130: No Such Thing As Train Jam

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Chaczynski and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with my facts, my fact this week is that on July the 13th, 1930, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle headlined a show at the Royal Albert Hall despite having died six days before.

Did he get booed?

You couldn't be booed off stage, could you?

You mean died in a physical sense, not died and had a really bad gig sense.

Yeah, so basically what happened is that six days previous, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had actually died.

And his family were very spiritual.

And they knew that they were going to be reunited with him in some way.

And they thought, why don't we put on effectively a family reunion gig at the Royal Albert Hall?

And they did it as a partial memorial as well.

So it was billed as a memorial.

However, the star bill at the top was that there was going to be a clairvoyant coming along.

There was going to be an empty chair on the stage at the Royal Albert Hall, and his spirit would be summoned to give a message to say, it's all good, I'm on the other side.

And it was, right?

It came, it rocked up.

It showed up, and 6,000 people came to see it as well.

Yeah.

6,000 people crowded the Albert Hall.

Some numbers put it up at 10,000, but apparently it doesn't seat that many or stand that many.

If you fit ghosts in, then presumably it's got a theoretically infinite infinite capacity.

Now, I don't want to be captain skeptical, Anna, but what do you mean he turned up?

Oh, well, we have recorded evidence that he turned up.

What I read about it is that

the medium, Estelle Roberts, claimed that she'd seen Doyle sitting in his chair, and she conveyed a message from him, but apparently only his wife heard it, and everyone else was overpowered from a massive blast on the organ that was playing.

It was an oddly timed blast of organ to mean that no one else could hear what was being said.

Was anyone playing the organ, or was it an organ played by a ghost?

There was an organist build on

the actual play build, so yeah.

So it wasn't a ghost business,

the organist being an idiot.

No, I think the idea is that they wanted to keep the message in the end a bit private, and so they did that.

It's really odd.

The total moment that everyone waited like two hours.

It's absolutely bizarre that they try and cover up the clear words of Arthur Conan Doyle speaking from Beyond the Grave.

Just quickly, the medium, Stell Roberts, she had a spirit that she used to talk to called Red Cloud.

He was a Native American.

He wrongly predicted that World War II wouldn't happen and that it would all be fine.

He said that and then obviously he was wrong.

But they did manage to catch him on photo once or twice, but it turned out always to look exactly like her wearing a hat.

Weird to predict that World War II won't happen.

I had a very specific, unnecessary specific prediction.

I think a lot of people were predicting it might happen and Red Cloud was like, no, it'll be fine.

Conan Doyle's spirit guide had said the opposite.

So, Conan Doyle and his wife, Jean, they had their own at their home in Sussex, they had a spirit guide called Phineas, who, and I'm quoting here, regularly predicted global catastrophe.

And he also advised them on when they should move house and things like this.

Supposedly, on one occasion, Jean asked the local station master to reschedule a train that Arthur was going to take because her spirit guide had said it'll be better if the trains moved, actually.

I think it might have fitted with her diary.

Did you reschedule it?

I don't know.

Because he was a popular man.

You never know.

Yeah.

Maybe.

You know, when he was a doctor before he became a writer and he had almost zero patients, his first one, when he sat up in Portsmouth, was a man who walked in.

And so Colonel Door said, Oh, come in, come in, really excitedly, showed him straight into his consultation room, sat him down, and said, I can tell already by the way you're coughing that you've got some bronchial problems.

And the man said, No, sorry, I'm just coughing because I'm a bit nervous.

I'm here to collect the gas bill that the previous tenant didn't pay off.

Thus, the Holmes method was born.

So, Conan Doyle very famously believed in fairies and he believed in contacting the dead, and all of his family were very much a part of the same belief system.

There was a Time magazine article that was published on the 21st of July.

It was basically reviewing the gig, but it was also giving the background and the lead-up to it.

So, they said that when Conan Doyle died, this is the words in the article, Sir Arthur's family cheerfully buried him because they were like, Well, we'll see him in a few days anyway, so that'll be fine.

And it was really interesting.

In the period between the gig happening, they got lots of messages from people saying that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had got in contact and left them messages.

And the son said, We believe the people that they're not lying, that spirits got in contact, but their spirits themselves are pranksters on the other side.

And people are like, what do you mean?

He's like, there are prankster spirits who are pretending to be Conan Doyle, and it's not our dad, it's just someone else.

I think this is quite a pervasive thought for people who believe in seances and about spirits.

There are a lot of pranksters.

There's a really excellent book by Hilary Mantel, one of her earlier books called Beyond Black, where the idea is that seances are all haunted by these bastard pranksters who are always just throwing shit at you and pretending to be your dead mum and then biting you in the face and stuff.

But you would only really need one ghost to exist, and he could do the voices, if it was like a John Colshaw ghost or something, who could do the voices of all the dead people who were ever there if there's just one prankster.

Well, so the thing about the mediums getting it wrong, this this was a huge part of the relationship between Doyle and Houdini, Harry Houdini, the escapologist.

They were friends, and Doyle believed, and Houdini didn't.

And Houdini spent a lot of his time cheerfully unmasking fraudulent mediums.

And then Doyle talked Houdini into going to a seance because Doyle's wife was a medium.

And she said, Houdini, I've got great news.

I'm in contact with your mother who's died.

And they talked him into it, and then he went along.

And then Houdini's mum wrote a 15-page message to Houdini.

Unfortunately, it was in perfect English, whereas Houdini's mum spoke almost no English.

And it only started with the sign of the cross, and Houdini's mother was married to a rabbi, and it was just, yeah, it wasn't very well done.

It wasn't very well done.

And that did break up their friendship, really, didn't it?

Which is a shame, because they had one of these very good sparring relationships where Houdini was constantly trying to convince Conan Doyle that he wasn't magic, and Conan Doyle was constantly trying to tell Houdini that Houdini was magic.

And then they sort of really fell out over this.

So you just probably didn't believe him that these were tricks.

Yeah, he kept saying, Harry, honestly, you've got amazing powers.

Embrace it.

And Houdini's going, no, this is how I do it.

But yeah, he called Conan Doyle's beliefs hogwash and applesauce, which I enjoy as insults.

Before he was an escapologist, he was the wild man and he would live in a cage and eat pieces of meat.

Was he?

Yeah.

He and his wife were absolutely broke and they had to do anything they could to get work.

So that was one of the acts that he had.

Oh my god.

Would he then break out of the cage using

this?

No, no.

Oh my god.

So have you heard of Marjorie Crandon?

No.

She's one of the best ever fraudulent mediums.

And Houdini had this huge vendetta against her.

She performed very scantily clad, and on one occasion, supposedly, she emitted ectoplasm from her vagina.

As you did.

As you do.

That's kind of what happened.

Yeah.

Well, was she embarrassed by that?

I don't think so.

Because usually it comes from your ear or your nostril, right?

It basically comes from anywhere you hide it.

Yes.

So you get a load of ectoplasm, and it's made out of egg whites and wood chip or whatever, and you hide it in your various orifices around your body, and then it comes out of there.

Wood chip.

So I think it's made of wood chip, isn't it?

Sawdust.

Sawdust.

Really?

Marjorie supposedly had some made of butcher's offal, which she was pulling out of.

I mean, it's.

I'm imagining butcher's offal is like intestines.

Yeah, yeah.

Like you would pull flags out of a top hat or something.

Yes, she blakes the flags with lamb's intestines and the top hat with a vagina.

That's exactly.

I'm never booking booking that lady for my children's party again.

So, yeah, so Houdini cancelled his own shows to travel across the country to attend her seances and try to debunk her.

I found a really cool seance thing.

The connection between Alcoholics Anonymous and seances.

So, Bill Wilson, who's the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, he was massively into seances.

He used to go to them all the time, and he had in his own house, he had a spook room.

And the spook room is where he would go into, and that's where he'd chat to spirits.

And actually, he claimed that the famous 12 steps that Alcoholics Anonymous has, he actually,

he wrote this in his autobiography as well, that

he got led to creating that as an idea because he was talking to a 15th century monk called Boniface.

Oh, yeah.

Saint Boniface.

And that's why step number seven of the 12 is woo!

Yeah, so he, and so it was the idea of sitting around in a room, around a table, and sharing things, and that led to a very similar situation for Alcoholics Anonymous.

Really?

I didn't know that.

Do you know who named Ouija boards?

Parker Brothers?

No, Ouija boards named Ouija boards.

So Ouija boards were...

They became quite popular.

Seances became very popular in the 19th century.

And people started using something like a Ouija board in about the 1880s, but it didn't have a name.

And about four investors got together in 1890 and decided they had to find out a name for the Ouija board.

So they called in one of their spiritualist sisters and and they gathered around it and they asked the Ouija board, what do you want to be called?

And it's spelled out Ouija.

So

the fact that it's also the words for yes in French and German.

That really is irrelevant, I think.

I think that's a myth.

No, you're right, Anna.

Your theory's much better.

So the truth was that the woman, the spiritualist, who said that the board had spoken to her was wearing a locket at the time, a picture of a woman who was called Ouiida,

thought that she got the idea from that.

I've never done a Ouija board.

I've never done any of this stuff.

It's too scary.

That's that's not quite the reason I haven't done it.

They used to use Ouija boards for contacting alive people mostly, didn't they?

During World War One, I think, they were used to contact soldiers on the front.

So families would say, How's it going over there?

And then the soldier would supposedly talk to them.

Well, they not rumbled when their sons came home from war and their mum was like, How dare you speak to me like you did last year?

Mum, I can't.

I can't believe you flung all that ectoplasm across the room.

I didn't even know you had a vagina.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Chacinski.

My fact is that Dutch trains are fitted with lasers to fire at leaves on the line.

That is amazing.

Is it how I imagine?

So it's like, I'm imagining actually a steam train at the moment, but it's got a massive laser on the front and it's firing like green lasers at and then kind of vaporizing them.

Yeah, it's just like that.

It also makes the noise pew pew pew pew.

It's that.

It's got a giant pair of eyes shooting lasers a hundred meters ahead.

No, it hasn't.

Sorry, guys.

This is they're a little bit smaller than that.

It's definitely the same principle, but they're tiny little lasers that are attached to the wheels and they just shoot and vaporize leaves on the track just in front of the wheels.

So they're quite small, but this is still in trial stage, I think, and it started in 2014.

And it's because leaves on the line is a massive problem, and it's just a more efficient way of cleaning them up.

So, other ways of getting leaves off the line, like jets of water or jets of sand, cause a bit of damage to the line.

And because lasers have a really tiny wavelength, they get absorbed by the leaves, but the rails are completely unaffected by them.

So you can fire a laser at a rail forever and ever, and nothing will happen.

I think the first time they started investigating this method was in 1999.

Yes.

And the original laser burned at 5,000 degrees Celsius and fired 25,000 times a second.

But the vibrations of the train meant that it wasn't accurate enough.

So that was one of the problems that felt like random tasks.

And after thousands of deaths,

they decided to rethink.

No leaves cut.

Trees prospered as humanity perished.

No, this is.

So the guy who came up with this idea is a man called Malcolm Higgins, who was a Royal Navy lieutenant commander and he had no experience in lasers and no experience in trains.

No, because he was in the Navy.

Don't use him that much on ships.

And he was just listening to the radio one day, I think, and thought, leaves on the line, I bet I know what could fix that, a laser.

And he looked into it and set up this company called Laser Thor.

And it turns out it is

better than the other methods in a lot of ways.

But you're right, because of the slight wobble of trains, the lasers sometimes misfired, whereas if you fire a jet of water, it just gets anything that's in its way.

But it's been adjusted for now in the Dutch version, and so it seems like it's working like a dream.

We haven't said why leaves online are a bad thing.

Yeah, they are.

They are.

No, no, no, why?

Oh, why?

Right, so they turn into a black mulch, don't they?

Yeah.

Sorry, Andy.

Sorry, Andy wanted to say why.

I thought you were asking me, but you just wanted to show off that you knew.

Sorry,

forgive me for bringing a fact to this table.

Go on.

No, no, no.

If I can showboat for a second and read out a fact.

Yep, no, take take the stage.

So what happens is when the lea so is when you've got a leaf on the line and th it's the previous train goes over it and crushes it, the leaves release the thing called pectin,

which um is the stuff that the food industry use uses as a gel to make jams and jellies.

So that's what happens.

So the train so it means it slows down the deceleration of the train, so the tr basically the train can't break very effectively and that's dangerous, so they have to go much more slowly.

Does that mean that this vaporizing by lasers of the leaves is going to reduce the quantities of jam available to us?

I think that jam companies don't principally source their jam from railway lines.

The jam harvest every year is little children running along railway lines, scooping up on the supermarket shelf.

You've got strawberry, raspberry, train.

So, they are a huge problem, and I do feel bad for things like network rail because we take the piss.

But I think 4.5 million hours of passenger delays, roughly a year, are caused by leaves on the rails.

The cost of repairing tracks because of leaf issues or repairing trains is 10 million a year, and then another 5 million for the vegetation management.

And the only reason they were there in the first place is because people who were building railways wanted to protect people who lived nearby from the sounds, so they planted lots and lots of trees next to them.

And turns out that was a real ballache.

You know, these aren't the only lasers that are used on trains.

There's another train that shoots out lasers that we have in the UK.

It's called the flying banana.

What?

This is an Arthur Koon and Doyle hallucination.

No, this is real.

It goes all the way up and down the UK rail networks and what it's doing is checking the quality, so using lasers and cameras, of the tracks.

They're making sure that the tracks are just still as strong, still as good.

Why did they call it the flying banana?

Because it's yellow.

Oh, okay.

So it looks a bit like a banana.

Yeah.

And they mean flying and going quickly rather than actually flying.

Yeah.

Sounds like a flying banana to me.

Exactly.

Do we know if it's curved?

We don't know.

We don't know.

No, it won't be because how would it go in the tracks?

Like, the one thing about trains is they have to be straight.

You can put a banana on wheels.

It's only the wheels that need to be straight, James.

That's true.

If you put a big enough axle and gauge on a standard banana, you could have a train that was just a banana on wheels.

Yeah, I agree with that.

But on the other hand, if you're checking the rail, you really want it to be pretty much the size and shape of a train.

It'd be too small as well.

Bananas, you don't get bananas the size of trains.

Well, I'm going to take the example from the Navy man, and I'm going to set up a company.

I should say the real name of that train is the new measurement train.

I can see why they had to come up with a nickname for it.

But yeah, so it checks strength in the joins and overhead cables and so on.

It just makes it the maintenance train, basically.

Do you know what the fastest train ever in North America was?

Oh, no.

Okay, it was called the M four nine seven Black Beetle, and it was basically a normal train train that they put two jet engines onto

and fired it down the tracks.

Cheating.

Yeah, well, it is, but for a while, it was thought that this might be the future, and they did it in Russia, and they did it in America.

But the problem was basically, if they crashed, everyone died.

Yeah.

So

it was incredibly dangerous, but they did go really fast, and they do technically work.

Isn't that how all trains work?

That if they crash, everyone dies.

No, no.

They work.

You think everyone's died in every single train crash?

I always make sure to get off before the last stop because I assume it just goes into a wall.

Well, we've talked about the phrase, haven't we, getting off at Gateshead?

No.

Getting off at Gateshead is slang for the withdrawal method in sex because Gateshead is the second last stop on the line

before Newcastle.

I thought it was for premature ejaculation.

I think that's being thrown off the train at Gateshead, whether you want to leave it or not.

Oh, wait, but just sorry, go on.

Oh, I should just finish off this thing.

So, yeah, basically, the reason is because you've got two massive engines on and it's going so fast that there's it's uses a lot of fuel, and yeah, any kind of accident is going to be pretty fatal.

Should we do some stuff quickly on lasers?

Yeah, do you know what the world's largest laser is?

No, the world's biggest laser.

It was made in Osaka University in Japan, and it has a power of 2,000 trillion watts.

That's two petawatts.

And it's a very short amount of time that it does it and that's a billion times more powerful than floodlights in a football stadium.

It's about the same as all the power that the sun gives to London every year.

Whoa.

And what they do with that is they fire it for a very small amount of time on some matter and it turns it into plasma.

And plasma is what we think, it's a state of matter and it's what we think 99% of everything in the universe is made out of.

But we can't really make it on Earth because it's quite hard to make unless you use this massive laser.

Well, so we're just trying to turn the remaining 1% into plasma as well.

The poor, desperate 1%

still clinging on.

That's very cool.

Can I tell you about my favorite laser out there?

It doesn't exist yet.

It's been proposed, but I would love it if this was made.

So, there's a lot of debate about the fact that we're transmitting stuff into space.

And people like Stephen Hawking has said, let's stop trying to tell any potential life out there that we're here because they might use us as a resource.

It's oddly, it appears in the news a lot.

Yeah, I've just been seeing Independence Day 2.

It does make sense because of all the life forms in the universe, let's assume there are others, it's pretty unlikely we're going to be the smartest.

And you know what happens when smarter so-called communities reach less smart communities.

Yeah, the less smart ones get pushed around.

Exactly.

I personally experience it every week on this podcast.

So two astronomers at Columbia University have taken this seriously, and they've developed the idea of two lasers that we would put out into space.

And what we would do is we would blast a continuous 30-megawatt laser for about 10 hours once a year.

And what that would do is it would cloak us into invisibility from any outside planets that we're looking for light emitting and whatever it is that you look for.

It's like an invisibility shield, and it wouldn't use that much energy.

It would only use about 70 American homes' worth of energy for that one 10-hour blast.

So, just 70 families in America just have to do without television.

No, surely that wouldn't work.

What would these aliens think?

They've managed to see all the way over to where we are, but there doesn't seem to be a planet there, despite the fact that all the gravity of all the other planets seems to say that there is a planet there.

Their episode of Friends just cuts out.

I suppose there's nobody there.

Yeah.

Must have cancelled it.

I think if they're smart enough to get to kind of look over here, then they're smart enough to realize that that was a trick.

That's true, unless they haven't spotted us yet.

I thought you were going to say two big lasers, one saying piss, and the other one saying oh.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that to avoid catching malaria, you should carry a chicken with you at all times.

A live chicken.

It can't be a KFC bucket.

It has to be a live chicken.

Are you sure?

Is it

because it's something to do with molecules that it gives off or something?

Yeah, so there have been some scientists from Ethiopia and Sweden who've been doing trials on this, and they're preparing more trials at the moment.

They did experiments where they suspended a live chicken in a cage near people sleeping

under a bed net.

Do they warn the people sleeping or do those people wake up in the morning and freak out?

They warn them.

So it's a particular kind of malarial mosquitoes, Anopheles arabiensis, and it's been discovered they avoid chickens.

And so the scientists are working on extracting the chemicals from the chickens which give off the chickeny smell.

And then you'll just be able to spray this around and you won't get malaria, which is

the smell of delicious chicken.

Exactly, yeah.

Then people will start eating you instead.

Worse.

Yeah, so this is about how great chickens are and all the things they do for us that we don't give them credit for.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's really amazing.

That's incredible, yeah.

Do you know you get some chickens which are half male and half female?

Really?

Yeah, and they're split down the middle.

All the cells on the left-hand side are male, and all the cells on the right-hand side are female.

So they have

cockscombs on one side and sort of big fighting spurs that male cocks have, and on the right, they have much daintier, more hen-like features.

Large breasts, yeah.

So, do they lay half eggs?

I don't.

I don't know.

That's an amazing question.

If you're not really hungry, but you do.

They could just eat half half an egg.

Thank God, I've got a hybrid chicken.

But

they look different.

Their plumage is completely different.

Wow.

It's amazing.

They're called bilateral gynandromorphs, aren't they?

Yes, they are.

And

I think you get them in butterflies.

I've seen them in butterflies as well.

So half of them look like they're one colour and half of them look like they're another colour.

I think chickens can change their sex, can't they?

I've heard that as well.

I remember hearing about a fighting cock once who was a female and then changed their sex halfway through or the other way around,

but then all the it was the other way around because then all the cocks would see this like hen and think, oh, well, this is going to be easy, but actually, she had all the aggression of a male cock and would just absolutely kill one.

So, it turns out you should pit a fighting hen against a fighting cock.

Yeah, but they just don't have that kind of aggression, the hens.

Okay.

Another possible cure for malaria, or sorry, not a cure for malaria, a malarial prevention trick is spiders.

So, there's a spider that preys specifically on the Anopheles mosquito, which is the jumping spider, and it's been found that they're attracted to smelly socks or smelly human clothes, like smelly underwear.

And so

there's a thought that you could leave your smelly clothes, just not wash your clothes, leave them in your house, attract jumping spiders into your house, and by having them there, they'll get rid of the malarial mosquitoes.

And instead, you'll just be infested with spiders.

Wow, that's amazing.

Isn't that interesting?

Because they used to eat spider's webs to get rid of malaria.

Yeah, they did, didn't they?

Which presumably didn't work at all, but

they used to give you tablets full of spider's webs, and you would take those and they would help.

And there was another thing that you would carry around walnuts, I think, empty walnuts with little spiders inside them, and that would supposedly stop the malaria from getting you.

Of course, none of these works, but in the midst of it.

I think that was up till the 20th century in Italy,

that they thought the thing was good for the 20th century.

Very early 20th century, they thought

the mosquito would bite the walnut or the spider inside it.

And also, I read that around the same time in Italy, a doctor would sew a live millipede into the clothes of the sufferer without telling the sufferer, and that would also stop them from getting malaria somehow.

Wow.

So people walking around with live millipedes in their clothes have no idea.

Did you know that you can, and Japanese students have recently, fertilized a shop-bought chicken egg and grown it into a chick, which I thought wasn't possible.

What do you mean?

So they bought, so this was to see if they could grow an embryo outside of its shell completely.

Oh, wow.

And these Japanese students, there's a video of this again online, and these Japanese students literally bought this egg, cracked it into a a cup, fertilized it, so they bought the required sperm, I guess, male sex stuff to fertilize it.

That's what we call it.

And they, yeah, they fertilized it, they covered it with sort of cling film, and it grew into a chick.

Isn't that weird?

So you could watch it, you could watch all the vessels develop.

If you look at the video, you can see this egg that you would fry in a pan turn into a chicken.

That's amazing.

That's extraordinary.

So do they do...

No, they don't start as yolk in all cases, right?

No, the yolk is what feeds them.

Food, yeah, okay, right.

Cool.

I'm just saying that we and chickens both eat chicken yolk.

Oh, yes.

Well, we and cows both drink milk.

What?

We and sharks both eat fish.

Whoa.

Mind-blowing, Andy.

Yeah, if you look in an egg, there's like a little tiny bit attached to the yolk, and that's what would be the actual true egg.

And the rest of it is just for, well, you sometimes get little red bits, don't you, in the yolk?

Yeah, yeah.

Speaking of male sex stuff,

so female chickens, they have sperm storage tubules, these are called SSTs.

They can keep male sperm alive inside them for up to 15 weeks.

That's cool.

Wow, it's way longer than mammalian sperm can survive.

A lot of animals that do that, it's so that they have a choice whether to

fertilise.

Fertilize or whether to fertilize or not.

Is that true, chickens?

It's true of hens, and they can eject inferior rooster sperm after sex.

Brilliant.

I want to see that.

They eject up to 80% of the stuff they receive.

No, thank you.

I want to see a rooster have sex with a hen and go, was that good for you?

And her go, yeah, yeah, it was great.

It walks 10 meters down the road and then it gets splattered.

And she goes, just kidding, it was terrible.

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It's that time of year again.

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Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that all of the sandals worn by the Pueblo people of New Mexico had enough space for six toes.

Wow.

Yeah.

Did any of them have six toes, or was it just a very bad shoemaker?

I just couldn't count.

Why?

Why?

So 3% of them had six toes, which is a a lot higher than normal.

Normally it would be probably less than 1%.

And it was the fact that they thought that people with six toes were specially good and they were revered and they were thought to be great and they were associated with important rituals and things like that.

And so having six toes was good.

And so researchers who have looked at the place where they live have found loads of sandals, loads of sandal-shaped stones, loads of pictures of sandals, and all of these have an extra toe.

Wow.

That's incredible.

So that kind of implies that the other 97% were pretending they had six toes.

They were all wearing six-toed sandals.

Yeah, maybe they had like little fake toes that they used to stick on.

Yeah, a little bit of play-doh.

Can I just ask, when were they around?

Okay, so

they're actually still around, the descendants of these people.

They're hoppy Native Americans are supposed to be descended from them.

But these particular times, they're looking at an area of a canyon in New Mexico, and they were living around 700 AD, 800 AD.

so just over a thousand years ago.

Okay.

And the other thing is that they found that it's about 3% of the population had six toes, but it could be actually that it wasn't that high.

The bodies that we find are ones that have been especially buried and it might be just the more revered people who have been buried.

So maybe they had a normal incidence of toes but we just know about them more because we only see the the special people.

Yeah.

Okay.

They found a skeleton haven't they where the the foot which has six toes has a special ornamental anklet worn around it, as if to say, check out my six toes.

And the other foot, which has only got five toes on it, has no such decoration.

No.

There's more another strut of evidence to the idea that this was a revered trait.

You know how you're saying it might attract the opposite of sex?

Yeah.

Not the opposite of sex.

Oh.

The opposite of the opposite of sex.

Sex.

But is there anything in genetics that if your mum and dad had six toes, that you're in any way likely to inherit six toes?

Really?

That's a genetic trait, yeah.

So we could actually just, within one generation, make new different humans.

I mean, if we forced six-toed and six-finger people to breed with each other in a kind of weirdly awful dystopian way, I guess we could.

Yeah, but if we decided it was more practical for humans going forward to have six toes, we could actually just do that within.

It takes a long time.

It doesn't, I don't think in one generation you're not going to have to, like, clerks don't need to worry.

You know who else has six fingers?

Pandas.

Oh, yeah.

They all have this sort of extra little thummy protrusion on the opposite side from their first thumb.

Right.

It helps them to grip bamboo and it helps with support and things like that.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah, is it that it's not really a true finger?

They call it a pseudo-thumb.

Yeah, I think it's.

It's like a bony protrusion, isn't it?

So you can't wiggle it.

It's thumb-like, but they can't, yeah.

But it serves a purpose that a thumb would be able to serve, doesn't it?

It grips.

I think people have said that if we were to pick a sixth digit, that another thumb on the other side would be the best one to have.

That would be fantastic.

If you do lose a finger or a thumb, you could get a toe transplanted, which is quite common now, quite a common treatment for losing a finger.

It's mostly to replace thumbs, isn't it?

It's mostly to replace thumbs.

I quite like this interview with the guy who had it done, who said there's an operation which involves two surgical teams.

One is to lop off the toe, and the other is to prepare the thumb area to have the toe attached.

And he said afterwards, the worst part of it was them taking the toe off,

which seems quite obvious to me that that would be the worst part,

as opposed to them putting it onto the hand.

But this was first done in 1897 by this Austrian surgeon called Karl Niccolodoni, who and it wasn't as successful, but it did work in that he was able to turn a toe into a thumb, and he did it by connecting the man's thumbless hand to his foot.

So the man had to go on.

They've done that the wrong way, haven't they?

I think if you're going to replace your thumb with a toe, what you want to do is take the toe from the foot and put it on your hand, not take your hand and put it down your foot.

No, that's what he had to do because he had to get the toe sort of used to being on the hand before he detached it from the foot.

So the man had to go around for a long time.

Because if you put the toe on someone's hand, he's going to go, oh, it's so high up here.

They've got to get used to it.

It's like this hand's just coming to stay for a while.

Wait, the guy's come down to meet the in-laws, basically.

Yes.

What exactly did the guy have to do?

Here's what the guy had to do.

He had to bend over, have his thumbless hand sewn onto his big toe, and then that allowed the big toe to get accustomed to the big toe sewn onto the hand.

The big toe wasn't detached.

No, the big toe wasn't detached, so the man had to spend a few weeks bent over with his hand attached to his foot, yes.

So

we'd be like, come on, Jeff, we're off.

He's like, I'm just tying my shoe on.

You've been tying your shoe for three weeks, Jeff.

But it won't do you any good in terms of acclimatising, surely, if your toe is still attached to your foot.

Well, apparently, it did work.

Well, I can see it.

It's not brilliant.

You might attach the blood vessels, for instance.

And they might be still attached in one place, but also attached in the other place.

If you look at images online of people who've had their thumbs replaced by toes, it's pretty easy to miss.

Yeah.

You could very easily meet someone, talk to them, shake their hand, and not notice that this replacement is that.

It's so

good.

Do you think you'd mention it if you saw someone and you thought that

looked like a toe on the top?

No, because it's the embarrassment.

It's like saying to a woman that you think she's pregnant and she might not be.

You can't say, oh, you've had that operation.

What you were saying, Anna, about putting your thumb on your toe, it reminds me of...

Yeah, it's shoulders, knees, and thumbs, knees and thumbs.

We've got to do it because Barry's here today and just all sing along.

Go on, James.

It reminds me of in the olden days when they used to have a nose job.

So you had to have a new nose put on there and they would put skin from your arm to kind of reconstruct the nose.

But you had to have the blood supply from your arm at the same time as it's growing on your nose.

So you used to have your arm attached to your face while the skin would grow over your nose.

So you would have people whose arm is attached to their nose for like weeks on end.

And there was one famous guy in Italy, I think, who had this done, but he didn't want to be having his arm over his nose the whole time, so he had his servant's arm used instead.

And so his servant had to walk around with his arm over his boss's nose the whole time.

Wow.

That's harsh.

I hope the servant never washed his hands to get him back.

Just on toes, have you guys heard of the World Toe Wrestling Championships?

No.

No.

It takes place in the UK, and

it's an annual event.

The current champion is Alan Nasty Nash.

He won it in 2015.

I'm not sure if the 2016 event has happened, but it's basically exactly what it says it is.

It is just toe wrestling.

And they treat it very seriously.

Each toe is inspected prior to.

Are you sure it's not a thumb?

Yeah, so the contestants have their toes examined by a qualified nurse before being given clearance that it's an unmodified toe and

that it can do it.

And it was invented basically by four guys who were drinking and just so annoyed that the UK just was never good at winning international sports.

So it was never just a champion who was from the UK.

So they thought, let's invent a new sport.

It's only a matter of time before we teach the continent how to play this game and they come over and start these games.

Exactly, yeah.

Do they have weight categories in toe wrestling?

So is it

little toe v, little toe?

It's always big toe v, big toe, isn't it?

Yes, and it's also

men versus men, women versus women.

So there's no plucky second toe which took on a big toe, because that is a screenplay waiting to be written.

But you can watch videos online, and they all come across like WWF wrestlers.

They take it really seriously.

And so some of the people in the top hundred at the moment, you do have...

There are not a hundred people who do this.

Maybe just top players.

There might be a hundred.

Alan Nasty Nash, as I mentioned before, current champion.

Tom 100 meter Martin.

And then there's a guy called Paul Beach whose nickname is Tominator.

Oh, very good.

Very good name.

It sounds like what happens when the characters out of this little piggy went to market grew up.

I think that's what they're all doing now.

This little piggy went wrestling.

This little piggy became a thumb.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, you can reach us on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at Egg Shaped, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

And Shazinski, you can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at qipodcast, or go to our website, no such thingasoffish.com, where we have all of our previous episodes.

Just got one more bit of news to tell you, which is that as of this week, we have changed over to Audioboom.

Audioboom, you probably know, hosts a bunch of awesome podcasts, and that's where we're going to be now.

If you listen to us via SoundCloud, this might be the last episode that you hear on there, and you're going to have to find somewhere else, some other app to download our show on.

If you do listen to things like iTunes or anything like that, if that's where you get our show from, don't worry, it's going to be exactly the same.

You don't need to push any other buttons.

This is just specifically for the SoundCloud people.

That's it from the show.

Off with the show.

Off with the show.

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