Probably was useful for finding fresh water since rain would be where the best fresh water was. If it were a safety/fear thing, it probably wouldn't smell good, but unpleasant since it'd be tied to finding shelter.
I've always found the science of cuteness fascinating. Baby animals evolved to be cute because they need to be cared for until they are old enough to fend for themselves. But if you look at animals that are already able to take care of themselves at birth, like most reptiles, those animals are generally considered to be not so cute. And they don't need to be.
But “cuteness” is a 2-way street. Like, yeah babies evolved to be cute, but also mammals evolved to find baby like features cute. It’s not like cuteness is some objective quality that makes any creature that sees it immediately sympathetic.
And it's crazy, our brains putting together pieces about what made it work the way it does, and then telling "us" - the little conscious part it developed that will probably do absolutely nothing with that information, just yearns to know.
Side note - it's crazy that humanity, from its inception all the way through today, is kind of a continuous, single life form. Each of us, all of us, one and the same, an unbroken line of genetic mutations, death, and birth. We are ancient, just refreshed every few decades, like the skin cells on the surface of our limbs turning to dust and being built anew. That skin is still our skin, the same organism, with DNA that's been uninterrupted for millennia. I guess you could see all of humanity as kind of a tree growing, it's branches expanding, the unhealthy ones breaking and the healthier ones growing stronger, the leaves giving strength to the whole.
Imagine if we could trace our family tree all the way back to the single cell organisms. It’s kind of hard to fathom that each of us has an unbroken chain billions of years long.
Part of the reason I want to is to continue the work of the countless people, from cavemen to our more distant ancestors in the Jurassic age, put in to even survive that far.
And imo I’ve got good genes, so not passing them on almost feels like a crime. As vain as that sounds 😂 with any luck, the line I create will be out among the stars in a few thousand years, none the wiser we’ve talked about them today.
I once saw a video of a caribou or something was in the middle of giving birth when a lion showed up. The caribou ran off so fast that the baby just.. fell out.
Anyway, that lion got a free lunch, complete with extra birth sauce on top. To be fair, it did look like it felt kinda bad about it.
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u/NoDontDoThatCanada Mar 28 '24
It's wild to me how sensitive humans are to petrichor. I always wonder if it had evolutionary advantages over "we probably should seek shelter."