Un homme et une femme, 1891, Stephan
Sinding (1846-1922). Almost
as fun as sex.
All
humans love to kiss, so kissing must go back to early hominids and even chimps
and bonobos. This is how ethologists and evolutionary psychologists think when
they write about the subject.
Just
one thing. Even in historic times not all humans loved to kiss. Far from
arising millions of years in the past, kissing seems to have arisen no earlier
than 40,000 years ago, when modern humans began to enter northern Eurasia.
So
concludes a recent cross-cultural study:
We
found only 77 out of 168 (46%) cultures in which the romantic-sexual kiss was
present. Significantly, no ethnographer working with Sub-Saharan African, New
Guinea, or Amazonian foragers or horticulturalists reported having witnessed
any occasion in which their study populations engaged in a romantic-sexual
kiss. However, kissing appears to be nearly ubiquitous among 9 of the 11
foragers living in Circum-Arctic region (i.e., northern Asia and North
America). The concentration of kissing among Circum-Arctic foragers, for which
we do not have a satisfactory explanation other than invoking cultural diffusion,
stands in stark contrast to its equally striking absence among foragers in
other cultural regions. (Jankowiak et al., 2015)
This
is not the first study to deny the universality of kissing, although scholars
have tended to place its origin in the civilizations of the Mediterranean, the
Middle East, and South Asia (Hawley, 2007; Hopkins, 1907). The English
sexologist Havelock Ellis argued that kissing began with "civilized
man":
It
is only under a comparatively high stage of civilization that the kiss has been
emphasized and developed in the art of love. Thus the Arabic author of the Perfumed Garden, a work revealing the
existence of a high degree of social refinement, insists on the great
importance of the kiss, especially if applied to the inner part of the mouth,
and he quotes a proverb that "A moist kiss is better than a hasty
coitus." Such kisses, as well as on the face generally, and all over the
body, are frequently referred to by Hindu, Latin, and more modern erotic
writers as among the most efficacious methods of arousing love. (Ellis,1897-1928)
It
may be that kissing originated in prehistory among the hunter-gatherers of
northern Eurasia and then spread south, where it reached its full flowering in
a milieu that idealized it in prose, poetry, and painting. A kind of positive
feedback thus developed between the practice and the ideal.
Then,
at a later date, it became less common in northern Europe because of the moral
climate that followed the Reformation, having been previously very common. When
the Greek scholar Demetrios Chalkokondyles (1423-1511) visited England, he was
surprised by its ubiquity:
As
for English females and children, their customs are liberal in the extreme. For
instance, when a visitor calls at a friend's house, his first act is to kiss
his friend's wife; he is then a duly-installed guest. Persons meeting in the
street follow the same custom, and no one sees anything improper in the action.
(Bombaugh, 1876, p. 33)
Another
Greek traveler likewise remarked a century later:
The
English manifest much simplicity and lack of jealousy in their customs as
regards females; for not only do members of the same family and household kiss
them on the lips with complimentary salutations and enfolding of the arms
around the waist, but even strangers, when introduced, follow the same mode,
and it is one which does not appear to them in any degree unbecoming.
(Bombaugh, 1876, p. 33)
Similar
comments were made by Erasmus (1467-1536):
If
you go to any place, you are received with a kiss by all; if you depart on a
journey, you are dismissed with a kiss; if you return, the kisses are
exchanged. Do they come to visit you, a kiss is the first thing; do they leave
you, you kiss them all around. Do they meet you anywhere, kisses in abundance.
In short, wherever you turn, there is nothing but kisses. Ah, Faustus, if you
had once tasted the tenderness, the fragrance of these kisses, you would wish
to stay in England, not for ten years only, but for life. (Bombaugh, 1876, p. 34)
Kissing
then fell into decline among the English; so much so, that frequent public
displays became seen as a continental thing. Nonetheless, it remained much more
common than in other parts of the world, particularly East Asia and sub-Saharan
Africa. This difference amused travelers as late as the 19th century:
An
American naval officer, who had spent considerable time in China, narrates an
amusing experience of the ignorance of the Chinese maidens of the custom of
kissing. Wishing to complete a conquest he had made of a young mei jin (beautiful lady), he invited
her—using the English words—to give him a kiss. Finding her incomprehension of
his request somewhat obscure, he suited the action to the word and took a
delicious kiss. The girl ran away into another room, thoroughly alarmed,
exclaiming, "Terrible man-eater, I shall be devoured." (Bombaugh, 1876, p. 80)
For
the same time period, Havelock Ellis noted: "Kisses, and embraces are
simply unknown in Japan as tokens of affection" with the exception of mothers
hugging and kissing their infants. Similarly, "among nearly all of the
black races of Africa lovers never kiss nor do mothers usually kiss their
babies." He then went on to argue that the romantic kiss evolved out of
this maternal kissing, which seems more or less universal.
With
the globalization of culture through movies, magazines, and other media,
kissing has been spread to the four corners of the earth. Clearly, we can all
do it and enjoy doing it to some extent. But I don't think we all share the
same urge to do it.
Gene-culture
coevolution?
Don't
laugh. Even religiosity is partly genetic, so why not the desire to kiss and be
kissed? What little we know about the subject comes from studies of compulsive
kissing syndrome, where a lesion to the right temporal lobe (associated with
epilepsy or glioma) causes an uncontrollable urge to kiss anyone independently
of sexual interest (Mendez and Shapira, 2014; Mikata et al., 2005; Ozkara et al., 2004). This compulsion differs from other disorders where increased
kissing results from loss of sexual inhibition and is targeted at sexually
desirable individuals. The brain may thus have a pre-formed circuit that
triggers the desire to kiss. In short, kissing is not solely learned. It has an
innate component.
At
first, this innate component would have been the same in all humans, back when
kissing mainly happened between a mother and her infants. It then became more
sexual and more important among the hunter-gatherers of northern Eurasia. Later
still, in Europe and the Middle East, it developed into a second channel of
sexual arousal almost on a par with the sex act itself.
As
Havelock Ellis observed:
[...]
there is certainly no such channel for directing nervous force into the sexual
sphere as the kiss. This is nowhere so well recognized as in France, where a
young girl's lips are religiously kept for her lover, to such an extent,
indeed, that young girls sometimes come to believe that the whole physical side
of love is comprehended in a kiss on the mouth; so highly intelligent a woman
as Madam Adam has described the agony she felt as a girl when kissed on the
lips by a man, owing to the conviction that she had thereby lost her virtue.
Sexual
kissing initially arose through people pushing the envelope of phenotypic
plasticity. This envelope in turn became part of the environment that people
had to fit into. Those who couldn't, or wouldn't, were at a disadvantage and were
bit by bit pushed out of the gene pool. Those who could, and would, took their
place. New genetic variants thus arose and flourished, some to strengthen the
new behavior and others to make it more pleasurable.
In
this, and in many other ways, Man has created Man. We humans have shaped our
environment, which in turn has shaped us, even in our genes. This point becomes
clear only if one abandons the assumption, so dear to evolutionary psychology,
that we stopped evolving back in the Pleistocene. We didn't. In fact, most of
the interesting stuff has come about since then.
References
Bombaugh,
C.C. (1876). The Literature of Kissing,
gleaned from history, poetry, fiction, and anecdote, Philadelphia: J.B.
Lippincott & Co.
https://books.google.ca/books?id=p9lPAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Ellis,
H. (1897-1928). Studies in the Psychology
of Sex, vol. IV, Appendix A. The origins of the kiss.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13613/13613-h/13613-h.htm
Hawley,
R. (2007). 'Give me a thousand kisses':
the kiss, identity, and power in Greek and Roman antiquity, Leeds
International Classical Studies, 6.5
http://pdf.thepdfportal.net/?id=123399
Hopkins,
E.W. (1907). The sniff-kiss in ancient India, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 28, 120-134.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/592764?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Jankowiak,
W.R., S.L. Volsche, J.R. Garcia. (2015). Is the Romantic-Sexual Kiss a Near
Human Universal? American Anthropologist,
early view
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1111/aman.12286/abstract
Mendez,
M.F. and J.S. Shapira. (2014). Kissing or "Osculation" in
Frontotemporal Dementia, The Journal of
Neuropsychiatry & Clinical Neurosciences, 26, 258-261.
http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.neuropsych.13060139
Mikati,
M.A., Y.G. Comair, A.N. Shamseddine. (2005). Pattern-induced partial seizures
with repetitive affectionate kissing: an unusual manifestation of right
temporal lobe epilepsy. Epilepsy &
Behavior, 6, 447-451
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1525505005000144
Ozkara,
C., H. Sarý, L. Hanoglu, et al. (2004). Ictal kissing and religious speech in a
patient with right temporal lobe epilepsy, Epileptic
Disorders, 6, 241-245
http://www.jle.com/fr/revues/epd/e-docs/ictal_kissing_and_religious_speech_in_a_patient_with_right_temporal_lobe_epilepsy__265692/article.phtml?tab=download&pj_key=doc_alt_2458 
