The absolutely disgusting reason why people started kissing – and it has nothing to do with love

Kiss your assumptions goodbye.

You might think you know why people enjoy hanging out with each other, but a new study published this month has revealed the real story behind why we lock lips.

Research conducted by Adriano R. Lameira, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Warwick in England, concludes that kissing was once an evolutionary instinct, something done to nurture another being.

“Evidence supports that kissing is not a derived signal of love in humans,” Lameira, who believes that kissing was once part of a lice removal method, told the Daily Mail.

“Instead, it represents a transferred, surviving form of primate care that retained its ancestral form, context, and function.”

According to the study of monkey behavior, “kissing is likely the final conserved stage of oral contact of a wrasse when the caretaker sucks with extended lips the groomer’s fur or skin to attach to waste or a parasite.”

“This made cleaning important for hygienic purposes given the high parasite load in the soil,” Lameira said.

But as humans evolved with less body hair, grooming became less necessary and, ultimately, all that remained was what we know today as kissing.

Lameira estimates that humans “became kissing apes” roughly 2 million to 4 million years ago, and the earliest records of human kissing, according to the Daily Mail, occur in Mesopotamian texts around 2,500 BC.

How it became an act of a sexual nature, however, “remains more speculative,” he noted, adding that kissing with a “sexual intent” is “a special case” of such behavior and further research is needed to identified how kissing and sex were so intertwined.

“Only when kissing was used as a general habit to show affection could kissing become a mutual mouth-to-mouth act,” he explained.

The kiss, now, is “a crystallized symbol of trust and belonging,” added Lameira,

“Few natural human signals carry the symbolism and social sanction of the kiss,” Lameira said, adding that the kiss is now “a crystallized symbol of trust and belonging.”