I have seen articles connecting the two recently although I'd be hard put to put my finger on one of them quickly. Nonetheless it's a very easy connection to make. AIDS originated as a disease of apes and monkeys. You watch those PBS things about the trade in "bush meat" up and down the Congo river and ask yourself how much of that stuff ever gets cooked properly, and you just don't need to be Albert Einstein to connect the dots.
I guess it'd be like eating squirrel.
A recent study has linked SIV in chimpanzees from the Kinshasa, Congo area as being the likely original animal source. Tribes in the area, hunting chimps for food, starting dying of AIDS as early as the 1930s. Only a few genetic changes were required to allow the SIV chimp virus to jump to humans and then become infectious between humans. The first verified case is a man from Kinshasa in 1959.