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For decades, scientists thought perhaps smell was a diminished human sense and less valuable than other senses - like our glorious eyesight. "In the West, people came to this conclusion [through] the fact that we don't seem to have a good ability to talk about smells," says Asifa Majid, a professor of language and cultural cognition at Radboud University in the Netherlands. But Majid found that isn't universally true. Certain language speakers can name odors as easily as English speakers name colors, and the key difference may be how they live. Majid worked with speakers of four different languages: English and three from the Malay Peninsula. Two of these languages, Semaq Beri and Jahai, are spoken by hunter-gatherer groups. The other one, Semelai, is spoken by farmers. In order to test the ability of these language speakers to classify odors, Majid and her colleagues gave asked them to smell pen-shaped contraptions each filled with a different scent like leather, orange, garlic or fish - and then asked them to identify the smell. She also asked the participants to identify colors using different color chips. The farmer Semelai, like English speakers, found colors relatively easy to name and agreed with one another that the red chips were, indeed, red. When it came to identifying odors, the Semelai failed as miserably as the English speakers on the same tests. But both hunter-gatherer groups were much better at naming smells than the Semelai. In fact, they were just as good at identifying smells as colors. "That says something about the hunter-gatherer lifestyle," Majid says. There's a scarcity of English words that objectively describe odors, Majid says. Given that, readers of this article - written in English - may wonder how it's possible to describe a smell without leaning on other senses like taste (words like "sweet" or "sour") or emotional words like "gross." In English, most of our attempts to describe smells come from individual sources. You

Every sense has its own "lexical field," a vast palette of dedicated descriptive words for colors, sounds, tastes, and textures. But smell? In English, there are only three dedicated smell words-stinky, fragrant, and musty-and the first two are more about the smeller's subjective experience than about the smelly thing itself. All of our other scent descriptors are really descriptions of sources: We say that things smell like cinnamon, or roses, or teen spirit, or napalm in the morning. The other senses don't need these linguistic workarounds. Some scientists have taken this as evidence that humans have relegated smell to the sensory sidelines, while vision has taken center-field. It's a B-list sense, deemed by Darwin to be "of extremely slight service." Others have suggested that smells are inherently indescribable, and that "olfactory abstraction is impossible." Yet some languages, like those of the Jahai people of Malaysia and the Maniq of Thailand use between 12 and 15 dedicated smell words: basic vocabulary not used for taste, or to describe general ideas of edibility. These two groups clearly show that odors, contrary to popular belief, are not universally ineffable; people from both cultures are also able to distinguish smells more accurately than Western cultures.