For the first time, an international team of scientists led by the University of Cambridge have deciphered the ancient genomes of the herpesviruses that cause lip sores.
In the wake of Bronze Age migrations into Europe from the Steppe grasslands of Eurasia, and population booms that drove rates of transmission, new research suggests that the strain of facial herpes we know today was created.
There is a history of the disease stretching back millions of years. Scientists say that ancient examples of HSV-1 were difficult to find.
According to a study published in the journal Science Advances, the Neolithic flourishing of facial herpes may have been linked to the introduction of romantic and sexual kissing.
Over the course of weeks and months, the world has seen COVID-19 evolve. The co-senior author said that aviruses evolve on a grander time scale.
Facial herpes can only be transmitted through oral contact and can take hundreds of years to change. She said that they needed to do deep time investigations to understand how the viruses evolved. Previously, genetic data for the disease was only available in 1925.
The team was able to recover viral DNA from the roots of the teeth of four individuals who had been dead for over a thousand years. Two of the ancient corpses had gum disease and a third smoked tobacco.
The oldest sample came from an adult male who was excavated in the late Iron Age.
There were two more samples in the UK. A female from an early Anglo- Saxon cemetery is a few miles south of the city. The other young adult male was buried in the grounds of Cambridge's charitable hospital in the late 14th century and had terrible dental problems.
The last sample came from a young adult male who was most likely killed by a French attack on his village in 1672.
"We screened ancient DNA samples from around 3000 archaeological finds and got just four herpes hits," said co-lead author Dr.
Dr. Lucy van Dorp from the University College London Genetics Institute said that they were able to analyze the differences between ancient and 20th century samples and estimate a time line for the evolution of the virus.
Dr. Christiana Scheib, Research Fellow at St. John's College, University of Cambridge, and Head of the Ancient DNA lab at Tartu University, said that every primate species has a form of herpes.
It could have been linked to kissing, but something happened around five thousand years ago that allowed one strain of Herpes to overtake all others.
According to the researchers, the earliest known record of kissing is a Bronze Age manuscript from South Asia, and suggests that the custom may have traveled west with the migration of people from Europe.
The Emperor Tiberius tried to ban kissing at official functions in order to stop the spread of diseases. The same strain of HSV-1 would have been passed from mother to child.
The World Health Organization says that two-thirds of the world's population under the age of 50 carry the disease. For most of us, the occasional lip sores that result are embarrassing and uncomfortable, but in addition to other ailments, the virus can be fatal. The deaths of two women in the UK in the last year were caused by the same disease.
"Only genetic samples that are hundreds or even thousands of years old will allow us to understand how our immune systems are adapting to each other."
The team would like to find out more about the disease's cause and how it came to be. The next mountain to be climbed is Neanderthal.
More information: Meriam Guellil et al, Ancient herpes simplex 1 genomes reveal recent viral structure in Eurasia, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo4435. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abo4435 Journal information: Science Advances
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