Natural history of the senses: Smell

 I greatly related to the message in the introduction where Ackerman describes how we still have the senses our ancestors used to navigate despite the changes that humans have gone through over time. We love others just the same as they were loved hundreds or thousands of years ago, and the universal nature of human experience is what connects us all together. I see a similar appreciation for the natural world and how our senses help us connect with it. I had a chance to see a replica of the Lucy skeleton at the London Natural History Museum. I felt rather emotional upon seeing such an early version of ourselves, wondering what her life would have been like, and how humanity has changed beyond what these early beings could comprehend. I greatly enjoyed reading the section about how incense and perfume started out as offerings to gods and other beings, whether to entice spirits or banish them, and the history of how perfume was used by the Egyptians in rituals of embalming, worship, or display social status. When I visited the Sensoji temple in Japan, people were not only lighting incense but purposely standing in the path of the smoke and taking in the smell as if to offer themselves to the deity there. In my room I have a small altar where I burn incense as an offering which always makes my room smell like sandalwood, so I associate that smell with a calm state of mind and spiritual worship.