2023-05-29 18:00:07
Find the first traces of a romantic kiss, lips against lips, in the history of humanity. This is the mission set by two Danish researchers, the biologist Sophie Lund Rasmussen (University of Oxford, United Kingdom) and the Assyriologist Troels Pank Arboll (University of Copenhagen), and that they detail in a article published on May 18 by the journal Science. These traces, they finally found them in texts in cuneiform writing 4,500 years old, originating from Mesopotamia, an ancient region corresponding to present-day Iraq and Syria.
The starting point of their quest? The publication, in July 2022, of a article on the evolution of the virus Herpes simplex de type 1 (HSV-1) in review Science Advances. The team of researchers in paleogenetics (study of ancient DNA) from the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) evoked a possible link between the introduction of the practice of kissing – assuming an exchange of saliva – and the spread of the virus HSV-1.
According to this study, the modern strain of the virus that causes “cold sores” emerged five thousand years ago. Today, about 67% of people under the age of 50 are carriers of the herpes virus in its HSV-1 form, according to the World Health Organization.
A constant channel of transmission
For Sophie Lund Rasmussen and Troels Pank Arboll, the romantic kiss would far predate the modern strain of herpes, which would make the role of this practice in the wide spread of the virus over the past five thousand years unlikely. “Chimpanzees and bonobos also kiss romantically and sexually, explains Sophie Lund Rasmussen at Monde. Because we are all hominids and that these primates also practice kissing, this could indicate that this is a very old behavior, much older than the documentation we found. »
To support the hypothesis of a constant influence of kissing on the transmission of diseases, and to refute the idea that this practice was a factor of sudden contamination, the biologist listed paleogenetic studies proving the existence, since the prehistory, of orally transmitted viruses, such as herpes HSV-1 or the Epstein-Barr virus, also from the family of Herpesviridae and agent of infectious mononucleosis, sometimes called “kissing disease”. “I wanted to find traces of these ‘kissing-borne’ pathogens in ancient times. Because, if they have always existed, it is likely that we have always kissed each other as well”adds Sophie Lund Rasmussen.
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