A researcher has come up with a new hypothesis for the origin of kissing and you may not like it
Kyiv • UNN
A British primatologist has hypothesized that kissing originated from the practice of grooming primates. The researcher believes that people have preserved this ritual as a vestige of social interaction.
No one knows for sure when people started kissing. However, the practice of pressing lips to another person, whether friendly or loving, is not universal. This means that culture, rather than instincts, probably plays a bigger role here. However, this practice is common not only to humans but also to some primates. Based on this, Adirano Lameira, a primatologist and evolutionary psychologist at the University of Warwick in the UK, has put forward his hypothesis of the origin of kissing, UNN writes with reference to Science alert.
Details
According to the researcher, first kisses were part of the everyday meaning of caring for each other among our ancestors. Lameira came to this conclusion based on observations of primate behavior: when a primate helps another primate take care of itself, when it encounters a problem, such as a parasite, it bends down and grabs the problem with its lips, sucking it out with care. The researcher suggests that although humans have lost the need for such care over time, this almost ritualistic action of kissing has survived.
"The hygienic importance of grooming in the course of human evolution declined due to the loss of fur. However, even those shorter sessions that remained would have preserved the final stage of the 'kiss' as expected, eventually remaining the only trace of a once ritualistic behavior to signal and cement social and kinship ties," the scientist believes.
The references to kissing between people date back thousands of years. So this aspect of interaction is not subject to fleeting fashions. In the past, it has been suggested that kissing is associated with feeding babies pre-chewed food. However, kissing involves the lips sticking out and some degree of sucking. And feeding a baby pre-chewed food requires pushing it into the baby's mouth. Therefore, this assumption seems somewhat questionable. Another assumption is that kissing could have originated from the ritual of sniffing. But the question arises: why would the lips be involved in this process?
Lameira believes that the practice of kissing is part of social interaction, rituals that cement social bonds and calm down. This conclusion is based on the fact that humans, like primates, are social beings. In primates, one of the most common forms of social interaction is grooming, i.e. caring for another member of the social group, for their skin and fur: combing, removing parasites, dead skin cells, debris and dirt. In addition to the direct hygienic purpose, such actions help to establish and maintain alliances, hierarchy, and cohesion through contact, which causes the release of endorphins that reduce stress and promote a sense of well-being. In this way, the bond between caregivers and care recipients is further strengthened.
But compared to primates, humans spend a total of 89% less time caring for another human _ we've lost our fur and developed methods of self-care. However, according to the researcher, we may well have retained rudimentary remnants of this important ritual. Lameira calls it "the groomer's last kiss." From such a touch, a kiss from mouth to mouth could well have developed in the future. But the further evolution of kissing depended on cultural and social contexts, the researcher believes.
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