Author puckers up for kissing details
Source: Agencies |
March 6, 2011, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
BIRDS do it. Bees do it. No, not that! This is about kissing, the simple gesture with a wallop that spans time and place but remains largely unexplained.
Anthropologists have their theories. So do neurologists, biologists, psychologists and endocrinologists. Einstein was interested. Darwin, too. So why doesn't anybody know how it all began, and why we do it in the first place?
Sheril Kirshenbaum, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, has compiled a mother lode of fragmented studies and observations from historians and sociologists, brain experts and animal-watchers in a surprisingly slim and definitely curious new book, "The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us."
Her conclusion? Inconclusive. The act of "osculation" - in technical parlance - is ingrained in more than 90 percent of cultures around the world. If they don't place lips on lips - or lips elsewhere - they lick or nibble with the same goals in mind.
If we could unravel its origins, Kirshenbaum surmises, we could unlock a trove of evolutionary and physiological mysteries that might carry the kiss from merely interesting to incredibly valuable.
Scientists cannot decide whether kissing is instinctual (newborns pucker for their first taste of mother's milk), cultural (learned, that is, for joy or survival) or deeper still (ingrained in our very DNA), or all of the above.
They suspect, Kirshenbaum said, that the practice has come and gone through the ages and might have surfaced as an outgrowth of sniffing as a way to suss out the familiar. The first kiss as greeting, according to some anthropologists, might have been a nose-to-nose exchange to recognize, reconnect or check on a person's health through smells.
The color red may also play a prominent role in the rise of the kiss. The hue takes us back millions of years to "red as reward" for ancestors in search of ripe fruits amid leaves and bush. It is possible that over all those years of man learning to walk upright, he also became hard-wired to appreciate the flashy color, primed to seek it out wherever it occurred, including the everted red lips on a woman's face and other parts of her anatomy.
Kissing was first documented in human societies around 1500 BC, in India's Vedic Sanskrit texts that serve as the basis of the Hindu religion. One describes the practice of smelling with the mouth.
Kirshenbaum estimates that today more than 6 billion of us, East and West, lock lips socially or romantically on a regular basis. The German language alone has 30 words for kissing, including one, "nachkussen," which is a kiss to compensate for those that have not occurred.
Anthropologists have their theories. So do neurologists, biologists, psychologists and endocrinologists. Einstein was interested. Darwin, too. So why doesn't anybody know how it all began, and why we do it in the first place?
Sheril Kirshenbaum, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, has compiled a mother lode of fragmented studies and observations from historians and sociologists, brain experts and animal-watchers in a surprisingly slim and definitely curious new book, "The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us."
Her conclusion? Inconclusive. The act of "osculation" - in technical parlance - is ingrained in more than 90 percent of cultures around the world. If they don't place lips on lips - or lips elsewhere - they lick or nibble with the same goals in mind.
If we could unravel its origins, Kirshenbaum surmises, we could unlock a trove of evolutionary and physiological mysteries that might carry the kiss from merely interesting to incredibly valuable.
Scientists cannot decide whether kissing is instinctual (newborns pucker for their first taste of mother's milk), cultural (learned, that is, for joy or survival) or deeper still (ingrained in our very DNA), or all of the above.
They suspect, Kirshenbaum said, that the practice has come and gone through the ages and might have surfaced as an outgrowth of sniffing as a way to suss out the familiar. The first kiss as greeting, according to some anthropologists, might have been a nose-to-nose exchange to recognize, reconnect or check on a person's health through smells.
The color red may also play a prominent role in the rise of the kiss. The hue takes us back millions of years to "red as reward" for ancestors in search of ripe fruits amid leaves and bush. It is possible that over all those years of man learning to walk upright, he also became hard-wired to appreciate the flashy color, primed to seek it out wherever it occurred, including the everted red lips on a woman's face and other parts of her anatomy.
Kissing was first documented in human societies around 1500 BC, in India's Vedic Sanskrit texts that serve as the basis of the Hindu religion. One describes the practice of smelling with the mouth.
Kirshenbaum estimates that today more than 6 billion of us, East and West, lock lips socially or romantically on a regular basis. The German language alone has 30 words for kissing, including one, "nachkussen," which is a kiss to compensate for those that have not occurred.
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