Thanks for the article link!<p>&gt;&quot;Our estimated location of pandemic origin explains the observation that Kinshasa exhibits more contemporary HIV-1 genetic diversity than anywhere else&quot;
&gt;This is totally circular. As shown in their figure S2, they used genetic diversity in a region as an indication of earlier presence.<p>It seems like they also used phylogenetic history. Diversity alone is not a sufficient to identify origination.<p>&gt;A very high genetic diversity of HIV-1 has
been reported, not only in Kinshasa and the
north and south of the DRC (12, 13, 31, 32), but
also in Brazzaville in the RC and, to a lesser extent,
in the Mayombe area of RC near Pointe-Noire,
all of which have been suggested as potential
source locations of the pandemic (22, 33, 34).
We therefore performed phylogeographic analyses
of viruses collected in both the DRC and RC
(table S1) and compared sequence sampling locations
with phylogenetic history to formally test
hypotheses concerning the location of ancestral
viral lineages (30). Our analyses robustly place the spatial origin of the HIV-1 group M pandemic
in Kinshasa [posterior probability (PP) = 0.99]<p>They could have used &quot;consistent with&quot; rather than &quot;explains&quot;, though that may be a bit pedantic and debatable and we wouldn&#x27;t be in the sorry state of science education&#x2F;trust if all researchers would communicate like Neil deGrasse Tyson.