Is deep kissing a universal human behavior?

A new study finds that half of human cultures don’t practice romantic lip-on-lip kissing. Animals don’t tend to bother either. So how did it evolve?

Humans are born with instincts for crying and smiling, but not for kissing. Sometime in the past, our ancestors had the idea to smack their mouths together and call it romantic. And though we may not know who gave the first smooch, ancient records of these steamy sessions are helping us piece together when people started locking lips.

When was the first kiss? Recent papers have suggested that romantic or sexual kissing began 3,500 years ago in what is now India. But a new review paper in the journal Science says that this style of kissing is also mentioned in clay tablets from Mesopotamia that predate the Indian texts by about a thousand years.

There are different perspectives behind our reasoning for kissing. The history of kissing is also very diverse, from being an instinct from breastfeeding to having to do with chimpanzees’ habits.

Face masks have saved thousands of lives over the past year and a half. In that time, we've come to learn just how much this cheap public health tool can dramatically reduce the transmission of a highly infectious virus.

Less than half of all societies kiss with their lips, according to a study of 168 cultures from around the world.

Lip-on-lip kissing is not nearly as universal as we might think it is, so can the diverse number of ways that humans kiss reveal what it is about this intimate act that we find important?