COMMITMENTS : A Passionate History : Kissing didn’t start with the silver screen. It has a lovely, lusty, 4-million-year-old legacy.

The young do it. The old do it. Even the butterflies--well, they probably don’t do it. But chimpanzees and orangutans do.

The Egyptians, Romans and Greeks did it. The Puritans did it (although they probably didn’t enjoy it). The Romantics perfected it. The Victorians dreamed about it--and then did it discreetly.

They all kissed. Romantically. Passionately. Longingly. And, most likely, often.

“It’s logical to conclude it’s very ancient, very primitive and very common,” said Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and the author of “Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage and Why We Stray” (Ballantine, 1993). From 1984 to 1994, she was research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Kissing is older than humanity. Well-acquainted chimpanzees and orangutans kissed before humans arrived. They still do. There is evidence they even French kiss because some of the bolder ones have tried their luck with anthropologists, Fisher said.

Our ancestors came down out of the trees and began roaming the grasslands of Africa about 4 million years ago, and they surely spent some of their time kissing, hugging, stroking and feeding each other bits of fruit, Fisher said.

And apparently humans haven’t stopped. Kissing is a lovely, luscious, lusty legacy.

Fisher estimates that more than 90% of all peoples on record kiss. Until Western contact, kissing was reportedly unknown among the Somali, the Lepcha of Sikkum and the Sirionon of South America. The Thonga of South Africa and a few other peoples traditionally found kissing to be disgusting, she said. But even in those societies lovers patted, licked, rubbed, sucked, nipped or blew on each other’s faces before sex.

Asian cultures regard kissing as a much more private activity than Western cultures do. In November, the Washington Post reported that the Japanese media had been castigating young people who were defying the unwritten social rule against kissing in public. The Japanese have been raised to greet friends, spouses and lovers with a polite bow. Even soldiers returning home from months overseas are welcomed by their wives at the airport with a smile and a bow, the Post found.

Diane Ackerman, staff writer for the New Yorker, explored the allure of kissing in her newest book, “A Natural History of Love” (Random House, 1994). She described Finnish peoples who bathe together completely nude but regard kissing as indecent. She also mentioned certain African peoples whose lips are decorated, mutilated, stretched or in other ways reshaped and who don’t kiss.

But they are unusual. Most cultures engage in kissing and enjoy it.

And no wonder.

“A kiss is the height of voluptuousness, an expense of time and an expanse of spirit in the sweet toil of romance, when one’s bones quiver, anticipation rockets, but gratification is kept at bay on purpose, in exquisite torment, to build to a succulent crescendo of emotion and passion,” Ackerman writes with relish in “A Natural History of Love.”

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The nearly universal quality of kissing led naturally to the artistic expression of the kiss. But Western art was slow to embrace the embrace.

Jean Cadogan, curator of European art at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., had to rack her brain to think of many examples of kissing in Western painting before the 19th Century.

“You’ll find a lot of hanky panky--people groping each other--but not kissing,” Cadogan said. “I think it was far too intimate and erotic for art.”

Another reason for its absence was the “hierarchy of the genres” in painting that was firmly upheld until the 19th Century. The most-revered genre was historical or narrative painting, followed by portraits of upstanding citizens and then landscapes. Paintings of low-life common people were at the bottom of the hierarchy.

If kissing was depicted in paintings, it was shown as something negative, rather than as a tender exchange. For example, some 17th-Century Northern European painters occasionally showed peasants drinking and carousing and kissing, but their work carried a strong moral message. It was obvious from the scenes that such behavior did not belong in polite society.

Kissing began to appear more often in the 19th Century. Gustav Klimt painted “The Kiss,” which now hangs in Vienna, Cadogan noted.

In sculpture, Rodin gave us a lasting view to a kiss. “The Kiss” shows two lovers sitting on a rocky ledge, embracing tenderly but with passionate energy radiating from their stony forms. The woman’s left hand is wrapped around the man’s neck, while the man rests his open right hand on her thigh.

In drama, Shakespeare gave us Romeo and Juliet’s doomed kiss. Cole Porter brought us melody and misogyny in Broadway’s “Kiss Me Kate.”

Pop music has given us too many kisses to count--Exile’s disco “Kiss You All Over,” Barbra Streisand’s “Kiss Me in the Rain,” Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Passionate Kisses,” even the defunct theatrical rock group KISS.

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Kissing has always been an essential element of the movies. Thomas Alva Edison, the irrepressible inventor from the romantic state of Ohio, is thought to have captured the first kiss on film.

The New York World had arranged for two stars, May Irwin and John C. Rice, to visit Edison in his New Jersey studio in April, 1896. He captured their re-enactment of the climax of the musical comedy “The Widow Jones.” The April 26, 1896, Sunday edition of the New York World devoted nearly an entire page of text and illustration to the event.

Kisses only got better on-screen. Greta Garbo and John Gilbert shared a good one in 1926 in “Flesh and the Devil,” said Jeanine Basinger, chairwoman of the film-studies program at Wesleyan University in Middletown.

Kissing became the gesture of romantic love, and actors took up the torch. Paul Stacy, a film professor emeritus at the University of Hartford, said his favorite movie kiss is between Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in the 1951 film “A Place in the Sun.” His favorite movie-kiss reference, however, belonged to Bette Davis in “Cabin in the Cotton” (1932), when she said: “Ah’d love to kiss yuh, but ah just washed mah hair.”

Movies also have taught us what two pairs of lips should be doing. We watch, with bated breath, as the faces draw nearer, tilt just so, eyes close and then the lips plunge in for the big moment.

“I do believe that movies teach people how to kiss--and a thousand other things,” Stacy said.