Claire Ainsworth. It all started with a kiss

Hello Beautiful! I won't give a penny to anyone who can figure out why you're connecting your beer-soaked circular mouth muscles to mine while the thorns of a drying Christmas tree rain down on us. If I'm lucky today, you'll be able to explore my oral cavity with your tongue , so that my mouth will be filled with your saliva, the billions of bacteria it contains , and maybe even particles of well-chewed salted nuts that you just gnawed.

Tell me, my love, what did I do to deserve this happiness?

What is it about trees and booze that turns a Christmas party into such an epic salivation? If you think lovers do what nature tells them to do, think again. “Kissing is as unnatural as wearing clothes,” says Vaughn Bryant, an anthropology professor at Texas State University. Maybe for those who like to sit in the back row at the movies, this news will be a slight shock, but what can you do - you can’t run away from the truth: the habit of kissing is entirely a product of culture.

Although monkeys - our close relatives and incorrigible sensualists - often kiss each other, actively using their large wet tongues, this does not mean anything. Because many human cultures still do not know, or have not known for a long time, what a kiss is. Residents of one of the islands in the Pacific Ocean, for example, did not know how to kiss until the 18th century, when European conquerors arrived. Even today in China and Japan , kissing in public is considered the height of obscenity. Although, despite the traditional ban, many young people in these countries are gradually starting to kiss - obviously, succumbing to the pernicious influence of the West. But if kissing is not an innate human need, but an acquired skill, it means that there was someone once who kissed for the first time on Earth. What made him suddenly become so attached to the closest and dearest person?

There are many different theories about the origin of the kiss. Some scientists believe it all started when women began to feed their children from their mouths, chewing pieces of food for them. This is how, perhaps, a kind of first kiss appeared - a sign of affection between a mother and her child after finishing feeding. And yet this theory does not tell us the whole truth - after all, Papuan mothers on the islands of New Guinea and African tribes living in southwest Africa still feed their children in this way. But none of these peoples knew a kiss until they became acquainted with European civilization.

If the primitive ancestors of modern man knew how to kiss, then, apparently, they were very embarrassed about this habit of theirs, since it was never attested in ancient painting. We find one of the first mentions of a kiss in the Vedic texts (memoirs of ancient Indian literature written in Sanskrit), dating back to approximately 1500 BC. This source mentions the custom of rubbing noses together. According to Professor Bryant, this custom may have been the prototype of the kiss on the lips.

Be that as it may, the ancient Indian erotic treatise “Kama Sutra”, written in the 6th century AD, is replete with descriptions of various kisses . The Kama Sutra teaches three main types of kissing on the lips and even prescribes exactly how to respond to which kiss. The simplest type of kiss on the lips is a kiss when the person being kissed does not react in any way to the act of kissing. The second type of kiss is also a closed-lip kiss, but in which the kissed person moves his lips slightly. Finally, the third type of kiss involves the contact of the tongue with the lips of the partner.

The first Europeans to adopt this habit were the Greeks. But mutual kissing became truly popular only in Ancient Rome . The erotic Latins even had several words to designate different types of kisses. The word osculum was a light peck on the cheek, the word basium was a more erotic kiss on the lips, and the word saviolum was a passionate kiss involving the tongue.

By the time of the late Middle Ages, kissing had already become firmly established in the everyday life of Europeans, but then the Catholic Church decided that things were getting out of control. Only a kiss as a sign of reverence for the Lord began to be considered the only acceptable thing. A kiss undertaken for the sake of carnal pleasure or - even worse - with the aim of inducing adultery, was regarded as a mortal sin.

So, if the Church Fathers were right, we are all destined to burn in hell long ago. Sensuality is what owes the kiss its unprecedented popularity among people, says Professor Bryant. The tongue and lips are among the most sensitive organs of our body: they are equipped with millions of nerve endings. A kiss is an irritation of nerve endings that gives us a feeling of carnal joy, the release of hormones and endorphins that lift our spirits. Moreover, substances contained in saliva may increase a partner's sexual attractiveness.

The answer to the mystery of a kiss lies in the chemistry of sexuality, says Bryant . She is convinced that a kiss helps us get an idea of ​​our partner through smell. And that the Papuan custom of rubbing noses together is nothing more than sniffing each other, inhaling the smell emitted by the glands located on the cheeks.

And this makes sense, since this smell can say a lot about a person, especially to a member of the opposite sex. “Smell is essentially the body’s phenotype for the immune system ,” says Rachel Hertz, a professor of psychology at the University of Rhode Island. “ Women subconsciously prefer the smell of men whose genes encoding the characteristics of the immune system are significantly different from their own. ” . This makes sense because pairing two individuals with different immune genes will result in healthier offspring.

So keep in mind: even if you pour so much cologne on yourself that the neighbors' canaries die, you will still be detected.

New Scientist

Abridged translation by Ilya Kun