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Name that smell! Most of us can’t name very many, but it seems hunter-gatherers are better at it than anyone else on the planet. It could be that, to survive in dark tropical forests, they have become adept at sniffing out fruit, prey, predators and each other – and have honed their vocabularies to suit.

By contrast, while westerners can discriminate between over a trillion smells, they have developed few words to describe them consistently. Most English-speakers knows what “purple” looks like, but are fuzzy on what “acrid” smells like.

of Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands and of Lund University in Sweden studied two ethnic groups on the Malay Peninsula. The rely on hunter-gathering, while the are predominantly horticulturists, mainly cultivating rice. Although they have different ways of life, the two groups share the same environment and speak closely related languages.

Majid and Kruspe wanted to find out if the groups’ different lifestyles affected their sensitivity to smells. They asked members of each group to name 16 different smells and 80 colours. In all, 20 hunter-gatherers and 21 horticulturists took the tests. The smells ranged from leather to turpentine, garlic and fish.

Liquorice or ginger?

“We didn’t know in advance what the ‘correct’ answer would be in each language, which are both non-written,” says Majid. So they created a “codability” score that reflected how many people gave the same answers for each smell and colour. The score would be 0 if every respondent in a group gave a different name to every smell or colour, and 1 if all responses matched.

The hunter-gatherers were four times better at giving the same answers for smells. Their average codability score was 0.26, compared with just 0.06 for the horticulturists. By contrast, the horticulturists outscored the hunter-gatherers on colour-naming, with codability scores of 0.46 and 0.3 respectively.

It may be that the Semelai’s embrace of horticulture has led them to downgrade the importance of smells, says Majid. Meanwhile, the Semaq Beri are still hunter-gatherers and depend more on odours for survival. “Smells are relevant for hunting and gathering,” says Majid.