How old is the oldest kiss? Well, the answer to that depends on your starting point!
A new study looked at “kissing” in the animal kingdom. Scientifically defined, a kiss is “non aggressive, directed oral-oral contact ‘with some movement of lips or mouthparts and no food transfer.’”
By this definition, the behavior of “kissing” is seen in many species, including great apes, dogs, polar bears, prairie dogs, and even the albatross. The researchers also note that Neanderthals and modern humans likely engaged in this behavior together for “hundreds of thousands of years after the two species split,” given the similarities of our oral microbiome.
Obviously, behaviors like mouths touching are not preserved in the fossil record, so how could scientists uncover its origins? The article says, “By finding evidence of other animals engaging in kissing, scientists were able to construct an ‘evolutionary family tree’ to work out when it was most likely to have evolved.” In other words, it’s all evolutionary storytelling based on their assumptions about common ancestry! Another evolutionary fairy tale.
In their evolutionary worldview, “kissing probably evolved around 21.5 million years ago in the large apes.” Note this conclusion doesn’t explain when the behavior allegedly emerged in other non-primate animals, including the albatross which supposedly split off tens of millions of years previously from the purported lineage leading to humans!
Nor does it explain why this behavior supposedly evolved.
While this study pinpointed when kissing evolved it was not able to answer the question of why.
There are already a number of theories – that it arose from grooming behaviour in our ape ancestors or that it might provide an intimate way to assess the health and even the compatibility of a partner.
It’s all just evolutionary storytelling because evolution must explain everything.
It’s all just evolutionary storytelling because evolution must explain everything. But this kind of research makes two assumptions that we know are wrong from a biblical worldview:
1. Humans are just like animals, and any similarity we observe, however minor (obviously humans kissing and animals’ mouths touching each other are not the same thing), must be the result of common ancestry. The Bible teaches the opposite: Humans are unique, created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and we have no relation to the animals.
All of life is related to one another. Again, this runs contrary to what the Bible teaches. According to Genesis 1, all of life was created according to its kind, so one kind will not change into another kind. Similarities in behavior show evidence of a common Designer or of organisms achieving a common purpose, but it has nothing to do with common ancestry. That exists only in the minds of the evolutionary storytellers!
So when did kissing first emerge? Well, probably 6,000 years ago with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden when God created and ordained marriage.
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. (Genesis 2:24)
Just for interest’s sake, the first kiss recorded in the Bible is in Genesis:
Then his father Isaac said to him, “Please come near and kiss me, my son.” So he came near and kissed him; and he smelled the smell of his garments, and then he blessed him and said,
“See, the smell of my son
Is like the smell of a field which Yahweh has blessed.”
(Genesis 27:26–27 LSB)
Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken
This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.