BENGALURU: If you think kissing is only about human romance, you’re already missing the story. The first kiss happened long before humans walked the Earth—somewhere in the misty forests of prehistoric Africa, between two ape ancestors, 16.9-21.5 million years ago. As per a new evolutionary study, a kiss is better understood as an ancient, risky mouth-to-mouth gamble that large apes, and probably Neanderthals, started playing millions of years ago. And instead of asking what a kiss means, researchers went after a tougher question: why this odd, germ-sharing behaviour evolved at all in the first place. Researchers from University of Oxford, University College London, and the Florida Institute of Technology began by stripping the sentimentality out of kissing and giving it a cross-species

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