The Aids pandemic started in the city of Kinshasa - now the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo - in the 1920s, scientists have concluded.
A "perfect storm" of population growth, a rampant sex trade and railways allowed HIV to spread, according to the team from the journal Science.
They used archived samples of the virus's genetic code to trace its source and found the evidence pointed to Kinshasa, then known as Leopoldville, where unsterilised needles used in health clinics helped spread the disease.
The virus was helped by the large number of men in the city - where they outnumbered women by two to one - which lead to the growth of a massive sex trade.
Once the disease took hold in the city, it was spread to neighbouring regions by the Belgian-backed railway.
"Data from colonial archives tells us that by the end of 1940s over one million people were travelling through Kinshasa on the railways each year," Nuno Faria of Oxford University's Department of Zoology, one of the authors of the paper, said.
"We think it is likely that the social changes around the independence in 1960 saw the virus 'break out' from small groups of infected people to infect the wider population and eventually the world."
Over the following decades it spread throughout the world, but was only identified in 1981 before ballooning into the epidemic of the 1980s. It has infected nearly 75 million people.
As part of the research, scientists from the University of Oxford and the University of Leuven in Belgium tried to reconstruct HIV's "family tree" to trace its origin.
HIV is a mutated version of a chimpanzee virus which was probably passed to people through contact with infected blood while handling meat.
The virus jumped to humans on a number of occasions - once to a subgroup that infected tens of thousands of people in Cameroon. But only one jump went on to infect millions of people around the world.
Dr Andrew Freedman, a reader in infectious diseases at Cardiff University, said: "It does seem an interesting study demonstrating very elegantly how HIV spread in the Congo region long before the Aids epidemic was recognised in the early 80s.
"It was already known that HIV in humans arose by cross species transmission from chimpanzees in that region of Africa, but this study maps in great detail the spread of the virus from Kinshasa, it was fascinating to read."
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