Regina Barber

Regina Barber here.

And Emily Kwong.

With our biweekly science news roundup featuring the hosts of All Things Considered.

And today we are back with space case Scott Detrow.

Yes, and we are going to talk about another moon story, Scott.

But this time it's ours and how it was made.

Yeah.

Yeah, so many animals kiss.

So birds, fish, insects, especially primates.

So tracking back through evolutionary time, Matilda's team found that kissing was present in the ancestor of all large apes 21 million years ago.

And they published these results in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

That would be really cool, but no.

This was all done through what's called phylogenetic analysis.

Matilda and her colleagues basically treated kissing as a trait and mapped it onto like a tree of primates.

Well, most humans of non-African descent have a very small amount of Neanderthal DNA.

And we know that Neanderthals and humans interbred after the two species split.

And this kissing study gives us a little bit more insight into those relationships.

Yeah, you want them for things like oxygen production, maybe to help terraform a planet once that becomes possible.

And for many people, aesthetics.

Well, because moss has some like incredible survival strategies.