When writer Jean M. Auel first published her now bestselling novel, “The Clan of the Cave Bear,” back in 1980, she made what seemed a questionable conceit at the center of her story: that our distant ancestors had mated with Neanderthals, our closest relative in the evolutionary tree of humanity, long ago in prehistory.
It was hugely controversial back then, but a 2010 study of the Neanderthal genome later revealed evidence that her assertion had been correct: traces of Neanderthal DNA are sprinkled throughout our genome, hinting at romance — or perhaps conquest and rape.
Now a new study, led by Oxford University and published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, sheds even more light onto the mystery with an exciting conclusion: humans and Neanderthals very likely engaged in some makeout sessions.
The team collected observational data from modern-day primates in Africa, Europe and Asia that have been seen smooching each other, such as chimpanzees, orangutans and bonobos. They then treated the act of kissing as an evolutionary trait, and used Bayesian statistical modeling to model kissing behavior in the family tree of primate ancestors.
Their result? That kissing is an ancient practice among large apes, first arising somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million years ago. And among those kissing cousins, they found, were the Neanderthals.
That finding is particularly interesting, the researchers point out, because of a previous study that found that humans and Neanderthals share common oral microbes — likely, they say, from swapping spit.
“Probably they were kissing,” the study’s lead author and evolutionary biologist at Oxford Matilda Brindle told The Guardian. “It certainly puts a more romantic spin on human-Neanderthal relations.”
“The fact that humans kiss, the fact that we now have shown that Neanderthals very likely kissed, indicates that the two [species] are also likely to have kissed,” she added.
Kissing is a vulnerable act, according to the paper, and may have aided our ancestors to assess the physical health of a potential mate.
From there, we can make an imaginative leap that romance was in the air between us and our closest yet extinct cousins — which, in spite of the disastrous 1986 Hollywood adaptation of “The Clan of the Cave Bear,” makes for an undeniably blockbuster story.
More on Neanderthals: Neanderthals May Have Been Killed Off By Magnetic Pole Flip
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