What Did Ancient Humans Smell Like?

Your sweat is odourless. Both kinds of it. The smell is made afterwards, by bacteria living in your armpit, and what they produce depends on one gene, what you ate, and what you have burned. Ancient humans smelled of smoke, of their diet, and of themselves — and the idea that your own smell is shameful is about a hundred years old. What You Will Learn in This Video? - Body Odour Is Not Made By You: Understand the difference between eccrine and apocrine sweat, why neither smells of anything when it leaves the body, and how bacteria cut odourless molecules apart to release the compounds you actually smell. - One Gene, Two Strange Jobs: Discover how ABCC11 decides both whether your earwax is wet or dry and whether your glands produce the raw material for odour at all, why the no-odour variant is near-universal in North-East Asia, and why people who cannot produce a smell still buy deodorant. - Why Humans Sweat Like Nothing Else: Explore how losing fur and gaining millions of sweat glands made us endurance animals, how lice genetics date the invention of clothing, and why the only hair we kept sits exactly where the scent glands are. - Smoke, Diet And Disease: Learn why every forager on Earth smelled of campfire first, what a meat diet does to how you are rated, why doctors diagnosed by smell for centuries, and how one woman identified Parkinson's disease from a T-shirt years before diagnosis. - Perfume Was Never About Hiding: Uncover the incense road that built cities, why the most prized ingredients came from a whale's gut and a beaver, why Rome bathed without soap, and why Versailles avoided water on medical advice rather than out of laziness. - The Problem Was Invented In 1919: Find out how one advertisement titled "Within the Curve of a Woman's Arm" raised sales 112 percent, how Listerine took an obscure word and made halitosis a household condition, and what an antiperspirant is actually doing inside your sweat ducts. Chapters: 0:00 Introduction 1:13 Two Kinds Of Sweat 2:01 Bacteria Make The Smell 2:57 ABCC11 4:16 Why We Sweat At All 4:54 Dating Clothes With Lice 5:26 Persistence Hunting 6:33 There Are No Human Pheromones 7:15 Smoke 7:46 Diet 8:19 Illness Has A Smell 9:48 Your Personal Signature 10:27 Mothers And Newborns 10:56 The T-Shirt Study 11:32 Straight To The Amygdala 12:06 We Are Not Bad At Smelling 13:11 Who Decided It Was A Problem 13:33 Ambergris And Civet 14:45 Rome Without Soap 15:06 Versailles 15:29 Miasma And The Beaked Mask 16:19 Odorono, 1919 17:33 What Antiperspirant Does 18:29 Losing It 19:12 Back To The Hide If this deep dive into biology, history and advertising blew your mind, smash the like button, subscribe for more breakdowns, and leave a comment telling us what topic to cover next!