{"id":278831,"date":"2025-11-23T11:25:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T11:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/278831\/"},"modified":"2025-11-23T11:25:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-23T11:25:09","slug":"first-kiss-could-have-taken-place-21-million-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/278831\/","title":{"rendered":"First kiss could have taken place 21 million years ago"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Humans, chimps, and bonobos all kiss,&#8221; explained lead researcher Dr Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Oxford. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">From that, she concluded, &#8220;it&#8217;s likely that their most recent common ancestor kissed.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The research also found that early humans, such as Neanderthals, would likely have kissed before they died out around 40,000 years ago.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">One previous piece of research on Neanderthal DNA showed that modern humans and Neanderthals shared an oral microbe &#8211; a type of bacteria found in our saliva.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">This means Neanderthals and humans &#8220;must have been swapping saliva for hundreds of thousands of years after the two species split,&#8221; Dr Brindle added. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"&#8220;Humans, chimps, and bonobos all kiss,&#8221; explained lead researcher Dr Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist from the University&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278832,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":{"0":"post-278831","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-unitedkingdom","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278831\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}