I’m willing to bet the last time you thought of kissing as gross was back when you were a kid. It was also probably around the same time we girls thought you boys came with cooties.
Then you grow up to be an adult, and you believe that sharing a kiss is one of the most romantic expressions of all time. It quickly evolves from disgusting to divine.
It’s the moment we all wait for in every rom-com. It’s how we judge how well a first date went – I mean, if they can’t kiss, you can’t keep seeing them. It plays a part in gauging our abilities to keep the romance in our lives alive.
But where does kissing come from? How have we evolved to do this? Birds put on intricate dances to entice their mates, and dogs show affection by licking your face – why didn’t we evolve to do that?
I hate to break it to you, but you’re about to go right back to thinking that kissing is gross when you find out how it even started.
Actually, I’m going to allow Dr. Adriano R. Lameira to be the one to ruin it for you since he’s the one behind the study called The evolutionary origin of human kissing.
He leads a research lab called ApeTank, which is focused on uncovering the origins of our behaviors as humans, and he’s also the Associate Professor and UK Research & Innovation Future Leaders Fellow at the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick, located in the United Kingdom.
Dr. Lameira believes that kissing has everything to do with parasites and nothing to do with love, as he thinks it came to be through primitive grooming rituals.
“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,” Dr. Lameira wrote in The evolutionary origin of human kissing.
Krakenimages.com – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual people – pictured above a couple kisses in front of the ocean
“The hygienic relevance of grooming decreased over human evolution due to fur-loss, but shorter sessions would have predictably retained a final “kissing” stage, ultimately, remaining the only vestige of a once ritualistic behavior for signaling and strengthening social and kinship ties in an ancestral ape.”
So, smooching is rooted in the grooming practices our ancestors engaged in millions of years ago.
Dr. Lameira hypothesizes that as our ancestors lost their fur, grooming became obsolete, along with that final step of lip-locking with whoever it was you happened to be grooming.
Along the way, kissing then evolved to be an ultimate symbol of trust and romance, you know, after we stopped having to pull parasites off of one another.
You can read Dr. Adriano R. Lameira’s study on the evolution of kissing here.
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