Researchers have found a tribe in the Malay peninsula rainforest who are markedly better than westerners at identifying aromas

As Ludwig Wittgenstein nearly wrote: “If a dog could talk, we could not understand him.” This is because while your average dog would be discoursing happily on thousands of subtle variations of smell, we humans, with our inferior nasal apparatus, would be unable to grasp what they were talking about. And our incomprehension might be the greater if we are unfortunate enough to be English speakers, according to a study by linguist Asifa Majid. She compared the fluency and discrimination of smelltalk between speakers of the Aslian languages (found on the Malay peninsula) and Anglophones. The latter came off a poor second. “It was hard for most English speakers to identify even the common smell of cinnamon,” Majid said.

The Jahai hunter-gatherers Majid studied might be better at conversationally distinguishing smells, the study speculates, because they live in a tropical rainforest, while many native English speakers inhabit the post-industrial west, where all smells must be chemically eliminated. More.

See: The Guardian

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