Discovered in 1972, the “Hasanlu Lovers” perished around 800 B.C., their final moments seemingly locked in an eternal embrace or kiss, preserved for 2800 years

Open the history,..;'//////https://www.highcpmgate.com/i9wxe52s77?key=797d33e3786455ffce63699420e0bd3c
 Fascinating story. Both were young and suffered no apparent injuries despite the entire city was massacred. They likely asphyxiated in this burial bin which partially explained the final pose. The person lying on his back was indeed a male. The person lying on the side was initially presumed to be a female (even by some archaeologists) but somehow difficult to determine definitively by bone structures. Eventually DNA analysis showed that person was also a biological male.

Reasons for expecting the skeletons to be a heteronormative couple, as Killgrove and Geller explain, are because modern society is primed by culture to see this representation. Geller states that projecting contemporary assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality onto the past can be problematic, and that the true relationship between the two skeletons is unknown and remains up to speculation, despite the implications that may be drawn from their apparently intimate pose

Honestly, with the age difference it could have been a parent and their child. Wasn't really an uncommon age difference back then and isn't really today. My g/f had her first kid at 16, he's 25 now. If she had to die with him I could see her curling up with her head against her kid in her last momentsI thought about this too. No shade on age gap relationships but if a marauding army threw a father and son into a pit and the son died first, I'm pretty sure that's exactly the position I'd imagine his dying father taking trapped in there beside him.

That said if this were the case there's probably some existing method of determining this with DNA, no? I'm not an archaeologist though, so a smarter person than me would have to answer thatGiven that these two died in a raid, probably from asphyxiation, we can't really read too much into their posture.

Even regardless of that though we can't really know what this culture thought about kissing. It might have been a family only thing, or something done between strangers.

But I don't think it hurts to call them lovers. We'll never really know their names or stories, but giving them one isn't the worst thingI always assumed it was possible they knew they were going to die, and tried to comfort each other the way people did during 9/11. And then you go through something like that, and the immediate response by everyone else is GAAAAAAY.

It's possible. But regardless, I like to just think of it as two dudes being good to each other. Whether it was romantic, platonic, or two complete strangers. Hell it could've been a father comforting a son during the blast for all we know