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.
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.