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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2835 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 8, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Really? That seems remarkably low to me, to the point it makes me wonder how they defined “percent of cultures”, I’d love to see where that’s sourced. Certainly it exists (and to my knowledge arose independently) in all the big dominant world cultures; Europe, both East and South Asia, MENA, the major African countries… I guess I don’t know if Native Americans kissed before European contact but I admit I’d be surprised if they didn’t.

It's not clear to me if you can disentangle this from the entire Western "universal culture" package that the dominant world cultures downloaded. As in, maybe rationalising modernism is necessary to make cultures dominant, and the first inventors of rationalising modernism happened to like kissing, and so those who adopted one and became dominant also adopted the other and started being into kissing.

They didn't weigh them by population. Here's the link to the study: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/aman.12286#aman12286

(Not linking to SciHub because 2rafa will be upset by this kind of brazenly antisocial behavior)

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