Why do we kiss? ‘I am not sure we have anything close to an explanation’

W e do it sitting in a tree, under the mistletoe, at midnight to ring in the new year. In fairytales, the act transforms frogs into princes and awakens heroines from enchanted slumber. We make up with it, seal with it, and – in Romeo Montague’s case at least – die with it.

Such is the supremacy of the kiss in our culture that we’ve extended the term to describe actions that don’t even involve lip contact – butterfly kisses, say, or the “Eskimo kiss”, a nose rub better known in Inuit culture as kunik, and in Māori as hongi.

The earliest record of kissing dates back 4,500 years to ancient Mesopotamia (present-day Syria and Iraq), where cuniform texts suggest smooching formed an ordinary part of romantic intimacy. Millennia later, the exact origins of kissing are still a matter of debate; a new theory published last month suggests snogging arose from primate grooming behaviour deep in our evolutionary past. How did the behaviour, which we do without a second thought (or, alternatively, obsess over and rank), come about?

“Freud, who was famously hung up on childhood complexes, took the view that kissing has something to do with the memory of the pleasures of sucking on your mother’s breast,” the renowned evolutionary psychologist Prof Robin Dunbar writes in his 2012 book, The Science of Love. “But the argument really doesn’t hold water. After all, if it really is a reversion to breast-sucking, why not just do that?”

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