The Absolutely Disgusting Reason People Started Kissing – And It Has Nothing To Do With Love

Kiss your assumptions goodbye.

You might think you know why people like to lock lips, but a new study published this month revealed the real history behind why we lock lips.

Research led by Adriano R. Lameira, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Warwick in England, concludes that kissing was once an evolutionary instinct, something done to care for another being.

“The evidence suggests that kissing is not a derived signal of affection in humans,” said Lameira, who believes that kissing was once part of a method of removing lice. Daily Mail.

“Instead, it represents a surviving, devolved, and vestigial form of primate care that has preserved its ancestral form, context, and function.”

According to the monkey behavior study, “kissing is probably the conserved final oral contact stage of a grooming session, when the caregiver sucks with protruding lips the fur or skin of the groomed to latch on to debris or a parasite.”

“This made grooming important for hygiene purposes, given the high parasite load on the soil,” Lameira said.

But as humans evolved with less body hair, grooming became less necessary and eventually only what we know today as kissing remained.

Lameira estimates that humans “became a kissing ape” around 2 to 4 million years ago, and the earliest record of humans kissing, per the Daily Mail, appears in Mesopotamian texts around 2500 BC.

How it became a sexual act, however, “remains more speculative,” he noted, adding that kissing with “sexual intent” is “a special case” of such behavior and that further research is needed to identify how in which kissing and sex. become so intertwined.

“Only once kissing was used as a general convention to show affection could kissing become a mutual, mouth-to-mouth act,” he explained.

The kiss, now, is “a crystallized symbol of trust and affiliation,” added Lameira,

“Few natural human signals carry the symbolism and social sanctions of the kiss,” Lameira said, adding that the kiss is now “a crystallized symbol of trust and affiliation.”