No Such Thing As Sausage By Chanel

25:15James Harkin:the idea of sci-fi we have the books are out there very important scientists read sci-fi because it does help them think differently about the future and quite often as we know from isaac asimov books and arthur c clark a lot of the predictions of inventions have been made and that's not a prediction like a premonition people read those books and go i want to make that So companies actually hire sci-fi writers to write specific things for them so that there might be inventions that can inspire their workers. There's a bunch of companies that do this. Hershey's, the chocolate company, hire sci-fi writers to write sci-fi based on...

25:48So then Hershey reads this sci-fi and they think, oh, maybe we could make a chocolate that orbits the Earth. Yes, exactly. Do you know what? That would work on me. No, I think that would work on you three as well. Like if you hired in a science fiction writer to describe what the future of this podcast looks like, I can see you guys being fired. I see the actual future and it's four of us heads in jars just blathering on about some facts or other.

26:15James Harkin:But they do and even armies do it. So the French army, they have a red team and that is they've hired six sci-fi writers to try and picture what future warfare will be like. I'm not just making this up. This is a real thing. it's simply about a way of generating ideas isn't it absolutely so they have they have a team five or six science fiction writers they might be defunct now but in 2019 they certainly look it's a small budget compared with the latest bit of military hardware you may as well give it a go i completely buy it are they getting the best sci-fi writers to do these jobs or are they getting people who can't sell their books well that's the question what is a good sci-fi writer because you can be um you can have a lot of books but they could all be terrible but they're published you You might just have one or two crisp early career ones, though, which are terrific.

26:58And even though your fictions moved in a different direction, those still remain very much... Pressing. Yeah. Yeah.

27:05James Harkin:I really admire science fiction writers, though, who just go for it. Like, there's a guy, Andy said thank you silently, listener, just so you know. There's a guy called Lionel Fanthorpe. He's 90 years old. Fanthorpe? Yeah, he's still alive. He's a retired British priest. He's also worked as a lecturer, teacher, television presenter, and a dental technician. and he has written over 180 sci-fi stories and novels, 89 of which he wrote in a three-year period. So he was averaging 158 pages every 12 days. And he was part of a company that was called Badger Books. And they were just, you know, those classic sci-fi covers where it's really illustrated arty.

27:43James Harkin:It might be like an alien pointing a laser gun. They would have those covers commissioned and in some cases already attached to other books. And they would just take that cover and go, write that i like it i like that because it's hard to come up with ideas isn't it it is is it yeah anyway so some of the words in sci-fi absolute bog standard sci-fi words were used for other things in the past okay so the word starship was used in the 17th century to describe a southern constellation of stars. The Argo constellation. So, can you guess what the word blaster meant in the 16th century? I think that's a young man like out on the tiles.

28:30He's a blaster. He's a blaster. No, it's not that. It's a bad case of diarrhea. It's not that either. It was someone who plays the trumpet. Oh, nice. Do you know what a Trekkie was in 19th century South Africa? So it's not someone just walking, like a tour guide walker. Pretty close. Is somebody trekking animals? No, Dan's closer. It was a group of people who were on a trek. You would call the whole group a trekky. So it's plural. What's the singular? Well, a trekker. A trekker. I guess. And in the 19th century, do you know what Ant-Man meant? No. Can you guess? Was it like pest control? Someone who would literally come to your house?

29:11The Ant-Man. The Ant-Man's here. It was. It had two meanings in the 19th century. It was a person who destroys ants' nests or a person who specializes in the study of ants. Right. And I'm sure that led to some hilarious mix-ups. And in the other direction, the word vape, which now means to smoke e-cigarettes, it originally meant to vaporize someone with a weapon. Oh. And that was used in sci-fi in the early 20th century. That's great. And do you know that the word monobrow was first used in science fiction? Was it? Yeah. Wow. And it was used 10 years after Frida Kahlo died. So no one could have called Frida Kahlo monobrow in her lifetime because the word didn't exist.

29:51We just did Frida Kahlo on a previous episode. That's why I brought it up.

29:54James Harkin:And I can't believe we didn't know that. We were just saying monobrow the whole way through and she wouldn't have known the word monobrow. She wouldn't have known that word. That's crazy. That's incredible. Makes you think. Yeah. What does it make you think? It's funny, isn't it? You know, sometimes you don't know your legacy. So you two, Ella and James, you said you don't read fiction. particularly science fiction. I mean I have read some. Yeah but do you think that reading a science fiction text is any different to reading a standard fiction text like literary fiction do you think the quality of the reading you do will change at all between those?

30:27I feel like probably if I read like some Russian literature I feel like I concentrate more. Okay okay exactly. And if I'm reading like I have read Andy Weir's stuff and I feel like I just flick through it a little bit. So this was a study that was done in 2017. It was a scientific journal and they presented 150 people, a 1 ,000 word piece of text. One was someone going into a diner in a small town you know, like a sort of standard bit of Americana modern fiction and the other was a guy going into a space station galley and you know, there's all sorts of weird stuff going on and weird aliens. And what they found at the time was that people who were given the sci-fi text put way less effort into reading, way less concentration.

31:10But the authors of that study did a separate follow-up two years later and they found they were wrong. So they then did a better control and experiment where they gave people exactly the same text. And text one started with, my daughter is standing behind the bar polishing a wine glass against a white cloth. And the alternate version just had one word different. It said, my alien. It said, my robot. But apart from that, it was exactly the same. And people read it with exactly the same concentration and empathy and all the levels of that. So what are we saying here? I think people read pulpy sci-fi less well.

31:46I unholstered my laser gun. But if it was a really well-written sci-fi book like someone who might have written two sci-fi books earlier in their career, then you would pay attention to that one. You'd hope so, yeah. That also just sounds like potentially an obvious interpretation of that is that they wrote bad sci-fi the first time around. Maybe, yeah, yeah. Maybe it was, you know. Like it's not even... Schlock. Yeah, what James is saying, it's just that they didn't write very well. Are we still talking about Andy's works here?

32:20Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that 18th century Austrians preserved their dead by shoving twigs up their bum. Wow.

32:33James Harkin:So you'd put it up your bum in the hope that it would... not your own not your own bum it was the bum of the dead that was the ancient egyptian book we all wanted to read wasn't it um yeah so this is a study from this year uh in the journal frontiers in medicine and they analyzed a mummy in an austrian village which is quite well known and it was of a priest and it had supposedly done some miracles and stuff but one of the things about it is it hadn't decayed very much this body and they wanted to know why and so they did a ct scan and they found that the abdomen contained quite a lot of wood chips twigs fabric uh zinc chloride they said was in it but zinc chloride wasn't invented at that time so i think it must be just like some rocks that had zinc in them and that had stopped the inside of the body from rotting which had managed to keep the body relatively uh intact and it seems that we don't really know why they did that but what it might have been is that they wanted to move the body from one place to another and in quite a lot of places around the world they would try and embalm or preserve a body a little bit so that you can get it to the burial ground first and that might have been what happened here so yeah we don't really know it was drying him from the inside out basically yeah like quite often the first thing to go will be your internal fluids will start rotting away on the inside and that's what will help rot away the whole body so it's basically a plug it's a what It's a plug.

34:04It's a plug, yeah. I thought it was absorbing, though. I thought it was like putting your phone in rice. It is a bit like that, yeah. It's a bit like taxidermy, I would say, that kind of thing. Right, yeah. You know, taking the animal and taking the insides out and shoving stuff up there. Yeah, you're putting the rice in the phone, actually. Exactly, that's the difference.

34:19James Harkin:This place where they found the mummy is just over an hour's drive from where all of my family live in Austria. So it's quite possible there's a lot of Schreiber's in the ground with twigs up their ass. I'm very excited by that. Talking about famously preserved Austrians, you know Otzi? You know they did some DNA on him a while back. Now, obviously, he was accidentally preserved, but they discovered that he had 19 living male relatives in Austria today. But in the articles, they always explained that his descendants have not been notified. And so maybe you're one of the descendants. Did he have an unusually small brain?

35:04That's a heck of a Jeremy Kyle show Where they've done the DNA test on the Iceman I think that would be so cool as a TV show To go to all these people and say This is your relative Is there an inheritance that you're dishing out? Well it'd just be the seeds from his stomach It's his bacon

35:22James Harkin:It's his leather sandals are finally coming home Why haven't they notified them? I would want to know Wouldn't you want to know? Of course I'd Yeah I'm game But Ella, like preserving bodies and stuff, you must touch on that in your work occasionally. So not particularly because I don't really, I only wake up for bone, not for any soft tissue. I have a dollar for every time a woman would tell me that. No, but okay. But I do find this really, really interesting because you often come across accidental preservation. in the kind of stuff that we do because you'll be at the back of a cave and you know or um some of my favorite stories are like you you get somewhere and you think you're the first person to enter into that particular cave or onto that rock and you're like nah crap because basically the ancestors have already got there and it's like their burial ground and they will have like embalmed or i remember being really intrigued because i think so often people think that mummification is an Egyptian thing.

36:26But actually, all these cultures around the world have their own mummification process. And for me, the interesting thing about that is they're clearly using local material. So for example, in Yemen, they have a local mummy culture and they used raisins and camel fat. And as an Arab, that sounds kind of quite tasty. That sounds yum. That's stuffing, isn't it? It's basically, I remember reading somewhere that they described the Yemeni culture as artisanal mummification. An artisanal mummification.

36:59James Harkin:What period is this? As in, are the ancient Egyptians our first example or does it go way further back? I think the first culture we found it happening really in widespread way is the Chinchorro people. So that's Latin America? Yeah, Chile and Peru. That's a thousand years before the Egyptians thought of it. I think everyone got mummified because in Egypt it was just the nobles. The elite, yeah. Yeah, and the Chinchorro, So they had a, well, see if this is as appealing as raisins and camel fat. You get your organs removed. Yeah. Then they'd be replaced with a paste made of ash, water, and sea lion blood.

37:31Oh. Yeah. Wow. And then that same paste is used to make a mask and a model of your sexual organs. And then you're painted black, polished until you're shiny and given a wig.

37:41James Harkin:Okay. What state are you in for the genital bit? You're not feeling good. Are you talking bone or soft issues? I've seen some of those mummies for sure. I think they had them in Bolton Museum, I think, for a while at least. And they were quite big in the early 20th century, weren't they? There was one in Paris that was really famous, and quite a lot of famous works were based on it. Definitely, Monk's The Scream was based on, he saw this mummy and thought, I'm going to paint something like that. But the oldest actual preserved body we have is from Portugal, 8 ,000 years old. But again, we think that they just preserved it so they could move it to another burial ground and then something happened.

38:22And yeah.

38:23James Harkin:Yeah, wow. So I was in Edinburgh the other day and I went for a quick drive out to what is quite a famous chapel called Roslyn Chapel. Oh, Jesus Christ. It's a Templar. From the Da Vinci Code. From the Da Vinci Code. It's supposedly they were protecting the bloodline of Christ. It's where the Da Vinci Code culminates in as a thing. So while we were waiting to... That I read. I'm not going to lie. That I read. Sorry. I thought it was good. Don't judge me. Yeah, it's not bad. But so we were waiting to go in there. We went to a cafe that's across the road and it was called Dolly's Cafe. We start noticing lots of sheep imagery.

38:59James Harkin:And then on the wall are photos of a black and white sheep. And it is Dolly the sheep. And because at Roslyn Institute, right next to it, were the ones who cloned Dolly. Oh, I didn't know that they were related. Yeah. So we bumped into a few people and one person told me. So this is some gossip. apparently when dolly was getting a bit iller and so on later in age um they had someone on standby a taxidermist because the idea was they were going to immediately do taxidermy and take dolly to one of the museums in edinburgh right and then they went on holiday and while they were away somewhere in corfu or wherever dolly died and there was a huge scramble to find a local taxidermist to immediately get to dolly before it was too late and they just managed to do it Now this is gossip, you know I haven't seen And pretty hot gossip at that We are going to be on the front pages Of all the newspapers with this We've been trying to go a bit more viral recently This is the kind of stuff you're talking about Dan, if you're not going there And immediately opening another identical cafe Over the road You're doing it wrong Brilliant Here was an interesting thing to do with the Titanic That I've never heard before which is that if you were first class on the Titanic that actually mattered after the boat had sunk and you had died.

40:15James Harkin:So a boat was chartered to retrieve all of the bodies and they found way more than they expected. They found over 300. Now the idea was you were only allowed to bring them back if they were embalmed because health and safety regulations. Unfortunately they didn't expect to find that many people so they only had limited amounts of embalming fluid. Oh no. So the first class passengers largely got priority and the others had to be left back into the ocean. It's something you don't think about when you're booking tickets, isn't it? Because you see the prices and it's like, first class, I can't do that.

40:46Maybe premium economy. Do I get any kind of twigs up my ass if I do that or what? Oh, God. Wow, that's really, oh man. Yeah. But how did they tell the passengers were first class based on them floating? Wristbands. It's the wristbands. Identified them. They identified them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. they wow yeah wowie madness um can i um lift lift the mood a bit by talking about pope pius the 12th oh yes always right so the vatican has its own embalmer okay i imagine it's not a full-time gig um but it's they embalm people they embalm the pope did you guys know that i assumed that they did yeah i've been to the vaults in vatican and i can't remember if you so they're not on display permanently they don't join the permanent collection but i think there is a like madam

41:38James Harkin:tussauds it's not it's oh dear it's good techniques though they're quite animatronic as well they can they can bless you as you walk by so i think it's for public mourning so the pope might be on display for a few days after their death and this and this doesn't happen i don't know if it still happened with the recent pope after he passed away but so that it used to happen that there would be a you know a raised beer and people would walk by and all that stuff um but in In 1958, Pope Pius XII died. And he had his own personal doctor in life called Riccardo Galeazzi Lisi. And he was not a good posthumous doctor.

42:14So, point one, he gave photos of the dead pope to two magazines. Whoa. Not cool. What year was this? 58. 1958, yeah. Wow. He tried to publish a diary of the pope's last four days to kind of get some copy out of it. He also announced, I'm going to be doing something a little bit different with this pope's embalming, guys. He said, I'm not going to be removing his organs, which was the traditional way of embalming someone after death. He said, I'm going to embody his holiness in the same way that Christ himself was preserved, the traditional way, using oils and resins. Okay. Now, unfortunately, this did not work.

42:51They basically didn't drain any bodily fluids. They didn't keep the body cold. It was extremely hot at the time. They were working in Castel Gandolfo, which is the Pope's... Oh, Gandalf. Never mind. That's his summer residence. Summer residence, exactly. So it's near the Vatican, but it's incredibly hot. And they just put the body in a bag with some herbs and spices. And they said this was, was it 11 herbs and spices? We don't know. And no raisins, I'm assuming. And they claimed this was aromatic osmosis. It made things go really wrong. So when the Pope was on display, he turned either green or black.

43:24Sources vary. But the Swiss guards who were standing guard around the coffin, they started fainting. And they had to change shift every 15 minutes. Wow. It was an absolute disaster. I mean, the doctor, Galiat Zalusi, was sacked. I mean, I would hope so. It was an absolute disaster. What was he thinking? I don't know. I mean, traditional method. Yeah. We talked about natural preservation earlier. In Xinjiang in China, you get a few of these preserved people because it's so dry there and the sand is so salty. It's like a desert in central China. and there's one mummy there, the princess of Gioahe and she still has her eyelashes, a hat and her natural hair streaming out because she's been so well preserved.

44:09So she's in the desert? She's basically well in a cave in the desert really but it's so dry that like bacteria can't really live there and so they can't eat up her body. She was buried with a cheese around her neck and a wooden penis on her stomach. That's all you need. That's all you need in the afterlife. That's a party in the afterlife. Let's go. Any wine? No, no. But I do have... A wooden penis. She's going to have a quiet night in tonight with some cheese and a wooden penis, and that'll be me. The article that I read said that the cheese was for sustenance in the afterlife, but no one knows why she had the wooden penis on her stomach.

44:48Oh, wow. Good Lord. But do you know, I think as an anthropologist, this is what I find really, really fascinating is the different reasons why so many cultures around the world would mummify. So the ancient Egyptians, it's the idea that you need a body, you need a body. So therefore we've got to preserve the body. You've got some Latin American cultures where it's more the idea that they're still with you. And so they get brought out in festivals because they're still part of the community. They're still active within the community. The soul hasn't necessarily gone anywhere. Other cultures, I'm thinking like, for example, in Muslim culture, you don't preserve, you don't even cremate because the idea is that the body feels after death but then you've got hindu culture where you cremate so that the soul may be released sorry i just find this absolutely fascinating and i think it's partly because we live in a much more homogenous society today so it's like oh the body where it is imagine that like every community you would turn up to they would have a different interpretation of what the body and soul are doing in the afterlife and how important the body is and that relationship between the body and soul is and what about like the obvious question is things like neanderthals and the hobbits and stuff what did they do with their dead the neanderthals yeah did they i think they buried them and put like gifts there and stuff or is that really contentious it is contentious i think some of them i find it really hard to interpret some of those caves where you find a neanderthal i mean i'm sorry if you put a neanderthal and there's lots of like palms and talons and of other animals i'm sorry guys what is that other than grave offerings like ritual it's really hard but it is it's not like it's very common but the most famous example of it or the first really famous example was in iraq in shanadar cave and they thought what they were finding was flowers being put on the grave because they were finding pollen and it was like it was you know they were described as the flower people it was the first time people were like maybe neanderthals like what's the first serious time people were like neanderthals might have been emotional and might have you know had a sense of the afterlife and blah blah blah and then they were like actually it might just be rodents rodents might have just come in and basically brought pollen with them and be ruining an archaeological site yes and it's like this beautiful kind of poetic story that had been presented to the public and then another bunch of scientists were like actually we think it's just rodents is that a problem like in your industry where you just get enticed by a good star not you but people just get inspired absolutely yeah so i actually worked on that in that cave and i have to say you could see those animal burrows it was really really clear but it's still not i would say it's still not conclusive one side or the other what if it was trained micro elephants who were mourning in their own way by bringing in the flowers there's that brilliant sci-fi brain working again sorry to think outside the box here sorry the french army are calling me again.

47:42If you could only be buried with a wooden... Once in your life. Which cheese are you choosing to be buried with? Oh, my goodness. Along with your... To go with your wooden penis. For the afterlife. Yeah, you can get one cheese and a wooden penis. But what's the cheese? For me, it has to be Lancashire, like where I'm from. Lovely. A nice crumbly Lancashire reminds me of my body crumbling away. That's really nice. And the archaeologists will be able to have some fun with that. You know, they'll be like, he was probably from Lancashire. Yeah. I think probably a lot of Lancastrians might have been buried with cheese or it could have been mice bringing them.

48:16Mice love cheese. You, Andy, obviously you wouldn't have asked this question if you didn't have your own hilarious answer. Probably a reasonably soft cheese, but nothing too adventurous, you know, for the afterlife. Which penis would you like to be buried with? I'll take the XL.

48:34James Harkin:I have a theory that she was actually holding a bottle of wine and it was like Indiana Jones where someone was trying to take the wine but thought they'd be booby trapped. Have we got anything around here? We got that. Gladys, come on. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well, we've all got theories. Now at McDonald's, get a$5 McChicken meal deal or a$6 McDouble meal deal. They come with small fries, a soft drink, and four-piece McNuggets. We're going to need a bigger tray. Get more value with your meal deal with McValue. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher for delivery.

49:11James Harkin:Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is, halfway through the summer, wasps switch from liking ham to liking jam. That's brilliant. And when did they start liking lamb? Oh, lamb. It goes ham, jam, lamb, spam. Well basically wasps are just Written by Dr. Seuss it turns out Like they're just So this has been a terrific year for wasps We should say It's been warm and dry Good conditions for wasps And also a great year for butterflies But we're not talking about them So wasps have a very different kind of food choice Depending on what time of year it is So in the early part of the summer What they're trying to do is feed their larvae And wasp larvae are all carnivorous right so wasps will be looking for ham if you're at a picnic and you've got some meat out wasps will be going drawn to the smell of that and they'll they'll you know take bits off it and back to their the brood um and then halfway through the summer uh the larvae pupate they go into the pupa they they don't need food anymore they're dealt with so the worker wasps think well i'm going to turn to feeding myself uh and wasps they have that tiny waist you know they've got an incredibly be divided body they can only really have a liquid diet and that's when they will go for jam or lemonade or whatever it is so you can tell what time of summer it is simply by putting out a sausage and some jam and seeing which the wasps do you have a date because some people like this will go out towards the end of the summer people will be going on picnics they need to know whether to bring the sausage rolls or the i think by the time this goes out what most wasps are going to be on the jam.

50:55So you'll be safer with the ham. Right. But UCL, the scientists at UCL are doing a survey. There's an online survey. If you Google wasp ham jam survey, you'll probably find it. What's the survey? They're trying to find out, like, have you been out recently at a picnic and noticed what...

51:12James Harkin:So this is new science. They're still asking for people to send in their... Yeah, contributions are being welcomed. It's a citizen science thing, basically. And I tried to fill it in, because recently I was out with a piece of sponge cake, and the wasps were absolutely bananas for it. But unfortunately, I didn't bring my sausage. So my contribution is useless to science. What I love about this is the idea that you wake up from a coma and instead of being like, what's the date? You're like, are the wasps after the ham? But isn't that great to know that if that did happen, you could work that out?

51:40James Harkin:Yeah, that's really cool. There was a bit of advice as well that I read that if you are out eating, let's say the four of us are out having a picnic and I'm making plates for us with whatever of food i'll make the four plates for us you should always make a fifth plate in case there are wasps around an offering an offering plate sorry how do the wasps know to go for that one and not the four plates so there you go make make four to begin with and then if a wasp lands in it and starts eating yours basically a wasp will return to the same plate so you've just got to go okay that's your plate now you put it aside so they tend to return to where they started eating so then they won't bother you put their plate over there i went camping this weekend and the wasps around me only went for my wine oh that feels like sugar unless you were having delicious meat wine it feels like that's a late summer thing for them what's interesting about that is that also some people wasps go after them more yes like i'm one of like but wasps will tend to not always but but there are some people who clearly you know there'll be four people having a picnic and they're going after one person.

52:45I wonder if some people have like a more meaty odour. No, I wonder. We're jammy, yeah. I dumped too much perfume on myself this morning and I was like in my head, I'm just like, is that the kind of thing that, you know, would be like that's all you're going for? Because they're certainly not trying to eat you. They don't eat live animals basically. Are you wearing sausage from Chanel?

53:11Yeah. Yeah, but do they not go for live insects and stuff? Because I thought the whole point of wasps is they bury their eggs in animals, don't they? This is the thing. There are so many species that you can't really be general about all wasps. Some wasps, the classic wasps that we have, yellow jackets. Don't stereotype them. No, they go for carrion and a bunch of wasps can strip a rat to the bone in a few hours. They can really do it. I know. But yeah, you're right. Loads of them go for live. And basically the difference between a bee and a wasp is that a bee is veggie. So I just want to give a shout out to the scientist who's behind this research from UCL, the Ham Jam Survey, because she's called Sarian Sumner, Professor Sarian Sumner.

53:54She's written a book called Endless Forms, which is all about wasps. And the first, I'd say, two chapters are predominantly slacking off bees and say, everyone loves bees, don't they? Oh, they're so cute. And basically people search how to save the bees and how to destroy the wasps. And she's just sticking up for the wasps. She says bees are just wasps that have forgotten how to hunt. Devastating. Bees are veggie. Bees are fluffy. They do honey. And actually wasps are incredibly useful in all sorts of ways. They deal with tons and tons of pests in your garden every year. Yeah, we'd be overrun with pests if it wasn't for wasps.

54:29But they are pests themselves. Well, we're getting into it. Take it up with Professor Sumner. No, that's really interesting. Her book is unbelievably good, all about the sheer variety of wasps. What does she think about hornets? I think she's pro. She's pro anything waspy. Anything that's not a bee. Yeah. The thing with the wasp waste thing is really interesting. So basically you're saying that they end up with a liquid diet because they've got these tiny wastes. Yeah. So when I first looked into the difference between wasps and bees, I did think that's a little bit like Neanderthals and Homo sapiens because we have wastes.

55:05Neanderthals don't have wastes. Neanderthals ribcage just keeps going out so it's like us after Christmas, like it just keeps going Wow, really? We have wastes, yeah and then we're not particularly hairy now we don't really know what Neanderthals are, but I guess Hollywood would tell you that they're hairy but yeah, I was just laughing that we are the wasps of the equation

55:23James Harkin:That's interesting, yes, so our wastes are the ribcage stops and then No, so if you look at a ribcage on Homo sapiens, the bottom ribs go in, like think of an image of a skeleton the ribs go in at the end, at the bottom whereas on a Neanderthal they just keep going out. Like a barrel? Yeah, so they don't have wastes. Interesting. So does that make them less flexible? I mean, it makes them stockier. Okay. It makes them stockier. They'd be a good prop forward. Right. And Homo sapiens would be a good... Winger. I understand. It's interesting because actually the first TV show I ever... Listener, he did not understand.

56:01I think I know enough about football to understand.

56:09what's brilliant about that is the first TV show I ever did was it's called Neanderthals Meet Your Ancestors but its actual original title for the first god knows how many years was Neanderthal Fight Club and it's because the whole premise was who would win in a fight between the Neanderthals and the Homo sapiens because the Neanderthals are so stocky so they were describing it as like Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali which by the way that went like people were talking about it in pitches all the time and i was like i should probably google who the hell no idea what boxing is about okay but yeah that stockiness but that does change how you stand how you how you hold yourself and who would win in a fight we decided that it would be equal because the neanderthals would be kind of just like heavy set blah blah blah and be quiet but then the agility of the homo sapiens would be like like light on their feet like muhammad ali we have tested this in a global sense exactly the results are in but just the waste thing the benefit of that wasps narrow waist which bees don't have stupid bees um is that it makes wasps very agile in terms of moving the lower half around oh yeah so originally wasps didn't have stings they had ovipositors you know egg laying tubes and those have to be flexible they have to be able to move and shift because you might be laying an egg on a live um host organism that kind of thing so the wasps back end can move around their stings are very flexible and pointable and that's a big advantage for them and that's why only female wasps sting you right because the sting is a egg laying organ really but new research and they found males that can sting with their genitals or kind of so these are potter wasps potter potter yeah like harry and they've evolved sharp spines on their genitals and when they're swallowed by a frog they'll use their genitals to kind of stab the mouth of the frog so they let some go this is the first evidence that we have of the defensive role of male genitalia in the whole animal kingdom so they're the only animals that we know of that are using their penises as a defense mechanism wow wow and that's huge apparently i don't know

58:32James Harkin:apparently this has been anecdote from people out in the fields talking about that they could do this and one person who had been saying it for years was schmidt justin schmidt pain index i I don't believe so, unless it's a different Schmidt, but he wrote Justin Schmitz. Ella doesn't know who Justin Schmitz is, I don't think. And possibly one or two of our listeners might not know. Yeah, we were reacting like he's an old friend. Sorry. Justin Schmitz was a guy who decided to find out where on the body was the most painful to be stung, and by what? Insects and animals and so on. And so he had the Schmidt Index.

59:09He was the one who found out how bad the torrentula hawk sting is, which is the worst kind of wasp sting. it was actually someone who we worked with who got stung by the tarantula hawk and he said that the pain was so great he crawled into a ditch and bawled his eyes out wow he wrote really poetic descriptions didn't he his papers are just outstanding yeah bullet ant someone is pouring lava into your ear you know all of these amazing descriptions of what it's like being stung by these things the most dangerous wasp in my opinion go on the mud dauber so the mud dauber is sometimes called the pipe organ dauber and they make nests out of clay and they're like they're shaped a bit like pipe organs so they're kind of cylindrical long cylindrical things but they have a bit of a habit of making them inside aeroplanes and their nests have caused the crashing of at least three planes causing the death of 200 people by these wasps.

1:00:08Really? Yeah. Oh, my God. Wow. You've got to check your plane for wasp nests. Yeah, I'm not blaming the wasps. They didn't know what they were doing, I have to say, but, you know. Interesting, because the captain

1:00:21James Harkin:will have the door closed, right? So, are they coming through cracks? What are they coming through? Because that's the only person you need to affect to make the plane crash. No, no, sorry. They're building nests in the engines which cause the engines to fail. Oh, they're not stinging them to death. They're not stinging them. What's going on? Did you? I thought it was like snakes on a plane Wasps in the cabin Wow You just check on the passenger in 3B I think he's a million wasps I'm not sure I thought he was 3B's 3B 3B Ladies and gentlemen, unfortunately we're out of fish and chicken Today's meal will be sausage or jam No

1:01:06James Harkin:Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we're all online. I'm on Instagram. I'm on at Schreiberland. James? My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin. Andy? My Instagram is Andrew Hunter M. Yeah, and Ella? Ella underscore Al Shamahi. And also Watch Human on BBC and PBS. Yeah, so PBS, what's the exact date for the Americans? 17th of September, when we start going out. Very exciting. And then if you're in Britain, it's on the iPlayer. So do check it out.

1:01:40James Harkin:Also, if you want to write to us, there's other means of getting to us. Podcast at qi.com. You can send your emails there. Andy checks all of those. Some of those emails will make it to drop us a line. Bonus episode that we do as part of our secret members club, Clubfish. So go to our website, nosuchthingasafish.com. You'll find a link to it there. You'll find all the previous episodes there as well. Some bits of merch. Otherwise, why not just come back next week? Because we will be back with another episode. We will see you then. goodbye