Possibly, contact between the bodily fluids had to have taken place, that may mean consumption/handling of the infected animal or what-you-say. Though, that alone wouldn't cause HIV infection in humans because the viruses for both the infections are different, for that to happen the species barrier had to be breached at some point of time.
Yawn, stop repeating what a 12th standard biology student too knows.
Some of the opportunistic infections associated with AIDS are pneumocystis jirovecii pneumonia, cryptococcosis and malignancies like Kaposi's Sarcoma.
Pneumocystis pneumonia was know to mankind since the late 1800s, Kaposi's Sarcoma was documented more than 150 years back and it is known to have been prevalent much before it. Same is the case with some other systemic fungal infections associated with it like Aspergillosis (early 1800).
A patient with the above mentioned diseases could well have been infected by HIV, the association was never established as the epidemiology, clinical spectrum and virology of HIV virus was not even studied back then. Once the pathogen was identified and the pathogenicity was understood in the 1980s every piece of the puzzle quickly put in place.
Of couse, these disease that we speak of were only identified in the last 200 years because medical microbiology as a whole took a giant step forward in that period.
Tell your wife to enlighten you some more, being a despicable ignoramus is not something you want to be in this day and age.
