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How to use modern science to reconstruct ancient scents

Nature Human Behaviour volume 6, pages 611–614 (2022)Cite this article

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Olfaction has profoundly shaped human experience and behaviour from the deep past through to the present day. Advanced biomolecular and ‘omics’ sciences enable more direct insights into past scents, offering new options to explore critical aspects of ancient society and lifeways as well as the historical meanings of smell.

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Fig. 1: Workflow for studying ancient scents using biomolecular approaches.
Fig. 2: Contextualizing biomolecular data to reconstruct ancient experience, behaviour and society.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Max Planck Society for funding this research. B.H. is supported by the Joachim Herz Foundation and holds an Add-on Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Life Sciences. We thank F. Kai Yik Teoh for his feedback and valuable suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany

    Barbara Huber, Thomas Larsen, Robert N. Spengler & Nicole Boivin

  2. School of Social Science, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Nicole Boivin

  3. Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

    Nicole Boivin

  4. Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA

    Nicole Boivin

Authors
  1. Barbara Huber
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  2. Thomas Larsen
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  3. Robert N. Spengler
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  4. Nicole Boivin
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Correspondence to Barbara Huber or Nicole Boivin.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Joanna Day and Ruth Nugent for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Huber, B., Larsen, T., Spengler, R.N. et al. How to use modern science to reconstruct ancient scents. Nat Hum Behav 6, 611–614 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01325-7

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