Change Everything No 14: The Nose Knows

From the culture of smell to the creativity of Neanderthals, via Lincoln Cathedral

Book news

Less than three weeks to go until the official launch of Change Everything: How We Can Rethink, Repair and Rebuild Society. Which means the postman will soon be busy. Get in soon if you want it hot off the press.

What can you smell right now?

Whenever I smell coal burning, I’m immediately transported to Beijing in the early 1990s, where I first encountered the practice. It is a reminder of how powerful this sense - which in our current society we think little about - can be.

I was left contemplating that lacuna by a New Books Network podcast, with Dr Xuelei Huang, talking about Chinese traditional approaches, which placed a far greater weight and importance on being exposed to the appropriate smells, adjusted for age, status and gender. Her work is focused on the physical, bodily experience of living in China through the tumultuous changes of the late 19th and 20th centuries, but it was the older history that really grabbed me. What scent should be in a room for an older powerful woman? There’s a justification for each element.

We tend to think of the past as smelling bad - and certainly that is the impression given by a visit to the Jorvik Viking Centre where an attempt at a complete sensory experience of life there in 975AD contains pungent and far from pleasant wafts. But of course there were and area plenty of natural ways to scent a room that have always been available. And even using smells to protect yourself from plague - like an orange studded with cloves, a reaction to the miasma theory of disease, which was one more reason to seek out good smells.

I learnt a lot more as I started on Huang’s book Scents of China: A Modern History of Smell, including that Linda B Buck in 2004 shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology for her work on uncovering how mammals detect smells, and how their brains process that detection and the impacts on behaviour. You can read her prize lecture here.

The Shang dynasty pictograph for smell or stink was a nose on top of a dog, Huang tells us, a reminder of how extraordinarily poor our own sense compared to that of canines. I often use the dominance of that scent for dogs as a way of demonstrating the totally different world in which other species live. Surely for a dog, a person is not present or absent, but 20, or 80, or 50 per cent present, depending on how recently they left. Which certainly helps in thinking of the famous historical cases where dogs have resolutely remained at the graves of their owners - like Greyfrairs Bobby.

Huang talks about “olfactory modernity”, and this is one more aspect of human life that has been homogenised, simplified, and industrialised over the past century. Multinational companies have not just dumbed down and denatured our diets, and also the products we use for cleaning ourselves and our homes, “deodorising”, perfuming, relying on usually petrochemical-derived and vastly simplified compounds. (Something that I raised back in 2019 in some of my first written questions in the House of Lords.)

When we think about the value of “forest bathing”, smells likely play a significant part. This is the first sense developed when animals emerged from the seas and crawled up on the shore - essential to be able to identify the scent of danger - and our response to smells is deeply wired into our stress responses.

There’s good reason to be concerned about indoor air quality in our modern world, not just in terms of exposure to poisons, but also broader wellbeing.

Quite a nose in Lincoln Cathedral, where I was lucky enough to spend a couple of hours this week. Hadn’t realised what a truly spectacular and historic building it was. Another edition of Change Everything might well feature some of its fascinating women, from Katharine Swynford to Eleanor of Castille.

Picks of the week

Reading

That Ludovic Slimak’s The Naked Neanderthal was not originally written in English is obvious from its beautifully poetic language and depth of thought; it is hard to think of any Anglophone academic who writes like this. The author is not handicapped by the narrowness of much academic discourse in English, but rather enriched by the depth of thinking characteristic of Continental European philosophy. His thesis is that we’ve profoundly under-estimated the alieness of Neanderthals, tried - like colonisers - to shape them in our own image, rather than see their intelligence as profoundly different, not limited by the ego or “the sign”, but embedded in a co-creative relationship between the object and its shaper.

“There is an absolute artisanal freedom, and probably a very rich freedom of thought about the world. … a perception of reality that has no structural echo in what we see today in sapiens societies, whether Paleolithic or modern-day. In this the Mousterian object is most like certain Eastern traditions such as the Japanese shibui and ma or the Maori mana.” (p. 181)

Slimak suggests this might be potentially educative, in the age of the Anthropocene, something we should learn from before it is too late.

He also reports a stunning piece of science, which had passed me by, analysis of a rock shelter, Mandrin cave, which demonstrates from the wood smoke marking its walls that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were in the cave not more than one year apart. There’s no doubt in his writing where responsibility for the disappearance of Neanderthals’ lies - and that the genetic exchange that still marks us was long before these encounters, far to the east and around 100,000 years ago. But there’s also the mystery of Byzovaya, a site in the sub-Arctic solidly dated to 24,000 years ago. No human remains have been found, but the tool kit and culture looks Neanderthal, not sapiens. Was this the last holdout?

And that led me to go back to a blogger (and academic) I’ve been recommending for two decades, the paleoanthropologist John Hawks, best known for his work on Homo naledi. Viewing a comet that would not have been visible for 50,000 years led him to reflect on what human watchers, of various species, would have made of it then.

Listening

I knew the look of the saguaro cactus from misspent early teenage years reading Western pulp novels (no I’m not really sure why I got into them), but didn’t know their name, until I listened to this New Books Network podcast that is not so much about the species or its ecology, but its social symbolism. Women in bikinis lounging in the arms of (presumably despined) limbs of the cactus - how very 1970s.

Photo by Christoph von Gellhorn on Unsplash

Thinking

Courtesy of the brilliant Inkcap journal, two reports this week led me to reflecting on fruit. In Cumbria, a small group of locals in Maryport is setting up a community orchard planted with traditional local apple varieties. And in Wales, another modest scheme is seeking to save “service trees”, once clearly widespread, with berries used to make "beer, flavour whiskey and produce jams, preserves & liqueurs”. At their ripest, said to be similar to dates. When we need to urgently think about food security, about resilience, the need for a more varied diet of plants for public health - and more trees, planting fruit trees, particularly less common ones, is an obvious - and relatively simple - win.

Researching

Citizen science - with records dating back to the early 18th century, shows how much plants have adapted to human’s impact on climate. “When all species were considered together the average flowering time in the UK had advanced by a month over the last 40 years. …Hawthorn is generally flowering 13 days earlier than it did in the early 1980s while the flowers of the horse chestnut tree appear ten days earlier.” That’s a big problem of course for insects, which have to adapt their lifecycles according.

Photo by Timo C. Dinger on Unsplash

Almost the end

Since it is Budget week, this street sign from Lincoln seemed appropriate, not just for the government, but Labout too. As the Telegraph reported in a big profile of Rachel Reeves: “Think tanks warn that ‘austerity 2.0’ is coming under Tory plans to increase public spending by just one per cent a year after the election, meaning real-terms cuts in unprotected government departments. And yet Labour is not mapping out a different path, barring a few small pockets of extra cash.”

What did you think?

You can also find me on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok and X.