Posted on 10/26/2006 11:04:30 AM PDT by blam
Ancient human hunters smelt blood on the breeze
26 October 2006
From New Scientist Print Edition.
Our ability to detect the characteristic metallic smell left on the skin after handling iron-containing objects like coins and keys may have evolved for a more gory purpose: to help our hunter ancestors track down wounded prey.
Fats on the skin break down to form volatile, strong-smelling substances called ketones and aldehydes when they come into contact with iron - whether it comes from the environment or from haemoglobin in blood - says Dietmar Glindemann, a chemist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg.
Glindemann and his team identified the chemicals after analysing vapours produced when seven volunteers rubbed metal objects on their skin. The strongest-smelling is 1-octen-3-one, the researchers report in Angewandte Chemie International Edition (vol 45, p 7006).
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
If you can smell them on the breeze, then they ain't fit to eat.........
Oh... That's just Earl. (/Capital One commercial mode)
Candygram.
If you leave meat out and a cat comes and takes it who is to blame?
It's incredible what passes as "science" nowadays.
"...may have evolved ..."
A word of wisdom: anytime some expert on something (be it global warming, evolution, or other mythology) says that something "may" have happened, it is equally true that it "may not have."
The meat, unless it was wearing a burka. Actually, even then in the absence of 4 eyewitness' to the theft, it's part of the cats belief system after all.
I've known hunters who, under favorable weather conditions, can find downed deer by scent.
Nothing like the smug ignorance of troglodyte science haters. Remind me, Elpasser, since you're so hot on criticizing science "nowadays," when was it exactly that scientists DIDN'T come up with hypotheses?
I'm pretty good at picking up that scent too... always have been able to do it...
None of the guys I knew who can do it ever lived in cities.
The evolutionist community and the MSM are complicit in reporting "hypotheses" as fact, however. Exhibit A is the headline of this article.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't that what is produced by followers of the Atkins diet?
Could it be that the "attraction" for the bags of bones who swear by it is simply an ancient chemical blood lust that seeks out the weakened and dying?
It's a conspiracy!!!
I knew a guy that said he could smell them. I don't know if he was lying or not, but he was d@mn good at it, and never needed a dog.
However I watched him pretty closely once and IMHO it was less smell than an overall interpretation of the landscape.
I've lived in smaller cities, even a city with a pulp mill...
I can really pick up the smell that they put in natural gas too... even if others can't smell it...
???
I now live in a city ,and I smoke,and can still do it,sometimes you can pick up the scent on approach before you see them when they are in full rut.....a combination of the musk of the tarsel glands and the fact that they urinate on themselves,big ole ruttin bucks reek!
My wife can smell beer over the phone.
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