The first-ever recorded kiss in history may date back earlier than we thought

Babylonian clay model showing a nude couple on a couch engaged in sex and kissing. Date: 1800 BC. (Credit: The Trustees of the British Museum) Kissing a romantic partner on the lips is a natural and common part of our modern-day society, but much remains to be learned about its origins.Humanity’s first-ever recorded instance of romantic kissing has been cited as a very specific geographical location in modern-day India some 3,500 years ago.

However, newly published research suggests it may have actually been 1,000 years earlier than that – and in a different region.

A new article, published on Thursday in the journal Science, points to a "substantial corpus of overlooked evidence" that kissing in relation to sex was already a well-established practice 4,500 years ago in the Middle East. "In ancient Mesopotamia, which is the name for the early human cultures that existed between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in present-day Iraq and Syria, people wrote in cuneiform script on clay tablets," author Dr Troels Pank Arbøll, an expert on the history of medicine in Mesopotamia from the University of Copenhagen, explained in a statement."Many thousands of these clay tablets have survived to this day, and they contain clear examples that kissing was considered a part of romantic intimacy in ancient times, just as kissing could be part of friendships and family members’ relations," Arbøll added.

Therefore, the authors say that kissing shouldn’t be regarded as a custom that originated exclusively in any single region and spread from there.