Your family stinks, researchers say

Family members tend not to like the way each other smell, researchers say, speculating that the unpleasant stink of your closest relatives m...

Family members tend not to like the way each other smell, researchers say, speculating that the unpleasant stink of your closest relatives may be one of nature’s ways of discouraging incest.

In research described on Thursday in Britain’s New Scientist magazine, a team at Wayne State University in Detroit recruited 25 families with children aged between six and 15, and gave them T-shirts to sleep in and odourless soap to wash with.

They were told to keep them in plastic bags and later asked to sniff two , one worn by a family member and another by a stranger.

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The researchers found that mothers and fathers could usually tell when they were smelling their pre-adolescent children, with mothers being better at it than dads, but they could not say which child was which.

Children younger than nine — with the notable exception of sons who had been breastfed — generally could not recognise their mothers, while older children could. All of them recognised their fathers.

Interestingly, even if they didn’t recognise which T-shirt belonged to a family member, volunteers said they far preferred the smell of the stranger’s shirt.

Children of the same sex were not offended by each other’s smell, but children of opposite sex often were.