The secret history of the first 'morreo': it occurred 4,500 years ago and caused the spread of herpes
The kiss was painted by Klimt at the beginning of the 20th century, it was given by the sailor and the nurse at the intersection of Broadway with the seventh celebrating the end of the Second World War, there are up to three types in the Kamasutra, which dates from the 3rd century , and it has been carved on the walls of the monuments of Khajuraho, in India, since the 10th century, but which was the first in the history of mankind? The scientists have gotten down to work and we can already point out that, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, a couple who today would have a Syrian or Iraqi passport did more or less what Julio Cortázar wrote 4,500 years later in the seventh chapter of Hopscotch: “The mouths meet and fight lukewarmly, biting each other with their lips, barely supporting their tongues on their teeth, playing in their enclosures where a heavy air comes and goes with an old perfume and silence.”
But to find the first, Dr. Troels Pank Arbøll, an Assyriologist, and Dr. Sophie Lund Rasmussen, a biologist, did not have to look for two lovers, but for herpes simplex HSV-1, Epstein-Barr virus and the human parovirus B19, studying the DNA of the antiquity and history of medicine. The earliest evidence of snogging was so far located in South Asia 3,500 years ago, but in research published in Science, doctors Pank Arbøll and Lund Rasmussen now dare to trace it back another thousand years.
Kissing in a friendly or brotherly way “should not be regarded as a custom that originated exclusively in a single region and spread from there, but seems to have been practiced in multiple ancient cultures over several millennia,” Arbøll says.. Syrians and Iraqis not only don't have the patent, because as biologist Rasmussen points out, “bonobos and chimpanzees also kiss, which suggests that it is a fundamental behavior in humans, and explains why it can be found everywhere.” The cultures”. Fraternal kisses appear in the Bible, in classical Greek literature, and there are even anthropological studies that suggest that the Cro-Magnon woman chewed the food that she put into her children's mouths.
But another thing is the romantic or sexual kiss. Clear examples of its existence were found in the cuneiform writing on clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, as well as “a substantial corpus of medical texts, some of which mention a disease with symptoms reminiscent of herpes simplex virus 1,” he says. Dr. Arboll.
Although ancient medical texts were influenced by cultural and religious concepts and cannot be interpreted literally, researchers have concluded that romantic-sexual kissing has played an important unintended role in the transmission of microorganisms.. “It is interesting to note some similarities between a disease known as bu'shanu and the symptoms caused by herpes simplex infections.. It was mainly located in or around the mouth and throat, and symptoms included vesicles, which is one of the dominant signs of herpes infection,” Rasmussen said.
“If the practice of kissing was widespread in a variety of ancient societies, the effects of kissing in terms of pathogen transmission must have been more or less constant,” Rasmussen concludes.
Recent paleogenomic research has shown that common kissing-transmissible pathogens were present in ancient and even prehistoric historical periods.. In fact, Arbøll and Rasmussen's research follows up on the conclusions of a July 2022 study published in Science Advances, which linked a change in herpes HSV-1 lineages in ancient humans with the rise of sexual kissing during the Ages. of the Bronze.
Arbøll and Rasmussen believe that the thing will not stop here and that the pathogens will give for more, depending on what emerges from future investigations of ancient DNA. “The most difficult is not the first kiss, but the last”, wrote the poet Paul Géraldy, but the investigations seem to insist on the contrary.