Contagious yawning is shared by humans and a few other species, such as chimps and dogs. I don't think the origin of this comes from an involuntary empathy reflex, as some psychologists believe. Although we are in the block of species that correlates increased empathy with contagious yawning, we are also in the block that partially evolved in caves. Because oxygen was in shorter supply there, we had to breathe harder to obtain more of it. I think contagious yawning came about so we could get our fair share of air after an initial yawner made their “threatening” inhalation. We perceived the yawner as stealing a fraction of the pure air that was left, so we sought to savor more for ourselves by returning their yawn with one of our own.
I have no way of proving this, but if you ever spend some time in a confined space, you'll know that as the air quality deteriorates, greater breaths of air are needed to compensate for the lack of it. After we moved into caves and away from the open savannah, the competition for air may have created this fascinating phenomenon. Alternatively, and this might make even more sense from a biological perspective, seeing as we evolved from chimps and they likely had contagious yawners before us, the trait in humans was probably inherited from them. That would point the origin of contagious yawning in primates to an isolated group of chimps living in a confined space.
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