Читать книгу Smells - Robert Muchembled - Страница 7

Prior to 2014, our sense of smell was significantly devalued, even derided. It was held to be too animalistic, an encumbrance in the human quest for exceptional status in an age of dazzling technology and scientific discovery. As a superfluous, vestigial remnant of our pre-human past, it came to be powerfully repressed in our deodorantaddled civilization. It barely raised a flicker of interest among scientists, who had never bothered to test the hypothesis commonly held by earlier generations of scholars that even the keenest human noses could only distinguish some ten thousand smells at best, making our sense of smell a distant runner-up to our eyes, able to detect several million different shades of colour, and ears, which can distinguish nearly five hundred thousand sounds. Smell seemed to be a biological dead end, doomed to gradual extinction.