Photo: Emma Bauso

Why do they kiss on the lips?

What is important with lip-on-lip kissing and other types of kissing is that the moment is about sharing close, intimate information about each other. Kissing by pressing our lips together is an almost uniquely human behaviour.

bbc.com - The reasons humans started kissing - BBC Future

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"But I think the key to the human universal of kissing, or the absence of it, is that people's sensuality can be met in many ways other than just kissing," says Jankowiak. Those cultures that do not kiss lip on lip find other ways to be intimate, says author Sheril Kirshenbaum. "There's the Malay kiss that Darwin described, where women would squat down on the ground and men would kind of hang over them and take a quick sniff of each other – take a sample of their partner’s scent." On the Trobriand Islands, off the east coast of Papua New Guinea, lovers kiss by sitting face to face and nibbling at each other's eyelashes, "which I think to many of us today doesn't sound like the height of romance but for them that did the trick", says Kirshenbaum. What is important with lip-on-lip kissing and other types of kissing is that the moment is about sharing close, intimate information about each other.

Kissing by pressing our lips together is an almost uniquely human behaviour. If kissing has an evolutionary purpose, why don't we see more animals kissing?

Melissa Hogenboom answered that question for BBC Earth in 2015. One of the reasons we might have been compelled to get up close to the face of a partner is to give them a good sniff. Scent can reveal all sorts of useful information: diet, presence of disease, mood and relatedness, to name some. Many animals have far more sophisticated senses of smell than we do, so they don’t have to be nearly as close. * William Park is a senior journalist for BBC Future and tweets at @williamhpark

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