It is thought that the first cases of cold sores may have been caused by the herpesviruses about 5000 years ago.
Christiana Scheib is a research fellow at the University of Cambridge and head of the Ancient DNA lab. 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.
It's the theory. The leader of Cambridge University's Department of Genetics told The Guardian that more evidence is needed to prove the link between Bronze Age make-out sessions and modern herpes. She said that kissing doesn't fossilise well.
According to the World Health Organization (opens in new tab), the most common type of herpes that causes cold sores is the Herpes Simplex Viruses 1 and 2. Sometimes blisters or open sores can appear at the site of an infectious disease, even though it produces no symptoms. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 70% of people under the age of 50 have an HSV-1 infection, and most of them acquire it through saliva.
The oral and genital herpesviruses are having sex. It is worrisome.
According to a new study published in the journal Science Advances, the modern HSV-1 virus was more dominant than the other versions of the disease during the Bronze Age.
The remains of four people were excavated in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Russia. The oldest remains found in Russia were about 1,500 years old, and the youngest in the Netherlands were about 350 years old.
The oldest genomes recovered before the study were from 1925.
The researchers looked at the roots of these people's teeth to see if they had any genetic fingerprints of the herpesviruses. Unlike bones, teeth don't regenerate, meaning they don't replace their old cells with new ones. The cumulative record of pathogens a person has encountered can be provided by the teeth.
The researchers were able to trace the evolutionary history of the pathogen by comparing the newly discovered herpes DNA to the 20th centuryviruses. They found out that the emergence of HSV-1 probably took a few hundred years. The custom of romantic and sexual kissing may have become more common during Bronze Age migrations to Europe.
The earliest written record of kissing is a Bronze Age manuscript from South Asia. The Romans tried to ban kissing at official functions in the first century A.D., after Alexander the Great brought the custom to the Mediterranean.
The authors argue that the increase in kissing may have helped the spread of the virus. "If you suddenly have a group of people who are kissing, which was not a universal human behavior, that is an extra way to spread the virus," he said. According to a study published in the journal American Anthropologist, romantic kissing isn't common in modern cultures.
Again, this is just a hypothesis. Even if romantic kissing became more common during Bronze Age migrations, it's not clear how much influence these sessions would have had on the evolution of the herpesviruses. In modern times, most people catch HSV-1 in childhood, similar to how most people caught it in the past, when they caught it from their family.
It was originally published on Live Science
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