How do we smell? Terrible! Food sources might affect how we describe scent

Humans have long been considered poor at describing smells, but research on hunter-gatherers shows this is not the case for everyone

If describing a smell leaves you struggling to find the right words, it might be down to how you put food on the table.

Researchers studying two communities living in tropical rainforests have found that while a hunter-gatherer group could easily describe different odours, their plant-growing neighbours floundered - suggesting different ways of finding food could be behind humans' proficiency, or lack of it, when it comes to putting a name to a scent.