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The reason our ancestors started kissing has nothing to do with love, says study
Across cultures and countries, kissing is treated as a common form of affection. Apart from the meaning associated with it, evolutionary psychiatrists argue that the reason our ancestors started smooching had nothing to do with love or any other emotion.
Call it a sign of love or lust, a lot of significance is placed on a kiss. In fact, kissing for as little as six seconds is believed to reduce stress among other things. But your perception of the gesture won’t remain the same after learning why humans started kissing in the first place.
Researchers trace back the origin of kissing
Though kissing has been prevalent for hundreds and thousands of years, researcher Dr. Adriano R. Lameira from the University of Warwick argues that it wasn’t born out of emotions as we assume today.
In his latest research paper titled, The Evolutionary Origin of Human Kissing, he says smooching – the protruding of the lips and slight suction – could have been used by apes to groom one another.
He argues that great apes used their mouths to remove debris or parasites like lice and ticks, and the mouth-to-mouth contact was the “last stage” of grooming.
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“Great ape social behavior suggests that kissing is likely the conserved final mouth-contact stage of a grooming bout when the groomer sucks with protruded lips the fur or skin of the groomed to latch on debris or a parasite,” he writes in his research.
Grooming became less important as we evolved from apes and our bodies lost a significant amount of hair/fur.
Regardless of the duration of grooming, the evolutionary psychiatrist believes that our ancestors would have “preserved this final step” – smooching.
Its meaning changed over the years
If Adriano’s proposed theory were to be true, our ancestors “became a kissing ape” around 2-4 million years ago when they lost all their fur, according to the researcher’s observations shared with Daily Mail.
However, the exact reason why kissing gained a sexual connotation “remains more speculative”. He believes that the kiss has been “turned into a crystalized symbol of trust and affiliation”.
He concludes by saying that kissing isn’t a “derived signal of affection in humans.” Furthermore, no other creatures of the animal kingdom kiss like humans.
“‘It instead represents a surviving devolved, vestigial form of primate grooming that conserved its ancestral form, context, and function,” he adds.
