Do Mummies Smell Like Baking Bread? 🍞

Nobel Prize–winning scientist Svante Pääbo shares that the scent comes from the Maillard reaction. This is the same chemical reaction responsible for the browning of bread, seared meat, and roasted coffee. In mummified tissues, sugars and proteins slowly react over centuries, producing new compounds that darken the skin and release those familiar toasty aromas. It's chemistry at work on a biological timescale. Scientists can sometimes smell it when they carefully drill into preserved remains during DNA extraction.

Svante Pääbo is a Swedish geneticist and Nobel Laureate who specialises in the field of evolutionary genetics.