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.
What’s so weird about a gasket. What SHOULD be there?
Have you seen genitals though? Now that’s some weird stuff.
Yeah . Both sets are super weird. I can’t even…
“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.”
They’re made of meat?
The mouth is a sphincter.
It is connected directly to your butthole.
The mouth is your face anus.
We are just a coiled tube, surrounded and protected by a system maintenance apparatus.
Humans are just meat silly straws
The fanus.
Delete this comment!
Fun fact: when two people kiss, they create a long tube that starts and ends with an anus.
Giggity
So you could also extend that tube woth a third person?
Plot for human centipede right here.
How do they think of these things? Just like this, with a bong.
Ever performed a double butt kiss?
Why, you offering?
The mouth is the face anus to the soul.
Wow, embroider that on a pillow.
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…
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.
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.
You’re just getting too used to seeing those phony fat-lipped MAGA concubines. They’re normalizing that expensive carved up face image.
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
Those are both great and also emphasize how weird big high contrast lips are on animals.
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.
I think we have different ideas on what’s cute. Those monkeys are creepy.
They don’t really have plump ring lips like us.
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.
SOME orangutans do: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=orangutan&iar=images&t=fpas
Ah so they do. How bout that. Yeah I would agree those are pretty close to human lips.
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.
They don’t really have lips like humans do. We have plump rings around our mouths. Those other animals do not
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…
_ /\ _
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.
We’re all just tubes … tubin’ around.
It’d be weirder if they were green or blue.
sometimes they are blue. it’s usually someone on the way to being a corpse, but i’ve seen it.
That’s definitely true
Wanna touch pink rings?
Dr Wesker and Daanni, sitting in a tree, R-I-N-G-I-N-G!
Evolutionarily, it probably helps with both speech and nonverbal language, i.e. facial expressions
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.
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.
100%.
Give me a wolf muzzle any day. Having a human face just feels wrong.
– Frost
Exactly! 🐺
– Frost
Freedom of Form Foundation is working on this (and the rest of the body) :3
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
I prefer it to my brown ring.
You could always get it bleached to match!
My dog disagrees.
Does your dog have a noodle ring around their mouth ?
Under the overhanging fur, yes. Mammals have lips.
I think our definition of lips is different
Are you suggesting that people with long mustaches don’t have lips?
Some other animals do have lips.
Fish. I think that’s it. Maybe you could argue snails.
But they ain’t pink
Dogs have lips, for one
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? )
_ /\ _
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 training 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.
