Did chemosensorial incompatibility doom our sister-species?

Recipient
Henrik Toft Simonsen
Technical University of Denmark
Project number:
00022855
Grant amount
1.947.340 DKK
Year
2018

Project description

Can unattractive body odors explain that the neanderthals became extinct? Our theory is that the smell of the neanderthal pheromones, which is one of the body's signaling agents used to attract a sexual partner, was so outrageous to the women of Homo Sapiens that they would not mate with them and thereby continue their genes.
We will recreate the body odor of the neanderthals through gene manipulation of a moss plant in order for this to produce pheromones from Neanderthals and modern humans. The pheromone mosses will then be used in a test, where women between the ages of 18-30 sniff the two different pheromones and assess if they find them sexually attractive or not. If the test subjects consistently find the pheromones from the neanderthals sexually unattractive, this could indicate that homo sapiens women did not want to mate with them can be one of many reasons that the neanderthals became extinct.