What’s In A Kiss? 21 Million Years Of Evolution
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Hey, short wavers. 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.
Listen, I like space, as you know, but I'm also a fan of apes making out. And that's why I'm here today. I heard that's a topic.
Yes, we're going to pucker up to some weird research. We're also going to talk about space moths.
Yes, and we are going to talk about another moon story, Scott. But this time it's ours and how it was made.
You know, I think last time we talked about one of Jupiter's moons. Yeah. So I'm glad we're closer to home this week.
Yeah.
Moon, moon. You know, buy local. Get excited for all of that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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All right, we are back. And to start off, tell me about our ancestors making out with Neanderthals.
It happened under some prehistoric mistletoe.
How did science address this question? Like, I don't even know where to start with that.
Yeah, so many animals kiss. So birds, fish, insects, especially primates.
And by kissing, scientists define that as non-aggressive mouth-to-mouth contact that does not involve passing food.
That's an important aspect.
And Matilda Brindle at the University of Oxford wanted to know, how far back in evolutionary history does this go?
If you think about the fact that humans and our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, all kiss, it makes sense that the common ancestor of those three species kisses as well.
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.
How do you even begin to see if somebody was kissing somebody 21 million years ago? Like was there a fossilized mid-kiss? I don't know.
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.
Which they did by determining which primates kiss and which do not. So Matilda had to watch a lot of video footage of primates locking lips. And she compiled evidence of which of our primate cousins canoodle. She built her family tree. And she discovered something else, which is that Neanderthals probably kissed too. And that is a big deal.
Why did that matter?
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.
Humans and Neanderthals were probably kissing each other, which is a way more romantic take on human-Neanderthal relationships than I think we might have thought of before.
What a romantic image.
I know.
Equally romantic in my mind is moss spores in space. Right. Yeah. How did this experiment come about?
So as humans contemplate long term space travel, scientists want to know which plants may survive the extremes of space because space is cold. There is a lot of radiation. It's a vacuum. Scientists can simulate some of that on Earth. But to know how a plant will do in space, you got to put it there.
And I assume that if you're going on really long space travel at some point, you probably want some plants with you.
Yeah, you want them for things like oxygen production, maybe to help terraform a planet once that becomes possible.
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