Pretty sure we are the only animals with pink rings around our mouth. It's flipping weird.
It probably helps with verbal language understanding as humans often use mouth movements to interpret words (see McGurk effect). But I still think it's weird.
Big pink rings.
66 Comments
hesh@quokk.au · 73 pts · 133d
"You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
klugerama@lemmy.world · 20 pts · 132d
They're made of meat?
tomiant@piefed.social · 51 pts · 133d
The mouth is a sphincter.
It is connected directly to your butthole.
The mouth is your face anus.
Murse@slrpnk.net · 27 pts · 132d
Fun fact: when two people kiss, they create a long tube that starts and ends with an anus.
abbadon420@sh.itjust.works · 8 pts · 132d
So you could also extend that tube woth a third person?
ByteJunk@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 132d
Plot for human centipede right here.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 132d
How do they think of these things? Just like this, with a bong.
rants_unnecessarily@piefed.social · 6 pts · 132d
Ever performed a double butt kiss?
daannii@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 132d
I heard this is called keyhole-to-keyhole
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 132d
Why, you offering?
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 132d
Giggity
daannii@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 132d
The mouth is the face anus to the soul.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today · 4 pts · 132d
Wow, embroider that on a pillow.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today · 7 pts · 132d
We are just a coiled tube, surrounded and protected by a system maintenance apparatus.
whaleross@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 132d
The fanus.
mimic_dev@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 132d
Humans are just meat silly straws
Chaotic_Altruist@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 132d
They're even more histologically related to each other than they are to anything else. Lips and anus look surprisingly similar under a microscope.
fisch@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 132d
Delete this comment!
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social · 28 pts · 133d
Mandrills, geladas, Rhesus macaques for a few.
Look at most Carnivorans (dogs, cats, etc) and they tend to have black lips. Is that less weird or more weird?
The human mouth is also the most sensitive area of the body (even moreso than lower areas), so that's almost certainly related. More blood flow and a specialised cell-type...
Beacon@fedia.io · 11 pts · 133d
Yeah if we're saying it's weird meaning it's unusual, then no it's not weird. And if we're saying it's weird meaning bodies are weird in general, then yeah, it's weird that we have colored lips, and also weird that we have bone-like protrusions sticking out into our mouth, and weird that we have little hairs growing right out of the surface layer of our skin.
As soon as you think closely about any piece of it, all the pieces start to seem bizarrely weird.
daannii@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 132d
They don't really have plump ring lips like us.
It's not just a hole with skin flaps. It's this plump ring of fat around the hole that's also tinted a bright color.
Dunno of any animal except us that has that.
Beacon@fedia.io · 7 pts · 132d
https://www.google.com/search?q=red+lipped+batfish
https://www.google.com/search?q=TONKIN+SNUB-NOSED+MONKEY
I googled weird lip animals and picked a couple
Hexanimo@kbin.earth · 5 pts · 132d
Man, the Red-lipped Batfish is weird. It looks like someone made it in the Spore Creature Creator.
The Tonkin Snub Nosed Monkey is cute. It's sad they're critically endangered.
It's been years since I watched a nature documentary and it's nice learning about animals I was unaware of before today.
village604@adultswim.fan · 2 pts · 132d
I think we have different ideas on what's cute. Those monkeys are creepy.
daannii@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 132d
Those are both great and also emphasize how weird big high contrast lips are on animals.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 132d
You're just getting too used to seeing those phony fat-lipped MAGA concubines. They're normalizing that expensive carved up face image.
Paragone@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 132d
SOME orangutans do: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=orangutan&iar=images&t=fpas
daannii@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 132d
Ah so they do. How bout that. Yeah I would agree those are pretty close to human lips.
JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social · 1 pts · 132d
Okay, but I was replying to the OP. What you're doing here is bringing in a new dimension, i.e. "plump."
Regardless, I think I already kind of answered that when I talked about kissing. Very few animals I know of do prolonged kissing. Humans do. That, and our sexual attraction cycle is more or less endless, whereas with most animals, it only happens during select times of the year.
As for "why" to both things? I think it's because humans are vastly more helpless at birth compared to most other animals. We need lots of care, and for a prolonged period. So evolution has drastically increased the mechanisms of sustained attraction between the parents via things like prolonged sensual kissing and a near-endless sexual attraction.
treadful@lemmy.zip · 18 pts · 132d
Have you seen genitals though? Now that's some weird stuff.
daannii@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 132d
Yeah . Both sets are super weird. I can't even..
Scubus@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 132d
No :(
Kolanaki@pawb.social · 11 pts · 133d
It'd be weirder if they were green or blue.
flandish@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 133d
sometimes they are blue. it’s usually someone on the way to being a corpse, but i’ve seen it.
daannii@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 133d
That's definitely true
andyburke@fedia.io · 11 pts · 133d
We're all just tubes ... tubin' around.
MerryJaneDoe@piefed.world · 10 pts · 132d
Piglet would like a word with you.
Also cats. Dogs. Lemurs. Rats.
Basically, any creature that has a pink nose probably has pink lips. We just don't notice because they are mostly covered in fur and proportionately thinner than human lips.
daannii@lemmy.world · -2 pts · 132d
They don't really have lips like humans do. We have plump rings around our mouths. Those other animals do not
Paragone@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 132d
Tell that to the rest of the great apes..
Color may not be pink, but as 1 African language calls Whites "peeled man" people, lack-of-black isn't defining of human, it is defining of the subset-of-humans who are caucasian, or who otherwise weren't tropical-enough to need all the extra melanin ( thank you Bill Nye, for explaining that clearly ).
They've definitely got expressive lips, the rest of the great apes..
_ /\ _
daannii@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 132d
So other primates in the ape family. The same one humans are from.
I agree some apes have them but not other non-primate animals.
It's likely we evolved ours for speech and emotion communication.
I still think it's weird that we have them. A big pink noodle ring around the mouth.
wesker@lemmy.sdf.org · 7 pts · 133d
Wanna touch pink rings?
NoSpotOfGround@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 132d
Dr Wesker and Daanni, sitting in a tree, R-I-N-G-I-N-G!
leadore@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 132d
Batfish: "Yes! It is indeed my lips that are weird and make me feel self-conscious."
[alt-text since Lemmy web UI doesn't seem to have a way to add it to the image: photo of a red-lipped batfish. Besides its bright red lips, its head has a large protruding bulge, and it stands and walks on its four leg-like fins instead of swimming like a normal fish.]
protist@retrofed.com · 6 pts · 133d
Evolutionarily, it probably helps with both speech and nonverbal language, i.e. facial expressions
daannii@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 132d
Yeah that's my guess. Since we use language so much and are social. It would help to make facial cues like the mouth shape, more visible.
I speculated that lighter skinned people have more pink lips and are generally thinner, compared to darker skinned because darker skinned people generally have larger lips, which would make up for any visibility loss from less contrast.
Humans just really need to see what shape the mouth is at any given moment.
That's kinda weird too even if it makes sense.
aMockTie@piefed.world · 2 pts · 132d
My understanding is that focus on the mouth in social interactions is also influenced by culture. That's why some cultures generally represented a happy face with the emoticon
:)while others used^_^The former is focused on the mouth and the eyes lack meaningful expression, while the latter is the opposite.
Professorozone@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 132d
What's so weird about a gasket. What SHOULD be there?
MantisToboggon@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 133d
I prefer it to my brown ring.
Agrivar@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 133d
You could always get it bleached to match!
forestbeasts@pawb.social · 4 pts · 133d
100%.
Give me a wolf muzzle any day. Having a human face just feels wrong.
-- Frost
tomiant@piefed.social · 6 pts · 133d
forestbeasts@pawb.social · 2 pts · 132d
Exactly! 🐺
-- Frost
wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 132d
Freedom of Form Foundation is working on this (and the rest of the body) :3
forestbeasts@pawb.social · 1 pts · 132d
I really hope it's scientifically possible somehow!
Even if not, I bet it'd be more feasible to build a robot wolf body, scoop out our brain and put it inside. I'd take robot wolf over *waves paw at human body* any day.
We're all feral (for the non-furries reading this: normal animal shaped) which means the rest of the body is significantly harder than it would be for an anthro, but honestly the stuff they'd need to do to our limbs is probably small potatoes compared to the shit they'd need to do to our skull (and that applies equally well to anthros).
-- Frost
Triumph@fedia.io · 3 pts · 133d
My dog disagrees.
daannii@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 132d
Does your dog have a noodle ring around their mouth ?
Triumph@fedia.io · 4 pts · 132d
Under the overhanging fur, yes. Mammals have lips.
daannii@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 132d
I think our definition of lips is different
Triumph@fedia.io · 4 pts · 132d
Are you suggesting that people with long mustaches don't have lips?
daannii@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 132d
Can you say where a lip starts and ends on a dog?
Is the part with wiskers also lips?
There is not a distinctive ring around the mouth on dogs like there is on humans.
We have fleshy fat rings around our mouth holes.
Triumph@fedia.io · 1 pts · 132d
Tell me you've never seen a dog without saying you've never seen a dog.
zeppo@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 133d
Some other animals do have lips.
daannii@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 132d
Fish. I think that's it. Maybe you could argue snails.
But they ain't pink
zeppo@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 132d
Dogs have lips, for one
Paragone@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 132d
Someone pointed-out that Black people have pale skin on the insides of their hands, same for people of India..
& that at night, in a tribal village ( without electric lighting.. ) that would make communication Italian-style, with gestures, work MUCH better..
Enough-so, that if there were any proto-humans who didn't have that pale-gesturing-skin on them, they .. apparently didn't survive the last few million years of Natural Selection..
The more dimensions of immersion/communication, the more effective the immersion/communication.
Nintendo made a mint on that, when they ignored the higher-graphics-resolution paradigm that their competitors were working on, to instead add-in motion/gesture, & the immersion-multiplication that that provided..
More dimensions is a fundamental advantage!
Perhaps if you ever get into a discussion with someone who's deaf-enough that they lip-read, instead of hearing you, you'll discover/feel how disturbing/"wrong" it is, to have no eye-contact, when discussing something..
But the fact that they can discuss things with one even though they can't hear well what one's saying .. that, too, is natural-selection advantage, through our ancestors..
Sometimes the flourishes that evolution produces are directly-significant ( like the items I've listed above ) & sometimes evolution produces negative-flourishes, like male-pattern-baldness ( after youth, male-attractiveness becomes irrelevant?, as far as evolution is concerned? genetic-reproduction's already settled, then, right? )
_ /\ _
daannii@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 132d
Well humans used to have significantly shorter lifespans so that has to be considered with evolution.
Even though a lot of people use eye contact when speaking 1 to 1. It's not used as much at farther distance and multiple group speaking.
Eye tracking research shows that we often glance at the mouth often when someone is speaking even if we don't realize it.
We also can see things in our Peripheral vision that are used in processing but we are not as aware of it.
There was some interesting studies done around covid regarding non-transparent mouth covering and verbal communication.