Viruses have history.  Virus history is deep history, older than the history written in books. Virus history is older than human history, older than the history of disease, older than the history of all living organisms and possibly as old as the history of life on earth.

Readings:
Luis Villareal, “Are Viruses Alive?” Scientific American December 2004, 291(6): 100-105. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26060805

Carl Zimmer, “Ancient Viruses are Buried in Your DNA,” New York Times October 4, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/science/ancient-viruses-dna-genome.html 

Edward C. Holmes and Andrew Rambaut, "Viral Evolution and the Emergence of SARS Coronavirus," Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, Vol. 359, No. 1447, Emerging Infections: What Have We Learnt from SARS? (Jul. 29, 2004), pp. 1059-1065. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4142237

Kelly M. Harkins and Anne C. Stone, "Ancient pathogen genomics: insights into timing and adaptation," Journal of Human Evolution 2015 (79) pp. 137-149. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248414002681?via%3Dihub

Music credits:
Nettle, "Black Eyes" on On A Steady Diet of Hash, Bread, & Salt by Soundeyet (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Soundeyet/On_A_Steady_Diet_of_Hash_Bread__Salt). Licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.