A couple takes part in the sixth Non-Stop Kissing Contest at the Taipei Railway Station as part of the Valentine's Day celebrations, in Taipei, Taiwan. Pictureby EPA/DAVID CHANG.
Johannesburg - That first romantic kiss between two lovers lost to time, has long been tainted by accusations of the spread of early disease.
Now the kiss, that most universal expression of love, has been cleared of wrongdoing, thanks to a pile of ancient texts that date back 4 500 years.
Until recently, the hypothesis was that the earliest evidence of human kissing came from South Asia 3 500 years ago and from there it spread to the rest of the world.
But with the spread of this new romantic fad came herpes, passed from mouth to mouth.
Now researchers have found evidence of the smooch a thousand years earlier recorded on clay tablets, from ancient Mesopotamia, an ancient civilisation that existed between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in what is now modern day Iraq and Syria.
Many of these tablets written in cuneiform script contain evidence of romantic kissing. “Therefore, kissing should not be regarded as a custom that originated exclusively in any single region and spread from there but rather appears to have been practised in multiple ancient cultures over several millennia,” said Dr Troels Pank Arbøll, an expert on the history of medicine in Mesopotamia.
It is not just humans that engage in kissing, our closest relatives do too.
Dr Sophie Lund Rasmussen added: “In fact, research into bonobos and chimpanzees, the closest living relatives to humans, has shown that both species engage in kissing. This may suggest that the practice of kissing is a fundamental behaviour in humans, explaining why it can be found across cultures.” The above two academics published their research in the latest issue of the journal Science.
The suspicion has been that the practice of kissing played an unintentional role in the sudden spread of some diseases. One of these is the herpes simplex virus 1 that is characterised by cold sores and fever blisters.
The researchers believe that this is doubtful.
“If the practice of kissing was widespread and well-established in a range of ancient societies, the effects of kissing in terms of pathogen transmission must likely have been more or less constant”, said Rasmussen.
In fact, the same clay tablets that contain written evidence of those first smooches might mention a disease with symptoms similar to herpes simplex virus 1.
“It is nevertheless interesting to note some similarities between the disease known as bu’shanu in ancient medical texts from Mesopotamia and the symptoms caused by herpes simplex infections.
“The bu’shanu disease was located primarily in or around the mouth and throat, and symptoms included vesicles in or around the mouth, which is one of the dominant signs of herpes infection.”
The final say in whether kissing was a disease driver all that time ago might one day, the researchers believe, be solved by future research into ancient DNA.
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