MOSCOW, July 31, Tatyana Pichugina. For a long time it was believed that the romantic kiss was invented in India around 1500 BC. However, judging by recent research, this tradition is a thousand years older. How it has changed over the centuries — in the material .
Manifestation of love and friendship
Many animals and birds exchange kiss-like touches. A striking example is prairie dogs that live on the prairies of North America. This is how they strengthen social bonds in their group.
The great apes kiss «with their tongues» — perhaps this goes back to the habit of feeding chewed food to an infant from mouth to mouth. Ethnographers have noted similar behavior among some tribes — for example, in China, Germany, among the Papuans.
They say that the kiss is universal: it is used by 90 percent of the world's population. This is true when it comes to a way to show sympathy, but not in the context of sex, say scientists from the universities of Nevada and Indiana in the United States. They recently spentan extensive cross-cultural study among 168 peoples around the world and found that only 77 of them made it customary to intentionally touch their partner's lips during lovemaking. Tribes from the Sahara, the Amazon forests and New Guinea do not know about the kiss of love. Whereas among the circumpolar peoples of the Arctic, it is ubiquitous. The popularity of kissing in Western societies led the authors of the work to the idea that this is some kind of special cultural adaptation. » data-crop-ratio=»0.75″ data-crop-width=»600″ data-crop-height=»450″ data-source-sid=»not_rian_photo» class=»lazyload» width=»1920″ height=» 1440″ decoding=»async» />
There is also no consensus on the evolutionary benefits of kissing. According to one hypothesis, the lips and tongue act as chemical sensors that help to choose the right partner. Bundles of endings of special neurons make it possible to sharply smell the breath, the taste of saliva. It is also suggested that kissing serves as a means of obtaining pleasure, as it promotes arousal and sexual intercourse, or helps to establish friendships. For example, in humans' closest relatives, the bonobo chimpanzee, kissing is associated with sex, while in common chimpanzees, kissing is used for platonic purposes to establish social bonds.
When the kiss happened< /h3>Scientists foundDNA of the bacterium Methanobrevibacter oralis. This pathogen causes gingival inflammation in modern humans as well, only now another lineage is circulating in the population, separated from the Neanderthal one hundred thousand years ago. It is possible, suggested, that in those days both types of Homo often entered into an intimate relationship and kissed. . Moreover, judging by the ancient texts, it was quite a common custom. came to such conclusionsscientists from the universities of Copenhagen and Oxford. They studied cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia — now the territory of Iraq and Syria. One of them, known as the Burton cylinder, depicts the myth of the creation of the world and two deities who had sexual intercourse. A certain god kisses the mother goddess Ninhursag, and she conceives seven twins.
In the earliest Sumerian texts, a kiss on the lips is described as an erotic act, possibly post-coital, the researchers specify. In later Akkadian texts, differences appear: some lip touches are described as friendly, family, ritual (when, for example, kissing feet), others as erotic.
Even in everyday correspondence there were lines about kisses. Two texts written 1,800,000 years before our era are especially frank. In one, a married lady is embarrassed about being kissed by a strange man; in another, a young woman vows to avoid being harassed by a certain man. ad. However, as it turned out, it is a thousand years older and even then it was quite common.
So far, references to a love kiss have been found only in written sources of complex hierarchical societies. But this does not mean that it was invented in any one region, from where it spread to the whole world. Scientists believe that this custom has been widely known since prehistoric times and arose many times independently among different peoples. This is evidenced by studies of the evolution of herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) in the Bronze Age. This pathogen is transmitted through oral contact. A large team of European scientists showed that one of the HSV-1 lineages quickly spread around the world due to the migration of peoples and the introduction of the habit of kissing into local cultures.
Scenario for two roles
Recently, experts have been carefully studying everything that affects romantic relationships. For example, Oxford scientists Wlodarsky and Dunbar survey more than 900 people about the role of kissing in sex and life. As it turned out, women appreciate it more than men. Those who prefer casual encounters also value it highly. Perhaps, the authors argue, this is due to a more careful choice of a partner — after all, a kiss helps to indirectly check the quality of his genes.
Scientists from Brigham Young University in the USA conducted a survey of 878 volunteers through the Lucid Marketplace platform. The study included roughly equal numbers of women and men, and 75 percent were married. Specialists were interested in the number of sexual acts, orgasms, the feeling of satisfaction, as well as the role of kissing. Moreover, the volunteers had to mark both kisses during sex, and ordinary kisses — friendly or related.
It turned out that couples who kiss a lot, make more love, and women experience orgasms more often. The authors suggested that such a prelude prolongs the process and the partner has time to get more excited, which helps to achieve pleasure. In addition, kisses characterize not only the depth of sexual satisfaction, but also the relationship between spouses in general. Simply put, happy couples kiss more often.
Scientists from Finland and Sweden decided to observe the volunteers at home to find out for what reason and how they kiss. To do this, video cameras were installed in 11 couples and recorded for a week for ten to twenty hours. They examined in detail how a kiss begins, who initiates it, and how the partner responds.
It turned out that a kiss is not just touching lips or cheeks with lips. This is the result of a joint action, movements, gestures, sounds, facial expressions, forming a small love dance. At the key moment, the bodies of lovers are intertwined, as if turning into a single whole. The main thing, the authors add, on which satisfaction with a kiss depends is emotional connection and mutual feelings. -crop-ratio=»0.425083240843507″ data-crop-width=»600″ data-crop-height=»255″ data-source-sid=»cc_by_40″ class=»lazyload» width=»1920″ height=»816″ decoding=»async» />