There was this attempt to make cultural anthropology more numbers based, and find correlates of various things: does the type of food you farm affect family structure, that sort of thing. Perhaps the most successful of these attempt was what's called "the Human Relations Area File". While picking a truly "representitive" sample (as in random) of world cultures is impossible, they tried to choose widely dispersed cultures (over space and, as possible, time) and more than anything wanted to pick a consistent, varied sample so that individual researchers couldn't affect the outcome of something by picking all favorable cases for their thesis. Wikipedia has a good entry on the Human Relations Area File. There was a similar attempt to create a "standard", though different, sample called the "Standard Cross Cultural Sample".
Why am I bringing this up? Just last year there was an article in the American Anthropologist that looked at this question. William R. Jankowiak, Shelly L. Volsche, Justin R. Garcia. "Is the Romantic–Sexual Kiss a Near Human Universal?" 2015. *American Anthropologist 117:3, pp. 535–539. Link to gated article. Here's the abstract:
Scholars from a wide range of human social and behavioral sciences have become interested in the romantic–sexual kiss. This research, and its public dissemination, often includes statements about the ubiquity of kissing, particularly romantic–sexual kissing, across cultures. Yet, to date there is no evidence to support or reject this claim. Employing standard cross-cultural methods, this research report is the first attempt to use a large sample set (eHRAF World Cultures, SCCS, and a selective ethnographer survey) to document the presence or absence of the romantic–sexual kiss (n = 168 cultures). We defined romantic–sexual kissing as lip-to-lip contact that may or may not be prolonged. Despite frequent depictions of kissing in a wide range of material culture, we found no evidence that the romantic–sexual kiss is a human universal or even a near universal. The romantic–sexual kiss was present in a minority of cultures sampled (46%). Moreover, there is a strong correlation between the frequency of the romantic–sexual kiss and a society's relative social complexity: the more socially complex the culture, the higher frequency of romantic–sexual kissing.
Since not that many people use the eHRAF anymore, so it was good for them to have a "hit" article and they extensively wrote this up as a sort of press release. It's great, it includes a few quotes from the original ethnographies that made up the file. Here's the main bit quoting individual ethnographies:
Overall, we found that the perception of romantic kissing in non-kissing societies ranges from simple disinterest or amusement to total disgust.
Among the indigenous Tapirapé people of Central Brazil, Wagley (1977) found that “couples showed affection”, but “kissing seems to have been unknown”. He explains,
When I described it to them, it struck them as a strange form of showing physical attraction … and, in a way, disgusting. It was common, instead, to see a married couple walking across the village plaza with the man’s arm draped over his wife’s shoulder. A couple might stand close to each other during a conversation with the man’s arms over his wife’s shoulders and she holding him around the hips (Wagley 1977: 158).
Across the Pacific Ocean in Melanesia, Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1929: 330) classic account describes the impression of kissing among Trobriand Islanders, who were equally bemused by the foreign custom:
Certainly it never forms a self-contained independent source of pleasure, nor is it a definite preliminary stage of love-making, as is the case with us. This caress was never spontaneously mentioned by the natives, and, to direct inquiries, I always received a negative answer. The natives know, however, that white people “will sit, will press mouth against mouth–they are pleased with it.” But they regard it as a rather insipid and silly form of amusement.
The Tsonga people of Southern Africa are also openly disgusted by the practice: “Kissing was formerly entirely unknown… When they saw the custom adopted by the Europeans, they said laughingly: “Look at these people! They suck each other! They eat each other’s saliva and dirt!” Even a husband never kissed his wife” (Junod 1927: 353-354).
In other situations, kissing behavior is distinctly non-romantic because it carries alternate connotations of ritual worship, social status or respect. For example, in Central America (see, e.g. Nash 1970: 109) and Africa – areas where Jankowiak, et al. suggest instances of romantic kissing are rather low – kissing is often more associated with respect than intimacy.
And so on, if you're interested in the subject, even if you don't read the full academic article, check out the full press release (I quoted about half of it here). I don't see any Western society mentioned here (they used the contemporary file, not the archeological one; HRAF separates contemporary and historical groups, unlike the SCCS). It perhaps safe to assume that passionate kissing has been a part of the West for a long time, though it is far from universal, especially in small scale societies.