The Brain in Love: Has Neuroscience Stolen the Secret of Love?

No one knows when the story of love began in the history of mankind, though from a religious point of view it started with Adam and Eve and the Forbidden Fruit. Scientifically speaking, love probably made its appearance with H. neanderthalensis between 350 and 30 thousand years ago. Neanderthal graves have yielded the pollen of brightly coloured flowers brought from different regions, and these have been associated with some kind of loving relationship between the living and the dead. If love started with the Neanderthals, anthropological studies have shown that today, 147 out of 166 societies in the world have a word for love or at least the concept of love, while for the other nineteen, it has been suggested that not enough questions of the right kind have been asked to discover whether it exists or not. For this reason, love is accepted as a universal or near-universal feeling.