Sniff, sniff. (Credit: Shutterstock) What’s easier for you: identifying what color something is, or identifying a smell from a source you cannot see? If you’re like most people, color comes more easily. That, however, isn’t the case for all humans. According to a new study published Thursday in Current Biology, those who practice a hunter-gatherer lifestyle have an edge when it comes to naming a particular funk.
So why are people often better at describing what they see versus what they smell? Previous scientific studies have suggested it was an evolutionary trade-off: as humans evolved to be upright, vision developed to be more critical than smell. That imbalance between the two senses shows up in the way humans communicate. There are often more ways to describe a sight than a smell, and descriptions of smells often rely on similarities to other smells (for example, “This shoe smells like a banana!”). ...
