In a tense situation, one sometimes feels even more ill at ease in a building with very strange odors - say, in a hospital, courtroom, dentist's office, or loan office. Familiarity with the surrounding odors breeds a sense of confidence, well-being, a higher social state. Mammals placed in a new enclosure will often scent-mark profusely. It is easy to imagine how self-specific threat odors evolved. In many species of mammals there is a variation of intensity of the species-specific odor with age and hence with status.
Puppy urine smells quite different from the urine of an adult male dog.
The change in odor with age complements the age changes occurring among the visual and vocal signals. We no longer have special glands with which to anoint our territorial boundaries, as our early primate ancestors did. But in spite of our accent on visual and vocal communication we still have a moderately well developed social scent. We are not too aware of it because of the strong taboos against scent display which have arisen fairly recently. We all know what areas of the body social odors come from.