From bad smell to pheromone

[arauca]

The evolution of bile salts from digestive aid to pheromone, featured in the current issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, mirrors humans' adaptation of perfume.

"It's similar to how perfume has evolved in our society," said Tyler Buchinger, one of the lead authors and MSU doctoral student. "Perfume was first used to mask body odor due to a societal stigma against daily bathing. Today, in many cases, it exemplifies romance and is used to attract mates."


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-10-bile-saltssea-lampreys-scent-seduction.html#jCp

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

The oldest perfumes we have discovered, and the oldest writing about perfumes, are about 4,000 years old. The proscription against bathing dates back only to the Dark Ages, about 1,000 years ago, when European culture stagnated under the iron thumb of the Christian church.

The Christian priests taught that it was a sin to immerse oneself in water. This is why "witch trials" were conducted by tossing suspected witches into a lake. If they could swim, they must be witches and were executed. If they drowned, then they were innocent and went to Heaven.

This is also one of the reasons for the incredible death toll from the Plague, and for Christian Europe's hatred of the Jews. The Jews have always believed in cleanliness and bathed regularly. So a much smaller percentage of their population were killed by the Plague, whereas something like one-third of the Christians died. The Christians said the reason was that the Jews were in league with the devil.

Perfumes have been applied to animals, food, objects and living spaces, not just to people.

 

[arauca]

The oldest perfumes we have discovered, and the oldest writing about perfumes, are about 4,000 years old. The proscription against bathing dates back only to the Dark Ages, about 1,000 years ago, when European culture stagnated under the iron thumb of the Christian church.

The Christian priests taught that it was a sin to immerse oneself in water. This is why "witch trials" were conducted by tossing suspected witches into a lake. If they could swim, they must be witches and were executed. If they drowned, then they were innocent and went to Heaven.

This is also one of the reasons for the incredible death toll from the Plague, and for Christian Europe's hatred of the Jews. The Jews have always believed in cleanliness and bathed regularly. So a much smaller percentage of their population were killed by the Plague, whereas something like one-third of the Christians died. The Christians said the reason was that the Jews were in league with the devil.

Perfumes have been applied to animals, food, objects and living spaces, not just to people.

Don't be so positive about smell and Christian . Think about access to water and winter . As a kid living by a river we have take a bath on weakly bases . If you look on a map in Europa you will find there are rivers all over and water in water well are very accessible. Now if you look tho the middle east and other Arab nation water becomes more scarce , then look at Arabs living in arid land and covering themselves . It wold be more likely to have body odor . So even looking into the new testament in that area they had odorous scents . As for me it means man develops things because necessity and so goes for aroma.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Don't be so positive about smell and Christian . Think about access to water and winter . As a kid living by a river we have take a bath on weakly bases . If you look on a map in Europa . . . .

The name of the continent in English, the language of SciForums, is EUROPE. (Also in French, which was the language of scholarship for hundreds of years until very recently.) Europa is one of the largest moons of Jupiter. Coincidentally, it's very likely that there is (frozen) water there.

Both the continent and the moon are named after a figure in Greek mythology, the queen of Crete who was courted by Zeus.

. . . . you will find there are rivers all over and water in water well are very accessible.

Yes, but in the Dark Ages it was terribly polluted. Most of the civil engineering projects of the Roman Empire had been allowed to deteriorate--including, unfortunately, their magnificent sewers. They just dumped their sewage into the rivers.

Because of this, people generally drank beer instead of water, because the alcohol was a disinfectant. This is one of the reasons that there was so little progress during those centuries: everybody was drunk. It wasn't until coffee was brought up from Ethiopia that things changed. Boiling the water to make coffee was also a disinfectant, but the caffeine in the coffee has precisely the opposite effect of the alcohol in the beer. So there was a sudden explosion of science and scholarship that we now call the Renaissance.

The Royal Society, England's academy for the study of science, was founded in a coffee shop.

 

[arauca]

The name of the continent in English, the language of SciForums, is EUROPE. (Also in French, which was the language of scholarship for hundreds of years until very recently.) Europa is one of the largest moons of Jupiter. Coincidentally, it's very likely that there is (frozen) water there.

Both the continent and the moon are named after a figure in Greek mythology, the queen of Crete who was courted by Zeus.

Yes, but in the Dark Ages it was terribly polluted. Most of the civil engineering projects of the Roman Empire had been allowed to deteriorate--including, unfortunately, their magnificent sewers. They just dumped their sewage into the rivers.

Because of this, people generally drank beer instead of water, because the alcohol was a disinfectant. This is one of the reasons that there was so little progress during those centuries: everybody was drunk. It wasn't until coffee was brought up from Ethiopia that things changed. Boiling the water to make coffee was also a disinfectant, but the caffeine in the coffee has precisely the opposite effect of the alcohol in the beer. So there was a sudden explosion of science and scholarship that we now call the Renaissance.

The Royal Society, England's academy for the study of science, was founded in a coffee shop.

European outbreak
'The seventh year after it began, it came to England and first began in the towns and ports joining on the seacoasts, in Dorsetshire, where, as in other counties, it made the country quite void of inhabitants so that there were almost none left alive.
... But at length it came to Gloucester, yea even to Oxford and to London, and finally it spread over all England and so wasted the people that scarce the tenth person of any sort was left alive.' (Geoffrey the Baker, Chronicon Angliae)

There appear to have been several introductions into Europe. It reached Sicily in October 1347 carried by twelve Genoese galleys,[29] where it rapidly spread all over the island. Galleys from Caffa reached Genoa and Venice in January 1348 but it was the outbreak in Pisa a few weeks later that was the entry point to northern Italy. Towards the end of January one of the galleys expelled from Italy arrived in Marseille.[30]

From Italy the disease spread northwest across Europe, striking France, Spain, Portugal and England by June 1348, then turned and spread east through Germany and Scandinavia from 1348–50. It was introduced in Norway in 1349 when a ship landed at Askøy, then spread to Bjørgvin (modern Bergen) but never reached Iceland.[31] Finally it spread to northwestern Russia in 1351. The plague spared some parts of Europe, including the Kingdom of Poland and isolated parts of Belgium and the Netherlands.[citation