Kissing, also known as kissing, is a common way of expressing love and affection among humans. People often use kisses to express their feelings, share happiness or show their love for someone. But it is interesting to know when and how humans learned to kiss. Did it evolve naturally or come by imitating another species? New research by scientists answers these questions.
According to research, humans started kissing around 50,000 years ago. This behavior did not evolve naturally by humans, but is believed to have been learned from our closest ancestors, the Neanderthals. Researchers at the University of Oxford and the Florida Institute of Technology have documented that early humans learned to kiss after coming into contact with Neanderthals. Neanderthals inhabited Europe and Western Asia about 400,000 to 40,000 years ago. It is also known that traces of Neanderthal DNA are still present in modern humans, indicating that they were closely .
However, it was unclear whether kissing was part of the relationship between Neanderthals and humans. For this reason, scientists tried to find out whether kissing was a natural behavior or developed culturally. Catherine Talbot, the lead author of the study, says that today kiss is considered a symbol of love in many cultures, but only 46 percent of the world’s cultures have a tradition of kissing. This is not common in many societies, which suggests that the habit did not spread equally everywhere.
Researchers studied modern primates such as chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans to understand the history of kissing. These animals have sometimes been seen making mouth contact or making light kissing-like movements. The research team used a statistical technique called Bayesian modeling to study when this behavior began.
The results showed that the habit of kissing evolved in the ancestors of great apes about 21 million to 17 million years ago. These apes were members of our own family ‘Hominidae’, which includes gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos and modern humans. This means that Neanderthals also knew how to kiss and that this behavior spread to humans through contact with them.
Scientists believe that humans and Neanderthals kissed each other during intercourse, transferring many microorganisms and habits through saliva. Kiss may not have had any romantic meaning at that time, but gradually it became a way of expression of love and relationships.
Another interesting theory was given by Professor Adriano Lamira of Warwick University. According to him, kissing probably originated from the process of ‘removing lice’. Earlier humans and their ancestors used to remove lice from each other’s body and during this there was light contact of lips. Over time, this behavior became a way of showing affection and closeness and later became a part of romantic relationships.
Thus, kissing, which is considered a symbol of love today, is linked to an evolutionary behavior millions of years old. Humans learned this habit from Neanderthals and other great apes, and even today it remains a prominent expression of many relationships.
