The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
The one that's relevant to the puberty discussion is the Vandenbergh effect, which I mentioned a few minutes ago, which is a novel male showing up, has to be a sexually competent male, so he has to have already passed through puberty, and his presence triggers activation of puberty in a female that otherwise would have remained pre-pubertal for longer.
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the more interesting pheromone effects that impacts puberty, at least in animal models is the so-called Vandenbergh effect, which is, if you take a pre-pubertal female, so a female that has not undergone sexual maturation, and you introduce a novel male that is not the father or a brother, not a sibling, she will undergo puberty almost immediately.
And so I don't want anyone to be alarmed or to leap to any great conclusions about the onset of timing of puberty in humans, but I'd be remiss if I didn't tell you about a certain result which shows that if a young female is exposed to the odor-- not necessarily the pheromones. There's a distinction between odors that we perceive and pheromones, which are subconscious. We don't actively perceive, but that can impact our biology, and pheromones effects in humans are very controversial. But we know, for instance, that if you take a female animal-- and there's some evidence from humans that if you take a young prepubertal female and you expose her to the scent of a reproductively-competent male for a series of days, but maybe even as short as a few hours, and she is also not regularly being exposed to the scent of her father, that she can undergo puberty earlier.
There is something about the odor and/or pheromones, or perhaps something else, that occurs when a young prepubertal female has a father that she's in regular contact with. He wouldn't necessarily have to live at home but that is around a lot that his smell is registered by her biological systems. That-- I don't want to say protects because it kind of skews the valence of the conversation, but that offsets or buffers the otherwise observed effect, which is that the scent of a reproductively-competent male, if it's present often enough or perhaps intensely enough, that it can trigger the onset of puberty in that female.
So the point is that the odors of individuals, both related-- in particular, closely related-- and non-related individuals, can shape the neural systems and the hormone systems that can trigger the onset of puberty or suppress the onset of puberty.
where you take a female of a given species that has not entered puberty. You expose her to the scent or the urine from a sexually competent meaning post pubertal male and she spontaneously goes into puberty earlier.