Human Sense of Smell Underestimated

Benjamin Long writes to note a study, by a team of neuroscientists and engineers, that demonstrated that humans can follow a scent trail — an ability that most had assumed only animals possessed. Furthermore, the study demonstrated for the first time that humans make use of differential information from the two nostrils. The researchers blindfolded college students who crawled through grass to sniff out a chocolate-scented trail. Here is the abstract of the paper in Nature Neuroscience. From the article: "The humans, however, still sniffed much more slowly than dogs, which may partially account for canines' greater efficiency at scent tracking. [A commentator] says that despite their relatively sluggish speed, the fact that subjects improved with training is noteworthy. 'I think that shows the effect of our distinctively different behavior in actually using this sense,' he says. 'The dog [has] been doing this its whole life, and humans [were] just asked to plunge in the first time they've ever done it.'"

Comments

Should we be surprised?

[tripslash]

My initial thought to this story was, "Well, duh." We are animals, after all, why should we be so far removed from other animals on this planet?

I think it goes back to that age old concept, or conciet, that humans are specially created by God to be above all other species, which leads to such arrogant and illogical beliefs that we are unlike other animals.

Did our far ancestors track their game only by visual sign (tracks on the ground, etc.) before they tamed the wolves? I don't think so. I know hunters today who can detect scent on the air, and use that sense to aid their hunting. They can't do want dogs can, obviously, but modern man can track a scent to some useful degree.

One of these days, we're going to have accept that we only think we are entirely different from the animals, not that we actually are.