Perfume burner, Egypt, c. 700-900 (Wikicommons, Musée du Louvre, Marie-Lan Nguyen)
We have sought to remake our environment in ever more appealing ways, including its smell. But the change hasn’t been one-way. By remaking our olfactory environment, we’ve ended up remaking ourselves.
I’ve published a new paper in Psych. When I wrote it, I had three aims:
· Explain the concept of gene-culture coevolution
· Provide a concrete example, i.e., how we have coevolved with the odors around us, not only in our ability to emit and sense them but also in our ability to represent them mentally
· Develop the theoretical basis of gene-culture coevolution
Please feel free to comment. The following is the abstract:
As hunter-gatherers, humans used their sense of smell to identify plants and animals, to find their way within a foraging area, or to distinguish each other by gender, age, kinship, or social dominance. Because women gathered while men hunted, the sexes evolved different sensitivities to plant and animal odors. They also ended up emitting different odors. Male odors served to intimidate rival males or assert dominance. With the rise of farming and sedentism, humans no longer needed their sense of smell to find elusive food sources or to orient themselves within a large area. Odors now came from a narrower range of plants and animals. Meanwhile, body odor was removed through bathing to facilitate interactions in enclosed spaces. This new phenotype became the template for the evolution of a new genotype: less sensitivity to odors of wild plants and animals, lower emissions of male odors, and a more negative response to them. Further change came with the development of fragrances to reodorize the body and the home. This new olfactory environment coevolved with the ability to represent odors in the mind, notably for storage in memory, for vicarious re-experiencing, or for sharing with other people through speech and writing.
References
Frost, P. (2022). Humans and the olfactory environment: a case of gene-culture coevolution? Psych 4(2): 301-317. https://doi.org/10.3390/psych4020027