A romantic kiss, blandly stated, involves movement of the lower jaw (the sole movable bone in the head) and contraction of 34 muscles in the face, neck and head -- principally the orbicularis orbis, which surrounds the mouth and allows the lips to pucker.
Nerve endings abundant in the lips and on the tongue rush signals to the brain, triggering a cascade of events. Blood rushes to the lips, and the body warms. Saliva pours out of glands (which is why kisses are wet), blood testosterone levels surge, and feel-good chemicals such as endorphins and oxytocin are released in the brain.
Others suspect that the pucker evolved from mouth-to-mouth feeding, sometimes called "kiss feeding." Think of mama bird feeding her nest of baby birds -- and imagine that our distant evolutionary ancestors did something similar. Then imagine that, over time, our hominid ancestors lost the need to join lips for feeding but kept joining lips for fun.
When you really think about it, kissing is pretty gross. It involves saliva and mucous membranes, and it may have historical roots in chewed-up food. Experts estimate that hundreds or even millions of bacterial colonies move from one mouth to another during a kiss. Doctors have also linked kissing to the spread of diseases like meningitis, herpes and mononucleosis.
Yet anthropologists report that 90 percent of the people in the world kiss. Most people look forward to their first romantic kiss and remember it for the rest of their lives. Parents kiss children, worshippers kiss religious artifacts and couples kiss each other. Some people even kiss the ground when they get off an airplane.
So how does one gesture come to signify affection, celebration, grief, comfort and respect, all over the world? No one knows for sure, but anthropologists think kissing might have originated with human mothers feeding their babies much the way birds do. Mothers would chew the food and then pass it from their mouths to their babies' mouths. After the babies learned to eat solid food, their mothers may have kissed them to comfort them or to show affection.
In this scenario, kissing is a learned behavior, passed from generation to generation. We do it because we learned how to from our parents and from the society around us. There's a problem with this theory, though: women in a few modern indigenous cultures feed their babies by passing chewed food mouth-to-mouth. But in some of these cultures, no one kissed until Westerners introduced the practice.
We are people of lips – something that sets us apart from almost all other life: and our lips are everted making them the most exposed erogenous zone of our body. The area of the brain stimulated by a brush against the lips, is larger than that concerned with the reproductive organs!
As to its origin: some anthropologists believe that kissing evolved from sniffing, some indigenous cultures do rub noses rather than kissing. It is a primal urge to sample another person’s scent, and test their sexual chemistry so could touching lips have extended from rubbing noses? Sounds crazy, but we‘re not alone, moles rub noses, turtles tap their noses, dolphins rub noses, dogs lick each others face, and some birds display with beak clapping or “kissing” displays. Alternatively, kissing may evolved from “kiss feeding”: in which mothers masticate food before passing it on to a baby.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteA romantic kiss, blandly stated, involves movement of the lower jaw (the sole movable bone in the head) and contraction of 34 muscles in the face, neck and head -- principally the orbicularis orbis, which surrounds the mouth and allows the lips to pucker.
ReplyDeleteNerve endings abundant in the lips and on the tongue rush signals to the brain, triggering a cascade of events. Blood rushes to the lips, and the body warms. Saliva pours out of glands (which is why kisses are wet), blood testosterone levels surge, and feel-good chemicals such as endorphins and oxytocin are released in the brain.
Others suspect that the pucker evolved from mouth-to-mouth feeding, sometimes called "kiss feeding." Think of mama bird feeding her nest of baby birds -- and imagine that our distant evolutionary ancestors did something similar. Then imagine that, over time, our hominid ancestors lost the need to join lips for feeding but kept joining lips for fun.
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-esoterica4feb04,1,4165832.column
When you really think about it, kissing is pretty gross. It involves saliva and mucous membranes, and it may have historical roots in chewed-up food. Experts estimate that hundreds or even millions of bacterial colonies move from one mouth to another during a kiss. Doctors have also linked kissing to the spread of diseases like meningitis, herpes and mononucleosis.
ReplyDeleteYet anthropologists report that 90 percent of the people in the world kiss. Most people look forward to their first romantic kiss and remember it for the rest of their lives. Parents kiss children, worshippers kiss religious artifacts and couples kiss each other. Some people even kiss the ground when they get off an airplane.
So how does one gesture come to signify affection, celebration, grief, comfort and respect, all over the world? No one knows for sure, but anthropologists think kissing might have originated with human mothers feeding their babies much the way birds do. Mothers would chew the food and then pass it from their mouths to their babies' mouths. After the babies learned to eat solid food, their mothers may have kissed them to comfort them or to show affection.
In this scenario, kissing is a learned behavior, passed from generation to generation. We do it because we learned how to from our parents and from the society around us. There's a problem with this theory, though: women in a few modern indigenous cultures feed their babies by passing chewed food mouth-to-mouth. But in some of these cultures, no one kissed until Westerners introduced the practice.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/kissing.htm
We are people of lips – something that sets us apart from almost all other life: and our lips are everted making them the most exposed erogenous zone of our body. The area of the brain stimulated by a brush against the lips, is larger than that concerned with the reproductive organs!
ReplyDeleteAs to its origin: some anthropologists believe that kissing evolved from sniffing, some indigenous cultures do rub noses rather than kissing. It is a primal urge to sample another person’s scent, and test their sexual chemistry so could touching lips have extended from rubbing noses? Sounds crazy, but we‘re not alone, moles rub noses, turtles tap their noses, dolphins rub noses, dogs lick each others face, and some birds display with beak clapping or “kissing” displays. Alternatively, kissing may evolved from “kiss feeding”: in which mothers masticate food before passing it on to a baby.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/thekiss.shtml