that studies have shown that HIV is traceable to a man who gave a blood sample in 1959 called Leopoldville. (We will want to believe that this man’s families are still in Kinshasa! It will be interesting for this team to show us the first family.)

So, what is the route from Cameroon to the Congo? According to Hahn, “Some Human must have done so. There is a river that goes from that south eastern corner of Cameroon down to the Congo River”. Ivory and hardwood traders are said to have used the Sangha River in the 1930s when the original human-human transmission is believed to have happened! However according to Hahn, “We dont know how these transmission occurred, we know that you don’t get it from petting a chimp, or from a toilet seat, it requires exposure to infected blood and infected body fluids. So if you get bitten by an angry chimp while you are hunting it that could do it”.

In essence, Leopoldville must have been bitten by an angry chimp. Will this man’s family please confirm if he is a hunter? Or he probably must have slept with the wife of a hunter. Rather, since it has been claimed that the first human transmission happened in the 1930s, Leopoldville must probably be a descendant of a chimp bitten Ivory or hardwood trader.

What we are waiting for is for Hahn and his team to show us what  impact the missing link that they have found will have on the larger challenges of HIV/AIDS.