Why We Cry?

These days there have been plenty of good reasons to be upset. Separation, painful loss, frustration. Luckily, we’ve developed ways of dealing with all of this, and one of them is called crying. But where does crying come from? And what purpose does it serve?

Nature is loaded with odd traits and behaviors — elephant trunks, the wide, separated eyes of hammerhead sharks, the bizarre mating dance of the Sandhill Crane — but there is nothing quite as strange as the crying we humans do. It may not seem odd to us. We do it often enough, after all. (Studies show that women, on average cry, five times a month and men a little more than one.) And the first thing we do when we enter the world is bawl to let everyone know we’ve arrived healthy and whole. It’s also a clear message that we can breath, and that it’s okay to cut the umbilical cord, both highly useful if you want to get on with life.

But the trait that makes human crying particularly unusual is its tears. Other animals may whimper or moan or howl, but none cries tears of emotion. Not even chimps or gorillas, our closest primate cousins. And unlike laughing or even speech, there’s doesn’t seem to be any obvious parallel in the primate world for the moist brand of crying we do. Apes do have tears ducts, and so do other mammals, even crocodiles, but they are there for house cleaning; to bath and heal. They have no connection to emotion. But for…