First kiss? Spreading herpes in Mesopotamia

Ancient DNA analysis shows herpes has existed since prehistory and adds fuel to discussions about when sexual kissing emerged.

The handshake, historians say, is at least 3000 years old, based on a wall relief from that time showing King Marduk-Zakir-Shumi the First of Babylonia shaking hands to mark an alliance with Shalmaneser the Third, king of the terrifying Neo-Assyrian Empire. Why the handshake emerged is debated.

Kissing goes further back and why it emerged is not debated. What is unclear is when it began.

A claim was made in 2011 that the earliest known record of human romantic-sexual kissing is a Bronze Age manuscript found in India. Even if so, the absence of prior documentation doesn’t mean sexual kissing wasn’t happening before.

Either way, at least shaking hands won’t give you herpes. That cannot be said of the sexual kiss, which has stood accused, when emerging in the modern era, of spreading oral herpes and other diseases.

Now, Troels Pank Arbøll and Sophie Lund Rasmussen of the University of Copenhagen argue in the journal of Science against the theory that the emergence of the sexual kiss was a sudden biological trigger for certain diseases and variants in Bronze Age Mesopotamia – on the grounds that it didn’t suddenly emerge.

Ancient-DNA analyses have indicated that in contrast to sudden-emergence theories, diseases commonly spread today by kissing such as herpes simplex I, Epstein-Barr virus causing mononucleosis, and human parvovirus B19 have been with us since prehistory. A 2020 paper even suggests that certain Tatar populations in Russia are harbouring an evolutionarily ancient strain of Epstein-Barr.

Even if there was a herpes variant shift in Bronze Age Mesopotamia, kissing was and had been around, including the sexual type. And some sudden advent of the practice – such as, introduced by strangers – wasn’t likely to underlie the viral variant shift, the authors posit. 

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The heartbreak of herpes in Mesopotamia: was it caused by the emergence of kissing? (Haaretz)

Photo: A clay model from Mesopotamia, dated, 1800 B.C.E, shows a couple kissing (British Museum /CC BY-SA 4.0)