It's tempting to say that kissing is a universal experience, but that is not quite true. About 90 percent of the human population kisses, but there are a few cultures in Africa, Asia and South America that don't kiss at all and have no idea what the kiss (fuss) is about. Then there are cultures that kiss but in ways that may seem foreign or strange to us. Polynesians, for instance, practice a kiss they call the “mitakuku", which involves biting hairs from their sweetheart's eyebrows. Trobriand Islanders do something similar but take it several steps further, biting their partner's lips, chin, nose, and cheeks, often drawing blood in the process, before finally biting off the tips of their partner's eyelashes.
Ask any child how Eskimos kiss and you'll be told that they rub noses. While this charming form of physical contact may seem almost childlike in its simplicity, the truth about what's really going on is more sophisticated and complex. When Eskimos kiss, they bring their noses close to one another and breathe in their partner's exhalation. In effect, what they are doing is taking in a heady combination of their partner's scent and a spirit-like essence that they sense in the breath of a person that they care about. Similar "breath" kisses are practiced in many places around the world, including Samoa, Mongolia and among the Maori people of New Zealand. Although Eskimos call their style of kissing lunik”, in Polynesia it’s known as the “rhoni", and the point is to exchange —" the breath of life, and mana”一 the spiritual power within people.
Back through the mists of time, many cultures have believed that an individual's soul was carried on the breath. Today most of us living in the West wouldn't go that far and, yet, when kissing someone we care about we may experience our loved one in a way that seems both physical and beyond the physical. We may have a feeling that, for fleeting moments at least, We're able to access some essential part of our partner’s core being that can’t be reached in any other way. At such moments, kissing has the power to tear down our feelings of separateness, and we may even lose our awareness of where one person begins and the other ends.
How did this seemingly strange practice of pressing our lips to another's first take hold? There are several theories floating about. One of the most popular suggests that kissing first developed among our caveman ancestors. Long before sterilized bottles of pureed peas and carrots were available, early mothers fed their infants by thoroughly chewing up food, and then passing this nutritious mush from their mouth to the mouth of their waiting infant.From this beginning, so the theory goes, the pleasures of pressing lips together soon became obvious, with or without the extra reward of food. It's not hard to see why such a theory is popular.If buried in our collective memory is eons of mouth to mouth care-giving, that would certainly help explain why kissing carries such an ability to bond us to another person. But theories based in early culture may not fully explain the profound pull that kissing has on us.
"Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated Bees do it”which is a lyric Cole Porter wrote about falling in love, but he might as well have been talking about kissing. For living creatures that have no culture, but a great deal of natural instinct, the widespread popularity of kissing seems to suggest that it may be built into our DNA. Of course, domesticated animals we know about. We’ve all had the experience of being licked to within an inch of our lives by an affectionate dog or purring cat, but the untamed have their own ways of showing affection to others of their kind. Interestingly, our closest relative in the wild, the chimpanzee, who shares about 98% of its genes in common with us, likes to kiss in a way that's very similar to humans: lips-on-lips, as a display of friendship or sexual interest. Primatologist Frans de Waal writes in his book "Our Inner Ape" that chimps prefer closed-mouth kissing, but another ape-relative of ours, the bonobo, engages in tongue kissing so similar to humans that it always catches his students by surprise.
It isn't just our closest animal relatives who engage in some form of kissing, though; the list of animals who enjoy nuzzling and cuddling is remarkably varied. Among pipsqueak mice, the males show their interest by licking the mouth of a female, while at the other end of the size spectrum, lumbering elephants express affection by brushing their trunk against another elephant's lips. Birds nestle beaks together, sea lions rub mouths, snails caress antennae, and porcupines very carefully touch noses to avoid getting poked by the quills that cover most of the rest of their body. Other examples of animals that kiss include polar bears, turtles, kangaroos, horses, and fish, in fact, one type of fish in the family of Grunts is nicknamed the 'Kissing Fish' due to its habit of locking lips with a willing partner and swimming around this way for hours in the warm waters off Florida.
To kiss really is to answer the call of the wild, to hearken back to our most natural instincts.
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