While kissing may feel like one of the most natural things in the world, this common behavior is mysterious – various animals also kiss, despite the lack of practical benefits and the real risk of disease transmission.
To shed light on the smooching enigma, researchers have attempted to reconstruct the evolutionary history of kissing in a heavy family tree, including mammals, monkeys, and humans. The discovery of the group suggests that kissing is an ancient form, the ancestors of the large APES appear (like humans 21.5 to 16.9 million years ago and they stick to this day and survive the large species of APE.
“This is the first time that anyone has taken a broad evolutionary lens to examine kissing,” Matilda, a biologist at the University of Oxford, said in a statement from the university. “Our findings add to a growing body of work highlighting the incredible diversity of sexual behaviors displayed by our bodies.” Brindle is the lead author of a study published today on evolution and human behavior.
What is a hug?
First, the group had to scientifically explain the kiss. That’s harder than it sounds, given that many oral methods seem like kissing and the meaning had to be modeled in different ways. Finally they decided on It’s really amazing Definition of love: Unpleasant mouth-to-mouth contact without the transfer of food. Pucker up.
Brindle and his colleagues gathered previously documented information on modern species of kissing, focusing on rituals and experiments that originated in Europe, Africa and Asia, including orangutans (all three have been documented kissing). Treating kissing as a “characteristic,” the team ran the computer model 10 times to simulate various evolutionary scenarios and estimate the probability of kissing for different ancestors.
“By combining evolutionary biology with behavioral data, we are able to make inferences about non-dangerous signals – like hugs.
Kissing Partners
This method revealed that Neanderthals may have kissed, too. In addition to previous evidence showing that humans and our higher-order cousins now transfer saliva and mate, the results strongly suggest that Homo sapiens And the neanderthals are also impressive.
“While hugging can be seen as normal or normal behavior, it’s only written into human culture,” explains Call Talbot, study co-author and assistant professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. “The norms and the social context and diversity of diversity in societies, raises the question of whether the embrace of the expressed behavior or the establishment of culture. This is the first step to address this question.”
Naturally, there are some important limitations that must be pointed out, given the method used. This paper is based on previously recorded behavior and computer simulations, and not direct observations. This is especially important when it comes to extinct species, including neanderthals. In addition, the data that exceeds the good APES are starse, the limits of how far the findings are. The results also depend on the assumptions built into the models, which means that the results can vary with different parameters.
At the very least, and as noted in the press release, the study provides a framework for future work and provides a way for primatologists to record kissing situations in naive animals using the perfect buzzkill.
