Posted by Becca Lewis | Published
If you love a good rom-com, you might not want to hear why scientists believe humans have changed the way they kiss. Often stemming from the idea of sharing a soul that arose about 4,500 years ago, kissing has been part of the love discourse for thousands of years, but the true roots of kissing are more disgusting than you might think. Early hominids probably removed parasites from each other, a practice we can currently see in our closest ancestors, the apes.
Kissing Was a Way to Disinfect
A recent paper on the habit of kissing in humans published by Adriano R. Lameira, Associate Professor and UK Research & Innovation Future Leaders Fellow in the Department of Psychology, University of Warwick in the UK, suggests that the behavior originated in grooming. pets participate.
As people transitioned to having less hair, the cool behavior of grooming became less of a practical task and a cool behavior. The paper’s research was based on the current, observed behavior of monkeys, using a living source to assess the current behavior of humans and their offspring.
Grommer’s last kiss
The grooming behavior has been called the “groom’s final kiss” because lip sucking is often the last part of the grooming ritual in which the monkeys participate for the purpose of bonding and removing parasites. Once the other monkey’s body hair has been thoroughly cleaned by its grooming partner, the final step is to pass the final coat to the groomer’s lips. Research suggests that this groom’s “last kiss” is the origin of the human kiss.
Because there is no visual or written record from early hominids to determine their behavior or reasons for kissing, there is a huge gap in the visual evidence of scientific theories on the matter. Although we can see that there are similar behaviors in chimpanzees that seem similar to human kissing and the promotion of social bonding, we cannot say for sure how that relates to modern human ideas about kissing.
Although anthropologists can examine current behavior and compare it to the behavior of living ancestors, there is no way to evaluate physical evidence on the subject beyond what is recorded by humans.
Some Ideas
Previous theories about the origins of human kissing say that humans first suckle while breastfeeding and then translate that suckling behavior into sucking the mother’s lips, and perhaps sucking the lips of other partners.
Less developed hypotheses include the idea that women’s mouths are seen as a proxy for sex and that kissing comes from this release of the mouths, but this theory does not show how this behavior started over time or when it was introduced. It is very likely that the behavior began as a grooming behavior and a bonding ritual that overrides the actual cause of the impulse.
No matter how disgusting, the idea that we inherited the act of kissing from our black animal ancestors fully explains why the behavior exists in every continent and culture, and why it is natural to our concept of romantic love.
Kissing as a progression of bonding culture explains why this practice occurs between close family members in other cultures or between acquaintances in other cultures. As the practice developed, the customs of bringing people together evolved to meet the needs of the communities we built, making the practice similar but different in different social and cultural contexts.
Source: Evolutionary Anthropology
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