I Know Not What It is, I Shall Smell It.

So, I just had a reality check.
30 seconds ago...
I'm about to get into the shower when I notice a pile of strange look cloths behind the door. And that I do not want to take a shower in a weird-smelling room. I figured that the smell was Alex's recently made popcorn that he carries around with him everywhere -I do not like the smell of fake-butter-popcorn. But, nonetheless, the human instinct to smell this unknown and foreign thing that lurked on my bathroom floor overpowered all reason. I shall tell you this...the cloths smelt as if someone had dropped something into a full toilet then had to strip naked of whatever they were wearing and use the cloth to absorb all of the contents of the toilet to get to the bottom of it and retrieve their item. Ewie. So, I attacked the bathroom with Febreze and dumped the stinky material on my brother's bed.
Present day...
But, this leads me to ask..why do we humans have a tendency to want to smell things? Or is that just me...