Practical experiments have shown that most eyewitnesses to death believe that a deceased person smells like freshly cut grass before his body begins to decompose, said biologists speaking at the British Science Festival in Bradford.
Since ancient times, people began to distinguish among the smells a special sweetish "scent of death."
At the beginning of the 20th century, scientists found out that the two main components of the "cadaveric odor" were two substances - cadaverine and putrescine, the molecules of which arise during the decomposition of the corpse. These smells were so important for the life of our ancestors that our body has a special receptor that recognizes cadaverine.
Anna Williams from the University of Huddersfield (UK) and her colleagues were interested in something else - how the body of a deceased person smells immediately after his life is over, and are there any differences in the smell of living and dead people.
To do this, the scientists purchased several recently slaughtered pigs, whose carcasses they placed in sealed boxes, protected from microbes, after which they took new air samples every hour.
A few days later, the researchers studied the chemical composition of these samples using a gas chromatograph and compared them with the bouquet of substances produced by the living human body.
It turned out that our body begins to deteriorate even before bacteria get involved - still living cells begin, as Williams and her colleagues say, to digest themselves, resulting in the release of a large amount of hexanal, a volatile substance that gives the characteristic aroma of freshly cut grass.
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In addition, during this "self-eating" small amounts of two other substances are released - indole, which has a rather pungent aroma, and trimethylamine, which smells of paint or fresh fish.
The results of the experiments, as British scientists hope, and the extracts of cadaveric aromas prepared by them at different hours after death can help forensic scientists to train sniffer dogs to search for recently died people, as well as develop methods that will allow determining the time of death by the structure of odors.