Bronze Age cold sores
One of the most extraordinary stories of recent weeks is the discovery that the HSV-1 strain of the facial herpes virus that we know as the cold sore spread rapidly within Europe 5,000 years ago, coinciding with the mass migrations of people from Eurasia to Europe.
The dating, carried out at the University of Cambridge by a team of archaeologists and geneticists from all over Europe, is based on four samples of ancient DNA and statistical estimates of the rate at which the virus evolves. In a paper published in the journal Science Advances (https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abo4435), the authors say oral transmission probably took place between parent and child, but that the increase in transmission in the early Bronze Age marks the introduction of ‘new cultural practices such as the advent of sexual-romantic kissing’.
In a note called ‘A Brief History of Kissing’, Christiana Scheib of St John’s College, Cambridge, and the University of Tartu, Estonia, says that there are Neolithic figurines that have been interpreted as couples embracing, but the earliest known written record of kissing occurs in South Asian Vedic scriptures, also dating from the Bronze Age.
