There is an idea going around that humans smell bad. John McGann has reviewed the research on the matter, in Science, and finds that actually, humans smell pretty good.
“Poor human olfaction is a 19th-century myth,” he determined. “Your nose knows more than scientists thought,” the news section of Science says about the paper.
Many people have thought that humans don’t smell all that bad. But on close investigation, it becomes striking how good people smell.
“I’d always kind of known that the human sense of smell was better than most people give it credit for, but it was striking to us how good it was,” McGann said.
The human nose has been underrated for 150 years, but science is setting the record straight, Deborah Netburn, Los Angeles Times
It has been particularly thought that primates smell especially bad, worse than rodents and dogs, and humans smell worst of all. The line of thinking is that humans, and primates generally, smell so bad because they are so concerned with how things look.
We’re highly visual, with the ability to pick out the face of a friend in a crowd and paint realistic works of art with our hands and eyes alone.
But we’ve long believed these strengths came at a cost: our sense of smell.
“People are sometimes taught that because humans developed such a good visual system, we lost a sense of smell as a trade-off,” Rutgers University neurobiologist John McGann says.
Let’s obliterate the myth that humans have a bad sense of smell, Brian Resnik, Vox
McGann works with laboratory mice, so he would have an accurate idea of how they smell. But after carefully comparing mice and humans, it turns out to be amazing how good people smell.
For so long people failed to stop and question this claim, even people who study the sense of smell for a living,” he said. “The fact is the sense of smell is just as good in humans as in other mammals, like rodents and dogs.”
McGann said he was alerted to the “big myth” after trying to translate rodent experiments to humans.
“We’d have two odours that mice couldn’t tell apart, expecting humans wouldn’t be able to, and they’d be like ‘that’s one and that’s two’,” he said. “It was amazing how good the human olfactory system was.”
Not to be sniffed at: human sense of smell rivals that of dogs, says study, Hannah Devlon, Guardian
Here is a background abstract for the paper.
It is widely believed that the human sense of smell is inferior to that of other mammals, especially rodents and dogs. This Review traces the scientific history of this idea to 19th-century neuroanatomist Paul Broca. He classified humans as “nonsmellers” not owing to any sensory testing but because he believed that the evolutionary enlargement of the human frontal lobe gave human beings free will at the expense of the olfactory system. He especially emphasized the small size of the human brain’s olfactory bulb relative to the size of the brain overall, and noted that other mammals have olfactory bulbs that are proportionately much larger. Broca’s claim that humans have an impoverished olfactory system (later labeled “microsmaty,” or tiny smell) influenced Sigmund Freud, who argued that olfactory atrophy rendered humans susceptible to mental illness. Humans’ supposed microsmaty led to the scientific neglect of the human olfactory system for much of the 20th century, and even today many biologists, anthropologists, and psychologists persist in the erroneous belief that humans have a poor sense of smell. Genetic and neurobiological data that reveal features unique to the human olfactory system are regularly misinterpreted to underlie the putative microsmaty, and the impact of human olfactory dysfunction is underappreciated in medical practice.