PEOPLE can recognise the smell of their close family members – but surprisingly, they don’t like it. This aversion may help prevent incest, the discoverers speculate.
Most studies of smell recognition in humans have looked at mothers and their newborn babies, who learn to recognise each other’s smell soon after birth. But Tiffany Czilli’s team at Wayne State University in Detroit wanted to know how well all the other members of the family would fare in a sniff test.
She recruited 25 families with at least two children aged between 6 and 15, and gave the participants odourless T-shirts, odourless soap…
