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.
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.]
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…
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? )
_ /\ _
Wanna touch pink rings?
The mouth is a sphincter.
It is connected directly to your butthole.
The mouth is your face anus.
They’re even more histologically related to each other than they are to anything else. Lips and anus look surprisingly similar under a microscope.
We are just a coiled tube, surrounded and protected by a system maintenance apparatus.
Humans are just meat silly straws
Delete this comment!
The fanus.
Fun fact: when two people kiss, they create a long tube that starts and ends with an anus.
So you could also extend that tube woth a third person?
Plot for human centipede right here.
Ever performed a double butt kiss?
The mouth is the face anus to the soul.
Wow, embroider that on a pillow.
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?
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.
“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?
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…
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
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.
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.
I prefer it to my brown ring.
You could always get it bleached to match!
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.
