The air that we breathe

Of the five senses, the sense of smell is undoubtedly the one of which we are least aware – why? Fragrances are a difficult subject to talk about – so descriptive terms have to be borrowed from other sectors, such as “green” from the world of color or “fruity” from the field of taste. And yet fragrances have the magical ability
to enchant.

A rudimentary kind of olfactory system played a crucial role in the development of life: Water served as the medium that transported information to the first living
organisms, which they assimilated with the aid of a mechanism that can be termed a “sense of smell” in the broadest sense of the world. The life forms that later developed on land were forced to adapt: It was now the air they breathed, and not water, that supplied them with vital information.

So it was necessary to find a filtration system, i.e. an actual olfactory organ. It was with this first nose that the prehistoric quadrupeds were able to sniff vital information about enemies and mates, sources of nutrition and territorial borders. When the first human-like beings set out to conquer the world on two legs, though, they lost their “olfactory contact” with the ground – their eyes and ears provided them with faster and more effective information about friends, foes and prey. Yet right
down to this very day, our noses tell us much more than we realize:
– if we equate enemy with a warning odor, mating with eroticism and prey with nutrition…