Body Odor May Have Smelled Much Worse To Your Ancient Ancestors (nytimes.com) 72
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: When you take a whiff of something, odor molecules sail inside your nose where they bind to proteins -- called olfactory receptors -- on cells that line your nasal cavity. These receptors trigger signals that your brain interprets as one or many smells. A team of scientists has identified the olfactory receptors for two common odor molecules: a musk found in soaps and perfumes and a compound prominent in smelly underarm sweat. The research team also discovered that more recent evolutionary changes to these olfactory receptors make people less sensitive to those odors. So if you're one of the fortunate ones who isn't overwhelmed by body odor, you should probably thank evolution. The work was published in PLoS Genetics on Thursday.
Olfactory receptors can be traced back hundreds of millions of years and are believed to be present in all vertebrates. Humans have around 800 olfactory receptor genes, but only about half of them are functional, meaning they'll be translated into proteins that hang out in the nose and detect odor molecules. But within a functional gene, minor variations can cause changes in its corresponding receptor protein, and those changes can massively affect how an odor is perceived. [...] Trans-3-methyl-2-hexenoic acid is considered one of the most pungent compounds in underarm sweat. Galaxolide is a synthetic musk often described as having a floral, woody odor that's used in perfumes and cosmetics, but also things like kitty litter. The research team was able to identify olfactory receptor variants for those odors and, in both cases, people with the more evolutionarily recent gene variant found the odors significantly less intense. The galaxolide findings were particularly striking, with some participants unable to smell the musk at all. "It's really rare to find an effect that's as large as what we saw for this one receptor on the perception of the musk odor," said Marissa Kamarck, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania who was an author of the study.
[Hiroaki Matsunami, a molecular biologist at Duke University who was not involved in the research] views this work as another example of human olfaction being more complex than people initially thought. He said that, although the major findings in the study involved just two scents, they're adding to evidence that "odorant receptors as a group have extraordinary variety." The authors think their findings support a hypothesis that has been criticized that the primate olfactory system has degenerated over evolutionary time. Kara Hoover, an anthropologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who was not involved in this research but who studies the evolution of human smell, is not convinced by that hypothesis in the first place. "Why is reduced intensity assumed to be degradation?" she asked. "Maybe other things are becoming more intense or odor discrimination is improving. We know too little to make these conclusions." For Dr. Hoover, these findings stirred up other evolutionary questions. "Our species is really young," she said. "Why this much variation in such a short period of time? Is there an adaptive significance?"
Olfactory receptors can be traced back hundreds of millions of years and are believed to be present in all vertebrates. Humans have around 800 olfactory receptor genes, but only about half of them are functional, meaning they'll be translated into proteins that hang out in the nose and detect odor molecules. But within a functional gene, minor variations can cause changes in its corresponding receptor protein, and those changes can massively affect how an odor is perceived. [...] Trans-3-methyl-2-hexenoic acid is considered one of the most pungent compounds in underarm sweat. Galaxolide is a synthetic musk often described as having a floral, woody odor that's used in perfumes and cosmetics, but also things like kitty litter. The research team was able to identify olfactory receptor variants for those odors and, in both cases, people with the more evolutionarily recent gene variant found the odors significantly less intense. The galaxolide findings were particularly striking, with some participants unable to smell the musk at all. "It's really rare to find an effect that's as large as what we saw for this one receptor on the perception of the musk odor," said Marissa Kamarck, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania who was an author of the study.
[Hiroaki Matsunami, a molecular biologist at Duke University who was not involved in the research] views this work as another example of human olfaction being more complex than people initially thought. He said that, although the major findings in the study involved just two scents, they're adding to evidence that "odorant receptors as a group have extraordinary variety." The authors think their findings support a hypothesis that has been criticized that the primate olfactory system has degenerated over evolutionary time. Kara Hoover, an anthropologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who was not involved in this research but who studies the evolution of human smell, is not convinced by that hypothesis in the first place. "Why is reduced intensity assumed to be degradation?" she asked. "Maybe other things are becoming more intense or odor discrimination is improving. We know too little to make these conclusions." For Dr. Hoover, these findings stirred up other evolutionary questions. "Our species is really young," she said. "Why this much variation in such a short period of time? Is there an adaptive significance?"
This is DUMB. (Score:5, Insightful)
The headline conflates *worse* with *more intense*.
As does the article. Look, it's entirely reasonable that folks long ago would know from far away if you stunk; many folks spent their lives working with offal and dung and so on... and stayed married throughout. Their wives most certainly noticed those smells, as did evyerone else.
But what is missing from this article is any discussion of *disgust*, which varies from culture to culture, context to context. Jokes aside, if everyone you meet stinks, and you are the only person who seems to care, then maybe the issue is YOU.
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Re:This is DUMB. (Score:5, Interesting)
If my last experience on public transportation is any guide, once bathed, modern people then saturate their skin with even more harmful substances that they (but not I) seem to think smell good.
As for offensiveness, the term BO was invented by the makers of Odo-Ro-No (deodorant) in 1919 and popularized by Lifebuoy's marketing department.
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Yup, right on cue. I knew someone would be along to defend body odor and make up some crap about perfume, and here it is.
Body odor existed before advertisements. I don't know why it's difficult to understand. You want to stink, you can. People do. But those of us in civilization bathe regularly in order to stay clean and healthy. Here's a secret: hot water actually feels really good on our skin. Try it!
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You had to misinterpret that to find offence. Seems in character I guess.
He did not defend body odour, he attacked people drenching themselves in the stench of artificial flowers and eau-de-clothes-designer. You can be free of BO and general skankiness and also not smell likes a tarts boudoir. Its not one or the other.
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Yes, if you want you can stink - and it seems quite a few people choose to stink, not of sweat but of obnoxious chemicals that sting my nose. The point of the post was not "defending body odor", but that many people after washing themselves then go on to put even worse smelling chemicals on them.
If you need perfumes (that includes "menly products" like aftershave and stingy smelling deodorants) to "not smell sweaty", you're not doing the washing part correctly.
I think you were looking for your "body odor de
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Big surprise, you're mis-reading between lines that were not even written again. The advertisers weren't really talking about the stink of sweating all day in the sun and bathing once a week "whether you need it or not", they were talking about the faint traces of scent left after you have thoroughly bathed with soap.
But as a matter of fact, the smell of someone who has been sweating in the sun all day is less offensive than the crazy perfumed soaps and such (so long as it is just one day's sweat since the
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Turns out, our civilization has advanced hugely in the centuries since everyone stank
Body odor faded with the invention of air conditioning and the popularity of deodorant. That was decades ago, not centuries.
Many countries adopted ACs much later, and many still don't use deodorant because they just don't consider the normal smell of a healthy person to be offensive. That is mostly an American thing.
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You had to interpret what you replied to to get offended.
However, I'd like to offer you another offensive reinterpretation: "many just don't consider the normal smell of a healthy person to be offensive. That is mostly an American thing." -> Americans stink, most people from the rest of the world don't (they might smell, but apparently not bad).
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You are spot on - on both accounts. Its not he first comment in this thread that DNS-and-BIND had to misinterpret so he could get annoyed. I think he just likes being angry.
Personally I find the smell of too much eau-de-designer much more offensive than a bit of BO (although I'd rather smell neither). Smelling of soap is fine, but why this obsession with smelling like you fell in a perfume vat.
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OK, let's parse this. People don't smell bad. But Americans stink.
Seriously? I think you came into this interaction with a drum you wanted to beat, and people you wanted to abuse. And you've done it. Good job.
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I'd have though body odour faded when regular bathing became common. Deodorant usually doesn't actually remove odour, it just overpowers it with another smell that is marginally less unpleasant.
Much of the smell is actually from sweat soaked clothing. If you buy clothing with anti-bacterial properties (Uniqlo make it, check their "Airism" line) you won't smell even in the heat.
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I think this is a common misconception.
People back then didn't have warm baths or showers. That doesn't mean they stank to high heavens or never cleaned themselves.
You can get far with a bar of soap and a wash cloth. Most people cleaned themselves regularly for large parts of history. Because as much as individual body odor may be something you can get used to, the rancid smell of stress sweat, tobacco consumers etc is not unless you're really in a cloud of it regularly.
For some reason people seem the extra
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People back then didn't have warm baths or showers.
Roman cities and towns had public bathhouses. So did medieval ones.
Though there was a decline in the number of public bathhouses from the 16th century.
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I know but so were there bathhouses in medieval times.
The point is unless it's part of your culture to go to a bathhouse very day, I didn't want to compare it to today's indoor plumbing. Fact is even farmers back in ye olden days cleaned themselves more than once a week.
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Body odor faded with the invention of air conditioning and the popularity of deodorant.
Deodorant literally causes body odor. It sticks dead skin cells to your armpits making them harder to remove by washing, so you have to use more deodorant to try to cover up the stink of rotting skin. I stink less now than I did when I used deodorant. I'm not saying I don't smell like anything, I'm just saying that I don't smell as bad.
As for air conditioning, those of us who actually work don't have the luxury of not sweating.
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There's more to arm pit stench than waste products - most animals can do just fine without sweating stuff through their skin, but like horses we humans sweat to control our body temperature, to cool down. We also excrete pheromones through sweating. I found it odd at first that my ex gf, love of my life unfortunately, when we were in bed (post-sex or just going to sleep) liked to put his head on my arm so that her nose was deep in my armpit - and this tended to happen more when I hadn't just before showered
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Dude, you are stinky and dumb. [grin]
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This.
If our ancestors were more disgusted by each others smells than we are, and had less access to ways to remove it or cover it up, I doubt they'd have fucked enough to keep the species running.
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This.
If our ancestors were more disgusted by each others smells than we are, and had less access to ways to remove it or cover it up, I doubt they'd have fucked enough to keep the species running.
Low T? Seek a physician.
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"As does the article. Look, it's entirely reasonable that folks long ago would know from far away if you stunk; "
They'd better if you were a sabre-toothed tiger.
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if everyone you meet stinks, and you are the only person who seems to care, then maybe the issue is YOU.
Almost everyone I meet stinks, and I am almost the only person who seems to care, but the issue is still them because it's not their body odor I'm offended by — it's their fucking perfume cloud. Most people are using scented body wash products, scented hairstyling products, scented laundry products, scented shave products, scented after shave products, and then maybe some deliberate perfume or cologne on top of all that, not to mention some scented hand sanitizer these days. And in the USA, most of th
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This makes sense to me in evolutionary terms, though.
People who find body odor to be extremely unpleasant would not want to live in cities as they were even 150 years ago, maybe less. Until pretty recently in human history, cities smelled really, really bad. Even today they aren't great, but the development of sanitation systems and technology and prosperity needed to enable people to manage their own body odor have made them hugely better-smelling. (If we can get rid of internal combustion engines, they'
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This is EXTRA DUMB:
Q: If you didn't have a nose, how would you smell ?
A: Terrible !
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The headline conflates *worse* with *more intense*.
Yes, it assumes most readers don't sit at home sniffing themselves. So we're clearly not the target audience.
Oh well (Score:2)
>"So if you're one of the fortunate ones who isn't overwhelmed by body odor, you should probably thank evolution"
Well, I guess I am one of less evolved, then! To me, BO smell is horrible. And so are most of the perfumes added to most products (and that people wear). Makes for a perfectly "wonderful" Walmart shopping experience (along with the noise and people blocking everything).
>"odor that's used in perfumes and cosmetics, but also things like kitty litter. [...] people with the more evolutionari
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Only vaguely relatedly, I've found it impossible to find unscented trash bags in local stores recently. I dunno if it's a covid supply chain thing or what, but I cannot stand scented garbage bags. What's the point? Great, with a scented trash bag, my trash can smell like cheap perfume and trash. So now I buy trash bags on Amazon and cross my fingers that what I order is what actually arrives.
Sorry, I just wanted to rant.
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>"but I cannot stand scented garbage bags."
Yep, they suck. Right along with so-called "air fresheners." But nothing is worse than most actual perfumes. I don't understand how wearers can stand being around themselves.
>"Sorry, I just wanted to rant."
Rant away, I am right there with you. But it is late and I have go to bed now, but not until I use some unscented hand lotion.
Re:Oh well (Score:4, Insightful)
Please feel free to rant. The one I really hate is when a product claims to be 'fragrance free' yet it smells like a punch in the nose. There's a special place in hell for the products like that that are also sealed tight enough that you can't smell the horror until you open them. Meanwhile, very similar actually unscented products have a much milder and less offensive smell from the active ingredients.
For me, it isn't all smells that are problematic. Actual flowers smell good, essential oils from actual flowers smell good, fake flower scent smells like ass (sometimes literally). Pungent things like ammonia don't smell good but I find them inoffensive, especially compared to the scents some products use to try to cover the natural smell.
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I've been in a lot of foul smelling places on the job (rat-infested garbage dumpster at a dairy bottling plant, basement in a prison with a long-ago broken pipe overhead with a pile of sewage underneath, oil and diesel pump rooms with leaky pump seals, back-of-the-house areas in zoos with rotting hay, piss, and dung, etc.) but the worst was the large room in a det
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ammonia don't smell good but I find them inoffensive, especially compared to the scents some products use to try to cover the natural smell.
Axe. So called because that's what it feels like has just hit you in the throat.
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Agreed. I'm pretty sure it violates the Geneva Convention if used in war time.
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> fake flower scent smells like ass (sometimes literally)
That smell of "fresh towels" is an artificial pthalate meant to simulate the scent of musk deer anal glands, which makes the ladies "feel good" with pheromone mimicry.
There are women who can't stand the scent but it's mostly guys.
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Covid to the rescue (Score:1)
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> Well, I guess I am one of less evolved
Same here. I definitely have Neanderthal DNA, don't do great with "agricultural" foods, and am categorized as a "supertaster".
I suspect my ancestors did well due to being conscientious of hygiene and bad food. Helps with survival.
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Advantage, or disadvantage? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think it means that "analogous genes and proteins are believed to present in all vertebrates" and that those are believed to be derived from the ancestor of all Olfactores [wikipedia.org]. Naturally, all kinds of animals can sense molecules in the air or water and it can well be called olfaction. It's just that their genes are quite separate. To be frank, I don't know whether that's the case but it seems to be meaning of the sentence in the article.
Reporductive advantage (Score:1)
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A person's smell and other perception thereof depends on many aspects, such as hygiene, genetics, diet, diseases, etc.
Naturally, humans, like other animals, evolved to be repelled by the smell of those, where offspring would likely be at an evolutionary disadvantage (or offspring is less likely), and evolved to be attracted to the smell of those where offspring would be likely to be at an evolutionary advantage.
In particular, the MHC aspect works as an incest-avoidance mechanism.
See the wikipedia article fo
Evolution at work... (Score:2)
The modern Homo sapien doesn't have as much use for body odors as his predecessors had. Territory is marked by signatures on paper, and disputes dealt with by courts. Sex today is rarely about a primitive need to convey genes, and a much more cerebral decision.
Gone are the times when one pissed to mark his territory, fought any guy that challenged it, and jumped any girl that was attracted into it. The ability to detect another humanoid from a mile away was obsoleted.
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The loss of smell is very ancient. Ancient humans with weak smell to musk would not detect predators (and preys), shortening their lives and reducing the number of their offspring (the driving force of evolution). With the control of fire for cooking (300,000 BP), the use of weapons to protect ourselves from predators, collecting food gathering, then living in fixed shelters and obtaining food from agriculture (10,000 BP), we evolved the last hundreds of thousands of years towards ability to have numerous h
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we evolved the last hundreds of thousands of years towards ability to have numerous healthy offspring without a good sense of smell.
Unfortunately, we can't test this, as we lack access to test subjects from hundreds of years ago.
But even if we did evolve that way, we are far from there yet.
Preference in mate choice is influenced by how attractive / repelling we find the smell of other's bodies. Which in turn is known to be heavily influenced by the differences in the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system between people.
And that in turn is known to have a strong impact on a couples ability to produce healthy live offspring: https://www.sc [sciencedirect.com]
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"Sex today is rarely about a primitive need to convey genes, and a much more cerebral decision."
Spot the guy who never gets laid.
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Spot the guy that still worries about getting laid.
I get laid anytime I want. I even had a whole celebration thing about it where I basically announced to all my family and friends that I was planning to have sex with this one person for the foreseeable future, and backed that up with words, a ring and signed paper. Sure there was animal attraction and yes, odor isn't irrelevant in that, but a decision to get married is cerebral, as are the decisions to keep vows.
Re: Evolution at work... (Score:2)
Marriage isnt sex. HTH.
Might have smelt better (Score:3)
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Rejoice! (Score:2)
Crisper to the rescue! (Score:2)
Smell of uncooked food is vital (Score:2)
The difference between "this piece of old meat is gamey, but still edible" and "this is not wise to feed to me or my children" becomes much more important without fire, refrigeration, pickling, or even containers to preserve food. When everyone is only a few meals away weakening starvation, especially children and nursing mothers, I'd expect notable evolutionary advantages to a more trained, or a more successfully evolved, sense of smell.
Larry Niven wrote a novel years ago, "Telempath", about a civilization
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This is basically what I came here to say.
A decade ago, I moved outside of the city. Going for drives through the countryside in the convertible became a way-of-life.
It took two years, but I started noticing just how great the air smelled. More than just "fresh".
The first time I noticed that I was smelling food, I actually started trying to find it. With nothing but a steering wheel in my hands, and a nose on my face, I could easily find the apple orchard from a kilometer away, and a corn field from as f
Nervous System? (Score:2)
They're confounding "worse" with "more intense" (Score:2)
Yes, I believe our ancestors had more sensitive smell sensors. But worse adds a value judgement that isn't implied by the ability to notice and discriminate. Much of our reaction to scents is learned. Go back a century or so and bathing was, at most, a once a week activity, and nobody used antiperspirants. (Of course, some used perfumes, but not most folks.)
City People (Score:2)
It's the City People. They live so close together that any who can detect odor normally, stop making babies. So that gene pattern dies out... ;-P
France (Score:1)
Have they walked around France much? LOL.
La Pew!