It has been known at least since E. Matsunaga’s ground-breaking paper “Polymorphism in Ear Wax Types and Its Anthropological Significance” (Annals of Human Genetics, Vol. 25, No. 4 [1962], pp. 277-86) that there are two types of ear wax, sticky-wet and crumbly-dry, and that different human populations have very different distributions of the two types. East Asians almost all have crumbly ear wax; Europeans and Africans have the sticky variety. Now, as reported in the New York Times, researchers (also Japanese–the study of ear wax seems to have a strong appeal to Japanese researchers) have discovered that a change to a single location in the ear wax gene determines ear wax type

“They write that earwax type and armpit odor are correlated, since populations with dry earwax, such as those of East Asia, tend to sweat less and have little or no body odor, whereas the wet earwax populations of Africa and Europe sweat more and so may have greater body odor.”