Researcher: Kissing was originally used to remove lice and parasites from the hair of a nearby monkey

Unromantically said: a person does not achieve any benefits by kissing. So if we look at kissing strictly biologically.

Vice versa. Kissing can spread bacteria and infectious diseases. Two people’s bacterial strains encounter each other, and usually still moist.

Maybe kissing once mattered? Now, evolutionary psychology and zoology have presented a new hypothesis about the origin of kissing.

Kissing may have started when adult great apes also cleaned each other with the help of their mouths, along with kissing. With the help of the mouth, parasites, insects and debris were effectively removed from the hair.

Snoring is very important for several monkey species. A lot of time is spent on it in monkey communities.

The importance of swimming is very clear to monkey researchers. Even for a layman, it is a familiar sight from nature documentaries.

The monkeys fingered their fellow species’ hair centimeter by centimeter with their fingers. They look for lice, insects, parasites and debris among the hairs and roots.

When one is found, it is grabbed by the hair. Many times the smoker eats it.

Swimming in addition, the primate can also push out its lips. Lips can suck out insects, parasites and debris from the pubic hair.

This is peer care. Parasites, for example, can transmit various diseases to a monkey.

Checking the second coat takes a lot of the second person’s time. Therefore, it also strengthens the social bonds of the community.

The monkeys kissing techniques are well known by primate researchers and evolutionary psychologists Adriano Lameira from the University of Warwick in England.

Lameira came to his assumption when he started to find out different ideas about the origin of kissing.

Previously, it has been suggested that one of the origins of kissing is sniffing. Another alternative to kissing is breastfeeding babies.

A third suggestion is that the older apes may have sometimes chewed up food for their young offspring and fed them.

Lameira rejects all of these. He presents his own “cleansing theory” in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology.

lick not convinced about sniffing, nursing or feeding as the source of kissing.

“I can smell your scent without having to pucker my lips and suck, right?” he asks.

“If I feed food through my mouth, of course I stick my lips out, so it’s close to kissing. But I push something out, I don’t take anything in.”

A great ape’s kiss appears to have a mission as it approaches another ape with protruding lips.

Sometimes the monkey makes a sucking motion at the same time. In this way, it latches onto any parasite or debris it finds in another’s fur.

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Kissing is frowned upon in many communities. It might even be considered a bit outrageous.

Human the origins of dance, language and, for example, imagination have been studied in laboratories, but not kissing.

Lameira wonders about this in an interview with science magazine.

He says that what some consider to be kissing by great apes has often been misinterpreted. It has also been considered a kiss if the monkeys have opposite noses.

A kiss however, is not common in human communities.

A person from the West sees kissing from their own perspective. In the West, kissing is romanticized. You see it in the mass media in different contexts every day.

This is not always the case elsewhere. Science journal American Anthropologist published a 2015 studyaccording to which only 46 percent of the 168 cultures studied maintain a custom of romantic kissing or strengthening social bonds.

In many hunter-gatherer communities, kissing is frowned upon. It might even be considered a bit outrageous.

Primates have many other rituals with which the community strengthens its bonds. A capuchin monkey can, for example, put its fingers in the nostrils and eyes of a fellow species, says a popular science magazine Popular Science.

Human the lineage changed in evolution. At some point, hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago, we lost most of our hair.

This meant that grooming gradually lost its importance. However, the custom survived.

Kissing became a ritual that strengthened and bound human communities together. Lameira calls the way “the last kiss of a suki”.

lick says that kissing occurs more in those monkey species that live more on the ground than in trees.

And on the ground, monkeys are more susceptible to parasites than their tree-dwelling relatives. This discovery would therefore support Lameira’s assumption about the origin of kissing.

Lameira says that his assumption could perhaps be investigated further. Researchers could follow the daily life of monkeys that have lost their fur for one reason or another.

Hairlessness may affect how and where such monkeys kiss.