Monkeys and AIDS

For anybody who's curious, according to the documentary "The Age of AIDS", available for viewing at:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/aids/view/

...AIDS didn't start from somebody having sex with a monkey, although I was laughing my ass off when I heard Dave talking about that.

So anyway, here's what the theory actually is as I understand it from watching the clip. In certain areas of Africa, people still hunted and ate chimpanzees, which were already transmitting a simian version of the HIV virus to one another. Humans could get the disease from eating chimp meat, but most of the people who killed chimps for food lived out in the wilderness, in small communities. They presumably died before anybody knew what was wrong with them and before they could transmit the virus to very many people, if any. This happened to a number of people, but it didn't result in a widespread epidemic or anything until later on.

Things changed when big cities started to get established and the people who had been hunting these infected chimps (and running the risk of getting infected by eating them) headed to those cities to find other work. And, of course, they got horny. And they met many different people in these cities to help them relieve that horniness. And that's how it all got started.

Then again, maybe somebody really did *beep* a monkey. I mean, I guess they COULD get the disease that way too. Who knows? :p