The high rates of evolutionary change obtained in this study are in accordance with the evolutionary rates of other RNA viruses [32, 33] . Consistently, HPeV replication mechanism relies on an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase that lacks proofreading capacity. This increases the number of mutations incorporated in viral genomes over time and settles the ground for a relatively rapid genetic diversification [46] . The evolutionary rates of a few members of the Picornaviridae family have been studied. Despite the fact that most of the studies used different evolutionary frameworks, the rate of evolutionary change estimated in this study for the capsid region of HPeV VP1 is 1) faster than the rate of Hepatitis A virus [47] , 2) resem-bles the rate estimated for the antigenic region of Echovirus 71 [41, 48, 49] and finally 3) it is nearly one order of magnitude lower than the rates of poliovirus (2.09 × 10 -2 s/s/y) [48] or FMDV (2.7 × 10 -2 s/s/y) [50] .