Cavemen kisses: Scientists discover evidence ancient humans and Neanderthals SNOGGED 50,000 years ago
A new study shows that humans kissed Neanderthals and they liked it too.
Researchers at the University of Oxford and the Florida Institute of Technology have found evidence that ancient humans kissed about 50,000 years ago.
Neanderthals (Homo neanderthaliensis) were a close human ancestor who lived in Europe and western Asia approximately 400,000 to 40,000 years ago.
Previous studies have shown that our species, Homo sapeins, had sex with Neanderthals because Neanderthal DNA survives in humans today.
However, it was not clear until now whether kissing was part of their sexual relationship.
“While kissing may seem like a commonplace or universal behavior, it has been documented in only 46 percent of human cultures,” said study author Catherine Talbot, a professor at the Florida Institute of Technology.
‘Social norms and context vary greatly between societies, raising the question of whether kissing is an evolved behavior or a cultural invention.
‘This is the first step in answering this question.’
Neanderthals, who were already settled in Europe and Asia when Homo sapiens left Africa, had large noses, strong, double-arched eyebrows, and relatively short and stocky bodies. Pictured is a Neanderthal statue in the Natural History Museum, London
Kissing is seen in animals as diverse as monkeys, polar bears, wolves, and even albatrosses, while equivalent behaviors such as nose touching and head banging are found in other animals.
For modern humans, kissing is often an integral part of the mating experience and appears to be controlled by biological impulses as much as sex itself.
But researchers call kissing an ‘evolutionary conundrum’ because while kissing carries high risks such as disease transmission, it offers no obvious advantage in reproduction or survival.
Looking at the evolutionary history of kissing is also misleading because it is clearly not a behavior that can be identified from archaeological remains.
For the study, researchers collected data from scientific literature on modern primate species that have been observed kissing, including chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans.
Experts define kissing as non-aggressive, mouth-to-mouth contact that does not involve the transfer of food.
They used a statistical approach (called Bayesian modeling) to simulate different evolutionary scenarios along the branches of the primate family tree.
The model was run 10 million times to give robust statistical estimates of our different ancestors who also kissed.
Kissing occurs in the animal kingdom (top panel clockwise) in Rhesus macaques, Galapagos albatross; polar bears, wolves and prairie dogs. The bottom panel shows non-kissing mouth-to-mouth behaviors (left to right): premastication in orangutans, trophallaxis in ants, and kiss-fighting in French grunts
The results show that kissing evolved in an ancestor of the Great Apes between 21.5 and 16.9 million years ago.
There are four living classifications of great apes or ‘Hominidae’: Orangutan, Gorilla, Pan (consisting of chimpanzee and bonobo) and Homo, of which only modern humans remain.
The results also show that Neanderthals kissed during their existence, which happened relatively recently (about 400,000 to 40,000 years ago).
This finding adds to an earlier finding to work discovered that humans and Neanderthals shared oral microbes through saliva transfer.
Combined with evidence of interbreeding, this strongly suggests that humans and Neanderthals kissed each other during sexual interactions.
Since then, kissing has been preserved throughout evolution and is still present in most great apes; but it is unclear why it survived for so long.
Last year, evolutionary psychologist Professor Adriano Lameira from the University of Warwick published a paper outlining the evolutionary origins of human kissing.
The act of very light sucking with pursed lips was once a technique for removing ticks and lice from each other’s fur, he said, but later began to take on sexual connotations and become an act that preceded mating.
Pictured is a reconstruction of the face of the oldest Neanderthal, nicknamed Krijn, found in the Netherlands, on display at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden.
It was thought that kissing and lovemaking between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals was common and probably not very different from today.
“We assume, of course, that the copulation was consensual,” Paul Pettitt, professor of archeology at Durham University, previously told the Daily Mail.
‘But a sad fact of the ancient world might suggest that this is far from the truth and perhaps a ‘partner’ had little choice in the matter.
‘Thus, in the ruggedness and confusion of the prehistoric world, mating perhaps occurred improvisationally, with little thought or intention.
‘If it was consensual then we can definitely assume there was foreplay; even sensual kissing and hugging.’
New study titled ‘A comparative approach to the evolution of kissing’ published Evolution and Human Behavior.
