A mouth communicates a lot, and not just with words. Also with gestures and signs; with mischievous movements and details that open wide, or seal, the shutters of interest. There are mouths that communicate with a mischievous or tender smile, evil or full of disdain, which are compensated by the reaction they provoke. There are mouths that lick their lips, that ask questions, and mouths that flee. There are mouths closed, made up, insolent, playful and open to astonishment. There are those that they touch, that they taste, that they smoke, that they travel or that they whisper. There are mouths that insult; mouths that point and mouths that shoot lies. There are mouths that lie, that threaten, that look for culprits and betray. Small and large mouths; young and bright. There are some experts and there are some full of foolishness. That draw illusions, that console, that reconcile and that caress with words. There are mouths that suck and mouths that sing; hungry mouths and stuffed mouths. There are mechanical, disturbing mouths that recite the obsessions trapped in Jonathan Borofsky’s thoughts with his own voice. There are even mouths that, when touched, provoke a torrent of hormones that intertwine attachments in the lips they touch. We could verify it in the performance Muxua da mezua (the kiss is the message) from the lips of sociologists Martxel Mariskal and Iñaki Martínez de Albéniz. There are mouths that kiss and there are artistic kisses, political kisses, selfie kisses and kisses that are all of these at the same time, like the one captured by the Russian artist Dmitri Vrubel on the Berlin Wall. That effusive greeting painted in the collective imagination between the Soviet leader Brezhnev and the president of the GDR Honecker is one of the iconic scenes of the 20th century.
Those who claim to know say that the first kiss is one of the most memorable experiences for people, even more so than the first sexual relationship. Hence, when an illness steals the judgment and directs the patient towards childhood without stopping at the platforms of youth and adolescence, the beats of oblivion peel off the tiles of memories that make up the mosaic of a life. Losing fragments such as that first kiss in the mist of forgetfulness or not recognizing the lips to be kissed is the disturbing situation faced by many patients with neurodegenerative pathologies. Curiously, there is growing evidence that links periodontal disease and Alzheimer’s, which was previously linked the other way around, when it was assumed that the loss of teeth was the effect of dementia. It seems that an imbalance in the oral flora, with a significant proportion of harmful bacteria, increases the probability of predicting Alzheimer’s, even decades before the symptoms of the disease appear. What we do know is that couples who cohabit tend to have similar oral bacteria. Maybe it’s because they share a similar lifestyle, maybe it’s because they kiss and kiss. A study in the journal Microbiome claimed that passionate kissing transfers about 80 million bacteria.
There are those who find the origin of the kiss in the gesture of passing chewed food to babies. Before the use of mashers or hand mills, the way to grind food was to chew it. With her arms occupied, the mother can only transfer the processed food from her mouth, which, when it comes into contact with the child’s lips, activates a sucking reflex like when sucking at the breast. “You kiss as if you were going to eat me,” which Blas de Otero would note in the poem A lightning bolt barely. In the Sima de los Hueses of the Atapuerca sites and in the Dmanisi site in Georgia, it has been documented that those ancestors chewed the food of those who, convalescent or disabled, could not do so. Solidarity evident from the preambles of our lineage. In practice, a mouth confesses a lot, and not only with silences or lip makeup, but also with the bacteria it hosts, which hold key knowledge about some events in the development of our species. Microbes have been discovered present between the teeth of both Homo sapiens as of the Homo neanderthalensis, which adapted to starch-rich diets early in evolution. In fact, the oral bacteria of both species are almost indistinguishable, which seems to prove the close relationship they had between them. Studies indicate that between 1.8% and 2.6% of the nuclear genome in modern non-African humans comes from Neanderthals.
Who knows, perhaps the gesture that sealed that bond between sapiens and Neanderthals began with the archaic reflection of a kiss so short that it has lasted an eternity.
#mouth #bacteria #hosts