Hey, I'm Kathleen Davis, and you're listening to Science Friday. This time of year with

freezing temperatures and short days, you might be turning towards smells to lift your spirits,

like a cozy candle or maybe a simmering stew, or an anticipation of Valentine's Day,

roses and chocolates. But here at

Science Friday, we're particularly partial to the scent of an embalmed ancient Egyptian mummy

or 5,000-year-old Saudi Arabian incense burners. You might be thinking these ancient smells are no longer sniffable, but not to my

next two guests who are working to bring these scents back to life to get a smellier perspective

of history. Dr. Barbara Huber is an archaeochemist at the University of Tübingen in Germany,

and Carol Calvé is a perfumer and founder of Iris and Morphé based in Paris.

I'm so excited to follow my nose into the story with you, too. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having us. Yes, thank you so much.

Okay, Barbara, I want to do maybe some myth-busting to start us off.

Was the ancient world smellier than today's world?

And also, why try to recreate an ancient scent at all?

I mean, do you think there's something that we can learn about ancient life

through smell that maybe we can't know otherwise?

The past, how it is conceptualized

nowadays for us is incredibly odorless. But the people in the past had an incredibly

odorous life, so to say, because they used so many different aromatic substances. So people

used specific smells, which were good, like frequent resins or

really balsamic notes, really rich and sweet and intense scents, to cover up bad smells, such as

the waste in the street or uncomfortable smells that you might not like.

...