Written by Becca Lewis | Published
If you’re a fan of good romantic comedies, you might not want to hear why scientists think people evolved kissing behavior. Kissing in humans is often attributed to the idea of sharing oneself that emerged about 4,500 years ago, and has been part of a romantic expression for thousands of years, but the true roots of kissing are more disgusting than you might think. Early human ancestors likely prepared parasites from each other, an act we can currently observe in our closest living ancestors, the apes.
Kissing was a way to remove parasites
A recent research paper on the practice of kissing in humans, published by Adriano R. Lamira, associate professor and Future UK Research and Innovation Leaders Fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick in the UK, suggests that this behavior arose from grooming activity. Primates participate in.
As people evolved to have less hair, the soothing behavior of shaving became less of a hands-on activity and more of a soothing behavior. The study for the paper was based on the observed current behavior of primates, using a living source to assess the current behavior of people and their descendants.
Gromer’s last kiss
The grooming behavior is called the “nanny’s last kiss” because lip-sucking is usually the last part of the grooming ritual that monkeys engage in for the purpose of bonding as well as practical removal of parasites. Once the hair on a fellow primate’s body has been completely cleaned by his shaving partner, the final step is to make a final pass over the subject’s lips. The study indicates that this groom’s “last kiss” is the root cause of human kissing.
Since there is no visual or written record from early humans to determine their behavior or reasons for kissing, there is a significant gap in observable evidence for scientific theories on the subject. While we can see that there are similar behaviors in apes that appear similar to kissing in humans as well as being driven by social bonding, we cannot say with certainty how this relates to modern humans’ ideas about kissing.
While anthropologists can evaluate current behaviors and compare them to the behavior of living primate ancestors, there is no way to evaluate physical evidence on the subject beyond what humans have recorded.
Other theories
Previous theories about the origins of human kissing posit that people initiate sucking while breastfeeding and translate this sucking behavior into sucking the mother’s lips, and perhaps sucking the lips of others with whom they are attached.
Less developed hypotheses include the idea that women’s mouths are viewed as a sexual indicator and that kissing comes from the sexualization of mouths, but this idea does not explain how this behavior developed over time or when it was introduced. It is more likely that the behavior began as grooming behavior and bonding rituals that went beyond the practical reason for the motive.
No matter how disgusting, the idea that we inherited the act of kissing from our primate ancestors fully explains why this behavior exists across continents and cultures, and why it is ingrained in our idea of romantic love.
Kissing as a continuation of bonding rituals explains why this practice occurs between close family members in some cultures or between acquaintances in others. As this practice evolved, human bonding rituals evolved to meet the needs of the communities we built, making the practice similar but different depending on social and cultural circumstances.
source: Evolutionary anthropology