Humans have long been led to believe that our sense of smell is sadly deficient compared with other animals, such as rodents and dogs.

But in fact, there is no evidence that our sniffing abilities are any worse than those of other mammals, according to a study published Thursday in Science. The title of the study says it all: “Poor human olfaction is a 19th-century myth.”

“This paper sweeps away a few centuries of insecurity about our capacity to smell,” said Leslie Vosshall, who studies olfaction at Rockefeller University in New York City and was not involved in the research. “This work is important both for the field and as a cautionary tale for scientists to question everything — and for all of us to take some time to smell the roses.”

The paper was written by John McGann, a sensory neuroscientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who has spent most of his career studying the olfactory system in mice but recently decided to see whether he could translate some of the work he was doing with rodents into human senses.

In one of the first experiments, he wanted to test how people learn to distinguish between two similar odors. But finding two odors that the human subjects couldn’t tell apart proved more challenging than McGann and his students expected. Even when they used two odors that mice consistently struggle to differentiate, humans had no trouble figuring out they were not the same. This suggested that at least in some cases, our olfactory abilities are keener than those of mice.

“I’d always kind of known that the human sense of smell was better than most people give it credit for, but it was striking to us how good it was,” McGann said.

His curiosity was piqued. Where did the idea that people have shoddy sniffers originate? And what proof was there that this notion was true?

To find out, he launched an investigation that led him to 150-year-old medical texts, the early work of Sigmund Freud as well as some contemporary scientific studies. McGann traced the idea that humans are bad smellers back to Paul Broca, a 19th-century French neurosurgeon and anthropologist. Broca’s work on comparative neurobiology led him to believe that our ability to exercise free will came at the expense of being able to smell as well as other animals.

Even Sigmund Freud jumped on the bandwagon. He claimed that smell is “usually atrophied” in humans and that people who took pleasure in scents were more animalistic and therefore more likely to suffer from sexual disorders.

There is some biological evidence that might, at first glance, bolster the argument that our sense of smell doesn’t stack up. For example, our olfactory bulbs make up less of our total brain space than is the case with mice. These smelling centers comprise 0.01 percent of the human brain by volume, compared to 2 percent of the mouse brain. But that argument is not entirely convincing, McGann wrote. Because our brains are much larger, the human olfactory bulb is more than four times larger than a mouse’s.

More recently, scientists have determined through genetic analysis that humans have approximately 400 genes activated by odors, compared with about 1,000 in mice. This finding was used to confirm the comparatively limited olfactory ability in primates, McGann wrote, “although no actual sensory testing was performed.”

Meanwhile, a few recent studies have started making the case that the human sense of smell is actually very robust. In 2014, Vosshall’s lab determined that humans could distinguish 1 trillion distinct smells. Before that, the prevailing wisdom held that humans were capable of smelling only 10,000 odors.

Other studies have shown that humans are capable of tracking scent trails outdoors, similar to dogs, and can be more sensitive to some smells than rats and monkeys, and worse at detecting other smells.

In fact, McGann said, scientists are working to identify the few odorants we can’t smell — though it may not inspire much confidence in sensory science.

“How could so many scientists have shrugged and went along with it, even though there was no actual testing?” he said. “That’s what really bothers me.”