First kiss dates back 21M years | Hacker News Reader

First kiss dates back 21M years

bbc.com

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I assume kissing comes from a parent chewing up food and then transferring it to the baby.

This is innate “caring” behavior.

Similarly, mammary glands are for providing milk/nutrition.

These get associated with primal needs and therefore the amygdala, and so is associated with strong emotion.

Or, kissing is just a subset of skin to skin touching, using sensitive body parts. Not so different from holding hands.

Holding hands may also be from when babies latch on and don't let go because of the necessity of holding on to the parent. My friend's 2 year old grabbed my hand recently and it reminded me of their iron grip.

And choking fetish naturally stems from the desire to strangle an annoying baby.

Yes, there's also the "Eskimo kiss" in Inuit culture. Rubbing noses together, as a climate adjusted habit. From Wikipedia:

> Rather, it is a non-erotic but intimate greeting used by people who, when they meet outside, often have little except their nose and eyes exposed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_kiss

Any touch can be erotic, depending on the context. That's why I'm skeptical about kissing being special. People have sex with their entire bodies, not just using genitals.

Chew your meat for you, pass it back and forth In a passionate kiss from my mouth to yours I like you

One hacker to another says "I'm lucky to've met you."

What a terrible day to have basic literacy skills and an imagination.

The song is 34 years old my friend.

It was a terrible day 34 years ago.

I think it’s a lot simpler. It’s touching parts of the body that have a lot of nerve endings. Lips, fingers and hands, genitals, noses etc.

> humans and Neanderthals may even have smooched one another

More than just "smooching," if DNA has anything to say about it...

Kissing is so weird. You can make up a thousand just-so stories. You can imagine it meant totally different things through time and across cultures.

For me it just seems like yet another culturally-defined signal of intimacy. Like showing ankles or chests or saying this or that. Seems to me trying to make everything some hard wired evolutionary thing is a dead end.

The researchers found a common ancestor of many different species that all conduct non-functional kissing. The surprising thing about the research is that it specifically implies kissing is not cultural!

Do hunter gatherers kiss near-universally? I think that would answer the question of whether it is nature or nurture.

I’m allowing for it to be suppressed at times by culture, but I would expect the instinctive behavior to win the majority of the time unless the instinctive behavior is somehow harmful in an environment different from the organism’s classic environment.

Except that as the article says many animals kiss, not just humans.

Really funny on a farm when you see young calves "kissing" i.e. stick their noses/mouths together and lick each other's noses.

No, kisses tingle, even completely emotionless ones. Lips have a lot of nerve endings.

OK, now date the last one :)

I just smooched my wife and reset the timer.

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