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By conveying cues of their current fertility, females can provide valuable reproductive information to conspecifics. Our closest relatives, non-human primates, employ diverse strategies, including olfactory cues from the anogenital region, to communicate information about female fertility. While their shared phylogeny with humans suggests that analogous olfactory cues may have been preserved in modern women, empirical evidence is lacking.
In a comprehensive two-fold approach, we investigated fertility-related shifts in the chemical composition of women’s vulvar volatiles as well as men’s ability to perceive them. We collected vulvar odour from 28 naturally cycling women […]
Simulating a first encounter, 139 men evaluated a total of 274 vulvar odour samples from 28 women, collected on different cycle days. […]
men’s attraction to vulvar odour was not significantly predicted by female fertility. Overall, our data suggests a relatively low retention of chemical fertility cues in vulvar odour of modern women.
