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.
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.
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.