By Becca Lewis | Published
If you like a good romantic comedy, you might not like hearing the reason why scientists think people evolved the kissing behavior. Often attributed to the idea of sharing a breath that originated around 4,500 years ago, human kissing has been a part of romantic expression for millennia, but the true roots of kissing are far more disgusting than many people realize. think. Early hominids likely got rid of parasites on each other, an act we can currently observe in our closest living ancestors, the apes.
Kissing was a way to eliminate parasites
A recent article on kissing in humans published by Adriano R. Lameira, a British associate professor and researcher in Future Leaders Research and Innovation in the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, suggests that the behavior came from a grooming activity. primates participate in it.
As people evolved to have less hair, the soothing behavior of grooming became less of a practical activity and more of a calming behavior. The study in this article was based on the current, observable behavior of primates, using a living source to assess the current behavior of humans and their descendants.
Grommer’s Last Kiss
The grooming behavior has been called “the groomer’s last kiss” because lip sucking is usually the last part of a grooming ritual that monkeys participate in for the purpose of bonding as well as removing parasites. Once another primate’s body hair has been thoroughly cleaned by its grooming partner, the final step is to make a final pass over the lips of the subject being groomed. The study suggests that this groomer’s ‘final kiss’ is the origin of the human kiss.
Because there is no visual or written record of early hominids to determine their behavior or the reasons for their kissing, there is a large 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 and are driven by social bonding, we cannot say for sure how this relates to modern human ideas about kissing .
Although anthropologists can evaluate current behaviors and compare them to those of living primate ancestors, there is no way to evaluate the physical evidence on the subject beyond what humans have recorded.
Other theories
Previous theories about the origins of human kissing posited that people began suckling while breastfeeding and translated this sucking behavior into sucking a mother’s lips, and perhaps sucking the lips of others they bond with .
Less developed hypotheses include the idea that women’s mouths have been seen as a sexual proxy and that kissing comes from this sexualization of the mouth, but this idea does not show how this behavior developed over time nor when it was introduced. It is more likely that the behavior began as a grooming behavior and bonding ritual that transcended the practical cause of the impulse.
As disgusting as it may sound, the idea that we inherited the act of kissing from our primate ancestors better explains why this behavior exists across continents and cultures, and why it is so inherent to our idea of romantic love.
Kissing as a continuation of a bonding ritual explains why this practice occurs between close family members in some cultures or between acquaintances in others. As the practice grew, humans’ bonding rituals evolved to meet the needs of the societies we built, making the practice similar but different depending on social and cultural circumstances.
Source: Evolutionary Anthropology