3: No Such Thing As The Middle Ages

Transcript

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Speaker 22 We ran it on QI a few years ago. Yeah.

Speaker 22 Which was there's no such thing as a fish.

Speaker 23 There's no such thing as a fish.

Speaker 22 No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish.

Speaker 23 Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Speaker 23 This is a special episode in which rather than having strictly just the QIL sitting around the microphone this week, we've got two special guests.

Speaker 23 We have a comedian from Brooklyn, New York, originally from Boston, Alex Edelman. Hi.

Speaker 23 Who amongst interesting things that you've got going on is you've got a current text relationship with Lindsay Lohan.

Speaker 23 You once severely angered Neil Armstrong in a lift. Yep.

Speaker 23 What else is there? There's plenty more of this stuff.

Speaker 23 And we're also joined by the historical consultant from the horrible histories tv series greg jenner who outside of that if you hang out with greg jenner as alex will know at any kind of social event is mobbed like a rock star basically yeah you just have groupies he has fans coming up to him are you having a relationship with any um american celebrity females sadly not uh george washington's total i guess an american relationship

Speaker 23 uh so also joining us we have james harkin uh and uh doing all the fact checking as we go along today is anna chaczynski Oh, and I'm Dan.

Speaker 23 So we should start by saying that this is the first time you've been to the office, Greg, to the QI offices.

Speaker 23 This is not the first time Alex has been. Alex is, you're almost like a part of the family now.

Speaker 24 I'm going to try to cut down because I...

Speaker 23 Well, and you're going back to America tomorrow.

Speaker 23 I don't think that counts. I'm trying to cut down.

Speaker 24 But I'll be back. I'll be back at the end of this month.

Speaker 22 Basically, as soon as Alex comes in the office, that's the end of work for the Death of TI.

Speaker 24 Well, you know, the thing is, this office is

Speaker 24 like what I would like the inside of my mind to look like. Just neatly ordered and filled with facts all categorized.
Like literally I feel like you could find any fact in this office.

Speaker 24 Because there's a lot.

Speaker 23 Well there's just a lot of books. There's a lot of folders.

Speaker 23 We've got the internet. And everyone's got

Speaker 24 to say, I was going to say technically it could just be a closet with a laptop and

Speaker 24 that would still hold true.

Speaker 23 So okay, well so as this is a special one, maybe we'll start with yeah, we'll start with you Greg. Oh good, at least the third one.

Speaker 23 Yeah yeah yeah let's uh let's begin with the sort of rambling incoherent. Yeah, I wrote the expert, that's what I would say.
The expert.

Speaker 23 Well, just give us what it's your favourite thing that's kind of on your mind this week

Speaker 23 that you've learned. This is my first week off after writing my book, my first of a book.
So I've been talking about it.

Speaker 23 I think it comes out next year. Are you allowed to say anything about the book? Yeah, I can see the title.
Yes.

Speaker 23 It's called One Million Years in a Day. Stone Age to Phone Age is the range.
And it's sort of structured around a modern satellite age. That's so great.

Speaker 24 Stone Age to Phone Age.

Speaker 23 The group is just

Speaker 23 a people. No, I thought

Speaker 23 something I just put in the book and I thought was quite an interesting fact, really, is that the earliest known dentistry is 9,000 years old. This is back in sort of Neolithic, really.

Speaker 23 It's like mammoths were walking the earth with dentures. Slightly, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 So we're talking here in, I suppose, modern-day Pakistan is what we call it. It's a place called Meghar, I suppose.

Speaker 23 My pronunciation is not great, but archaeologists have found teeth which have been drilled.

Speaker 23 And they've been sort of, you you know, the earliest really sort of fillings or early drilling technique using a bow drill, which is, you know, just a sort of whittling, a bit of sharp stick, which is a technique used really for jewellery.

Speaker 24 So not even teeth cleaning, because I knew that the Egyptians had horse-hair toothbrushes. Well, yeah.
Even reparative dentistry goes back that far.

Speaker 23 So this would be medicinal dentistry. This would be pain relief.

Speaker 22 Yeah, I guess it's an obvious thing because people would have been in so much pain, wouldn't they?

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 22 Although I remember reading that

Speaker 22 like sugar, cane sugar came in relatively late, so people didn't have as bad teeth in the Neolithic time as they have today.

Speaker 23 It's interesting actually, there's been a couple of major studies in the past couple of years that are showing that's not really true actually. There's an awful lot of dental

Speaker 23 wear and tear, but also it's sugar-based actually, because there's quite a lot of sugar in natural fruits and so forth.

Speaker 23 And obviously, if you're not brushing your teeth every day, it will build up.

Speaker 24 Is it complex sugars that really do harm, though?

Speaker 23 Yeah, I mean, the worst dentistry in history, I think, if you were gonna if you were sort of elected an era, I would say probably the 18th century, the Georgians.

Speaker 23 The 18th century is where dentistry begins as a modern discipline, but it's also where, really, dentistry teeth were at their worst.

Speaker 23 If you look at portraits, no one smiles

Speaker 23 until the first ever smile. I can't remember, as a female artist, a French female artist.
I think it's in Le Bran, I think maybe. Did you check that out? Marie LeBron, perhaps.

Speaker 23 It's a really famous painting, and it's very controversial because I think it's a self-portrait, and I think she's grinning. Wow.

Speaker 22 And is the reason you didn't grin before? Because your teeth were so bad. My teeth were awful.

Speaker 22 Who was it who used urine for mouthwash? Was that?

Speaker 23 The Romans.

Speaker 23 Wow.

Speaker 23 Wow. Super just as me.
The Romans brushed their teeth to a certain extent.

Speaker 23 They used rags. I mean, the Egyptians didn't do dental surgery particularly.
They were very good dentists. In fact, the first known dentists in human history, the first named dentists are Egyptian.

Speaker 23 They found, I think, in 2006, I think they found a tomb with three named dentists on the wall, sort of, you know, written in.

Speaker 23 Like a company name.

Speaker 23 Shines for Shoremen and

Speaker 23 dentists to the pharaohs.

Speaker 23 And they were, they were royal dentists. So they they were sort of official dentists to a pharaoh, and

Speaker 23 these three guys were clearly sort of official tooth prodders. There was a recent meta-study done on Egyptian mummies.

Speaker 23 I think 40%, if I remember the curve, I might be wrong, but I think 40% had serious dental disease. Wow.
And dental disease can kill you.

Speaker 24 My father's a physician, and he says something really interesting: that historically, the people who get the worst care are the famous and the wealthy. Because

Speaker 24 he's being ironic. What he's saying is

Speaker 24 typically famous people have been killed by over-medicating or over-operating or too much complex treatment. Like, as soon as they, like, the body will repair itself.

Speaker 22 We talked in an earlier podcast about James Garfield, who

Speaker 23 prodded

Speaker 24 dirty fingers in the wound and stuff like that. My father gave a TED talk on it, which is actually really interesting.
Yeah, his name is Elizarman.

Speaker 24 And so, I wonder if those Pharaohs were receiving, A, a lot of dental attention or B, getting such rich food that they were.

Speaker 23 Well, that's the big question.

Speaker 23 So, the quality of food obviously is going to affect things. I mean, Ertzy, the ice man found in Tyrulean Alps, he had really, really messed up teeth.

Speaker 23 What was the fact that you were saying about the baseball player?

Speaker 22 I can't remember his name, but it was a baseball player who

Speaker 22 had to be taken out of the game because he bit himself on his own ass. And what happened was he slid into the final base and his false teeth fell out.

Speaker 23 Oh, and you landed on them.

Speaker 22 I'm sure you know about it.

Speaker 23 So, what we were saying, though, is that he must have been in his 20s, right?

Speaker 23 But yet, there he was with a full set of false teeth because that was a thing that happened had his teeth he knocked out it was the 1920s apparently he's not his he was called clarence blethen and he's now called clarence climax blethen i don't really understand why he's born

Speaker 23 he had a really particular gimmick yeah yeah

Speaker 23 no teeth you say

Speaker 23 oh alex i have to tell you just as an american and a baseball fan yeah if you don't know this it's my favorite baseball fact so do you know lou gehrick i know the disease exactly

Speaker 24 he really should have seen that one coming yeah

Speaker 24 so this is what's fantastic about it turns out that Lou Gehrig didn't die of Lou Gehrig's disease so the disease named after him he didn't have there's an interesting Wikipedia list of people who have been killed by already deceased people my favorite one is someone killed not by a deceased person but by a deceased animal a really notorious poacher in Montana this is a story that people in Montana like to tell and like this poacher outside of Helena he was he was really famous for shooting deer and people told him that there was one particular deer that he'd never be able to get, and he wounded it a whole bunch of times.

Speaker 24 And finally, he spotted it on a bluff

Speaker 24 over him, and he shot it, and he turned around to celebrate. The deer bounced all the way down and landed on him and killed him.
And the deer survived.

Speaker 24 Yeah, the guy didn't.

Speaker 23 We should move on to another fact.

Speaker 25 Just quickly to satisfy you, obviously, Greg was right. I mean, he's a historian, about the first ever smile in a portrait.
It was in 1787. This is quite funny.

Speaker 25 The court gossip sheet at the time said, an affectation which artists, art lovers, and persons of taste have been united in condemning and which finds no precedent among the ancients is that in smiling she shows her teeth.

Speaker 25 So, you know, pretty outrageous.

Speaker 23 I saw an amazing collection of photos from a period pre-smile where they did all the grim kind of straight-face looking. And it's outtake photos where the families crack up and they're laughing.

Speaker 23 And it's so interesting because it's the first time where you see the real personalities. and this is so interesting

Speaker 23 yes where they're just they're properly laughing out loud and clearly the person's like well this is unusable

Speaker 24 like you don't look creepy and you don't look sullen yeah

Speaker 23 Michael smiled

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Speaker 23 All right, let's move on to our second fact. I want to throw in my fact here, particularly because I want to hear your thoughts on this, Craig.

Speaker 23 It's a theory from a guy called Dr. Hans Ulrich Niemitz, which is that the Middle Ages never happened.
Oh, wow. Wow.
So it's a thing called Phantom Time Theory.

Speaker 23 It's basically his alleges that it was just made up.

Speaker 24 Are you sure that the guy is Dr. Hans Ulrich?

Speaker 23 Yeah, I know. A lot of people believe it.
You know, obviously a lot of idiots believe it. But

Speaker 23 according to them, 614 to 911 AD did not happen. Did not happen.
We're going through it now. What is the basis for this theory? This is madness.
He thinks it's a conspiracy of the calendar. Brilliant.

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 23 And so, what his suggestion is, as well, is that the things that were supposed to have happened in the Middle Ages, people at the time removed them from that bit of history and created a fiction of these 300 years.

Speaker 23 I think he said Charlemagne just never existed. Wow.
He was a fictional character.

Speaker 22 So basically, half of the things that you do for a living just

Speaker 23 is a fictional. Yeah.
I'll give you some direct sort of from this article. It seems that historians are plagued by a plethora of falsified documents from the Middle Ages.

Speaker 23 Some documents forged by the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages were created hundreds of years before their great moments arrived, after which they were embraced by medieval society.

Speaker 23 This implying that whoever produced these forgeries must have very skillfully anticipated the future. Or there was some discrepancy in calculating dates.
Wowzers.

Speaker 23 So, where does he stand on the Vikings?

Speaker 23 Because they burned. Why Vikings?

Speaker 23 They've not burned down Lindisfine, they didn't know what happened. Lindisfline wasn't attacked, it was just he just didn't happen, and no Charlemagne and

Speaker 23 Alfred the Great, no Crusades.

Speaker 23 He says that maybe Alfred the Great was in a different period of time. Maybe the Vikings, you know, maybe they were just the year before.
The year before.

Speaker 23 So he stops at 9-11, does he? Because 9-11 is the first time. He stops at 9-11.
No, he stops at 9-11. No one has conspiracy theorists.

Speaker 23 9-11 is the year that the Vikings conquer Normandy and become the Normans. It's Rollo, King Rollo, who founds the Norman dynasty.

Speaker 23 9-11 is the Vikings become Normans, and the Normans, of course, become William the Conqueror, and that becomes our first dynasty of English medieval kings. So 9-11 is a good year.

Speaker 22 But this goes with the thing that you like, Dan, which is that if you come up with an idea or a conspiracy, then you can always seem to fit in

Speaker 22 facts into whatever your theory is. And you can imagine if you said to him,

Speaker 22 what about the Vikings? He would have an answer.

Speaker 23 He won't have an answer, yeah. There's no chronology in the Bible, isn't it?

Speaker 23 People who sort of try to find patterns in the Bible and you sort of go, you do realise it's been retranslated loads of times.

Speaker 23 So, all right, final question then. Is there any truth that the Middle Ages

Speaker 23 didn't happen?

Speaker 23 I would be deeply, deeply upset if

Speaker 23 you're going to say that it didn't happen. Would you really? Yeah, I would actually.
But I mean, but what was it? I would spend a lot of my life on it existing.

Speaker 23 No, I mean, I'd be intrigued. I mean, it's true, we should be very deeply suspicious and sceptical of the past.

Speaker 23 And one of the things that historians do is we rigorously interrogate documents, and we'd always try to disprove them.

Speaker 23 You try to apply that sort of scientific methodology of saying, How do we know this is true? And that's what great scholarship is, but you don't destroy all things,

Speaker 23 you're just trying to question them and say, Okay, and obviously, there were problems with forgeries.

Speaker 23 A monastery, for example, would be given land and they would lose the document, and then a king would turn up, going, Brilliant, I'm having your land back.

Speaker 23 And they'd be like, No, no, no, this is ours, we've always had it. So they'd forge a document, yeah, and then we get the forgery from there.

Speaker 22 I read that, um, you know, Andorra, the country, yeah, they have a constitution, um, but it's in a safe in Andorra somewhere, and a lot of historians think that it's fake.

Speaker 23 Really? You heard that before? No, I haven't. Faking what's in, like, it doesn't exist at all.

Speaker 22 As in, yeah, it's a modern reproduction because

Speaker 22 they don't have the historical basis that they think they have. Because it was one of those states that came in to buffer from the

Speaker 23 15th century wars, yeah, the Italian wars.

Speaker 24 If it were to be true, this phantom time thing, which is 110% not,

Speaker 24 Then what it would mean is, I mean, no new scholarship is emerging, and new scholarship is emerging all the time. Yeah, it is.

Speaker 24 So it would be insane.

Speaker 23 But it would also kick off our, we would really interrupt with our carbon dating.

Speaker 22 Yeah, I was just thinking.

Speaker 23 We use historical documents to try and ally up with carbon dating, and you use carbon dating to try and ally up with historical documents.

Speaker 23 You try and play them off against each other and try and find a cross-reference. And that way, if they both agree, you kind of go, all right, maybe that's legit.

Speaker 23 And with Richard III discovery in the car park recently,

Speaker 23 the carbon dating there can sort of give you that specificity scientifically, which then legitimises the documents that told us he was there.

Speaker 23 So then we can kind of go, ah, these docs are these are okay. Maybe we can look at them closely for something else.
So that's a way of verifying. That's a way of verifying.

Speaker 23 Because you're using the scientific method to sort of say, okay, the archaeology is legit, so maybe the history's okay.

Speaker 22 Physicists like to use really old lead for their experiments because it's quite it doesn't react with as many things, but that means that they're trying to use a lot of archaeological items to make their experiments.

Speaker 23 Have you heard about that? Yeah, I've heard about it briefly. I don't know if that's, I mean, it was supposed to make sense, wouldn't it? Maybe.
Yeah.

Speaker 22 But then, yeah, it's not really great to steal someone else's stuff.

Speaker 23 This is Richard III. Can I borrow that? Sorry.

Speaker 23 I've got an experiment on and just, you know, need an old king.

Speaker 25 I mentioned that James was right, that there is a theory, which in fact sounds quite well founded, that the Andorran Constitution is a forgery.

Speaker 25 Although this is in a book, so apparently it came from Charlemagne. It was signed at the Independence of Andorra.

Speaker 23 It was this document.

Speaker 22 Oh, we all know Charlemagne didn't exist.

Speaker 23 I think we've established that.

Speaker 25 Although I am reading it in a book where they've spelt it, it's a book, it's Andorra Business Law Handbook, but they've spelt Charlemagne. Charlemagne.

Speaker 23 He's a dog. He was a dog with a terrible skin reading.

Speaker 23 I don't know how trustworthy that is. Okay.

Speaker 23 Alright, so we're going to go on to,

Speaker 23 we'll do Alex's fact.

Speaker 24 Now, Alex, my fact is it's about the most medically indispensable sea creature in the United States is the horseshoe crab. Are you aware of the

Speaker 24 wide, wide claim to make, isn't it? Yeah, how does that work? Well, so the horseshoe crab lives in the very bacteria-rich

Speaker 24 coastline, shallow waters in the ocean. So in the early 20s, they were sort of seen as a nuisance, and they were ground up and used as fertilizer and stuff and fed to pigs.

Speaker 24 And now,

Speaker 24 every year, a half million horseshoe crabs are harvested, and they're brought into factories by one of five companies all along the eastern coast of the United States, and they're bled alive, and their blood is baby blue.

Speaker 24 And if you can find a picture, it's incredibly interesting. And this blood, it detects any

Speaker 24 dangerous bacterial endotoxins, even at a concentration of one part per trillion.

Speaker 24 So the FDA requires that all drugs, all new drugs that are brought to market, be run through this horseshoe crab blood.

Speaker 24 So that every single person in the United States who's ever had an injection of any kind has had a drug that's been tested in this LAL test.

Speaker 23 Wow, that's amazing. That is incredible.

Speaker 24 It's unbelievable. And the blood per quart is $15,000.
So they don't kill the crabs. So that's like, so people will

Speaker 24 bleed them and then they take them on a boat all the way out to sea so they don't re-harvest crabs that they've already bled.

Speaker 23 They have like a great holiday crew.

Speaker 23 You guys have done a really good thing.

Speaker 24 Well, they dump these guys really far out and they notice that less less and less of them are coming back.

Speaker 24 While you don't kill something when you take a lot of its blood, it does make it more lethargic and less likely to mate. But yeah, so that's to me is

Speaker 22 I think that's really cool. Yeah.
That they have basically the best immune system of anyone.

Speaker 23 They do. We can use it.
Do you know? My favorite crab.

Speaker 23 Have you heard of the samurai crab?

Speaker 24 No, but that sounds like a movie.

Speaker 23 It's very exciting. Sorry, Stevens.

Speaker 23 Basically,

Speaker 23 it attacks sideways. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 There was a superstition that samurai warriors, when they died, were reincarnated as these crabs because a lot of these crabs that came up had the pattern on their shell of a samurai face.

Speaker 23 And

Speaker 23 it became an evolutionary thing, so it was the samurai pattern that became the

Speaker 23 ones that looked like a samurai back into the ocean.

Speaker 24 Are there other stories of animals selectively surviving like that?

Speaker 22 Well, I think dogs are supposed to be a bit like that, and cats and

Speaker 23 cats. Cats domesticated themselves.

Speaker 22 Yeah, because cats, when they meow, they don't meow to other cats, they only do it to humans.

Speaker 23 Really?

Speaker 22 They've selected to meow just so that we would think they're little babies, I think.

Speaker 23 We've domesticated dogs. We, you know, deliberately took wolves and went, please stop biting me.
I'd like you to be a dog, please.

Speaker 23 And the amazing thing is that you can domesticate an animal really, really quickly. There was a Russian scientist who did it in the 50s with foxes.
I think it was, what was his name?

Speaker 23 I think it was B, I think Beliadinov or something like that.

Speaker 23 He took foxes, feral, wild, angry foxes, trying to eat his face, and he just bred them and bread them and bread them, always taking the most docile cubs and bringing them together. Beliaev.
Beliaev.

Speaker 23 Beliaev.

Speaker 23 But he bred them together so that you ended up with these sort of more increasingly docile creatures.

Speaker 23 But the extraordinary thing that he discovered was that when you breed for physical characteristics, it also creates a personality change.

Speaker 23 They became more sort of dog-like, more sort of fluffy-tailed, and more sort of willing to follow around. But they also changed their face.

Speaker 24 More obsequious. But they did get.

Speaker 24 Obsequious foxes.

Speaker 23 Obsequious fox.

Speaker 23 But they would also change their personality and demeanour and the fact they'll respond to calls and so on. And he did that in like 10 generations.
That's all it took.

Speaker 23 You know, there's been an awful lot of genetic testing recently because we can now do DNA analysis on animals. And we found that actually dogs are much older than we thought.

Speaker 22 So do we think that we got them for companionship or fighting?

Speaker 23 It's probably hunting and companionship. Because we had pet bear.
There's definitely at least one pet bear that's been found in the Stone Age.

Speaker 22 Byron had a pet bear.

Speaker 23 Byron did have a pet bear.

Speaker 24 Byron had a pet bear?

Speaker 23 He took it to Cambridge with him. He took it to Cambridge.
Because he wasn't allowed a dog, so he was a bit of a dick. He's going, fine, I can have a bear.

Speaker 24 Is this before or after he founded the hamburger chain, or is that

Speaker 24 the most ridiculous? I'll wait. Someone kept a pet scorpion in a jar on his desk.

Speaker 23 I read this in one of your books.

Speaker 24 I read that in one of the QI books, which are available and fine bookstores everywhere.

Speaker 22 Probably the same books as Greg's book will be available in next year.

Speaker 23 All the bookshops.

Speaker 24 Talk about obsequious.

Speaker 23 But extraordinary, back to the sort of dog thing, the extraordinary thing is we obviously domesticated dogs because, to do that, you have to sort of take a wild, feral wolf that is trying to kill you and gradually tame it.

Speaker 23 But it's not taming, it's breeding it. You take the run to volita and the run to villa, you bring them together, and gradually you breed them and you create a new animal, and that is the dog.

Speaker 23 The amazing thing is that the oldest dog breed in the world is only sort of a thousand years old or something. Roman dogs don't exist anymore.

Speaker 23 So when you find the Roman dog at Pompeii, which we have found one, that breed no longer exists, doesn't exist anymore. Wow.

Speaker 24 Is it because they die out?

Speaker 23 Well, the breeding programmes change and you have sort of different needs for them, and animals are constantly evolving and changing, and we breed them in different ways. George Washington bred dogs.

Speaker 23 George Washington bred the American foxhound. He took a French foxhound from the Marquis de Lafayette and an English foxhound and he bred them together and created the American foxhound.
Wow.

Speaker 23 And he was really obsessed with this. He was sort of a typical 18th century gentleman and was like, I'm going to breed an animal.
But the amazing thing is cats domesticated themselves.

Speaker 23 The oldest known cat I think is from Shiloboros, I think in Cyprus. I think it's about 9,000 years old.

Speaker 22 Is there any truth to the story when people attach cats to their shields and the Egyptians were?

Speaker 23 Yes, I love this. This is the battle of Pelusium, I think, off the top of my head.
Because the Egyptians believed cats to be holy and revered.

Speaker 23 They had huge cat funeral monuments with like millions of buried cats that they would. If your cat died, you shaved off your eyebrows and you would take your cat to this holy city of cats.

Speaker 22 They found a load of mummies, didn't they? Mummified cats.

Speaker 23 Like a million of them. Mummies were a huge one recently.
Yeah, yeah. And the city, I think, was called Bubastis, named after the, I think, I might have made that up.
There's definitely a city.

Speaker 23 And they would bury the cats and they'd shave off their eyes.

Speaker 24 It was working over time, by the way.

Speaker 23 Sorry, sorry.

Speaker 25 Well, they never want to interrupt. So I'd put a thousand tabs up with information.

Speaker 23 We're great.

Speaker 24 I can't wait till the end of the session.

Speaker 23 That's called Bubastis. Bubastis.
Okay, good. I wasn't making up some random names.
But they worship cats.

Speaker 23 And there's a famous story that a Roman soldier was in his chariot and he ran over a cat and he was killed by an angry mob.

Speaker 22 But then in the Middle Ages, people thought that cats were evil, didn't they?

Speaker 23 They thought they had no soul, they thought they were witches' familiars. They used to be burned alive as well, Louis XIV, I think.

Speaker 25 Yeah, he did go into a burning ceremony, didn't he?

Speaker 23 They used to be stoned, they were eaten alive, eaten alive, eating alive. How do you eat cats?

Speaker 24 There's a lot of declawing involved.

Speaker 23 Yeah, you just grab it,

Speaker 23 I guess you hold out the later to just start chomping. I don't know.
Oh, God.

Speaker 22 They've gone from gods to being evil, and now we just put them on the internet and laugh at them.

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Speaker 23 We worship kittens.

Speaker 22 Okay, listen now. I'm going to quickly do my last fact.
I found that we have 28 people that we know slept with Queen Elizabeth I,

Speaker 22 and that they were all women.

Speaker 23 Whoa!

Speaker 23 What? So what you mean when you say slept with?

Speaker 23 Slept in the same bedroom.

Speaker 23 Yeah. Well, does that sound right to you? Same bedroom.

Speaker 22 In the same bedroom.

Speaker 23 Yeah, same bedroom.

Speaker 23 The interesting thing about Queen Elizabeth, I actually made a documentary for Channel 5 Views ago that was awfully ridiculous, where we sort of went, did she have a love child? Yeah.

Speaker 23 Did she? Well, Well,

Speaker 23 there was rumours she did, and the Spanish used it, it's propaganda. And obviously, I don't think she did.
But

Speaker 23 I listened to first, she probably couldn't spend more than five minutes of her life alone. She was constantly surrounded by people everywhere she went.

Speaker 23 She was born a princess, she was always going to be a princess, and then she was a queen, and then she died.

Speaker 23 So you'd have ladies in waiting who, of course, would sleep in the same room as her, and you'd have sort of truckle beds at the bottom of the bed usually they would sleep in, or more beds.

Speaker 23 More of a sort of a pull-out little oh, like the cupboard.

Speaker 23 Yeah, almost like under the beds, like a little, you know, but these people didn't really have any kind of private space, but the queen can never go, like, I want some alone time, maybe, but we don't have any records for that.

Speaker 24 And you know what else? I don't think this time period ever existed. So,

Speaker 23 what does this fact mean then? Does it mean that she slept with way more than that?

Speaker 22 Basically, it's a way of bringing up this interesting fact that the monarchs would have sleeping partners for companionship and for safety and whatever.

Speaker 23 I read that Gandhi used to sleep with naked female virgins

Speaker 23 to test his chastity. So they would lay next to him in bed.
Wow. Yeah, and just so he could be like, look how awesome I am.

Speaker 23 Look at nothing. I don't want to knock Gandhi on our show, but I'll not Gandhi, fuck it, that's weird.
No, but

Speaker 23 maybe he was caught the first time by his wife. She's like, oh my god, you're having a very, he's like, no, no, honey, hey, I am testing my chastity.

Speaker 23 She's like, you're going to... So he's like, yeah, I'll do it every night.

Speaker 23 But there's a nice story. I think it's in the Bible.

Speaker 23 You might be able to help us more here, our Resident Jew, but it's King David, I think, has a woman called, is it Abbishag?

Speaker 23 Abishag.

Speaker 23 I think

Speaker 23 she's the official human water bottle. He gets really old, he gets really clean.

Speaker 24 Yeah, and just a woman that he cuddles with.

Speaker 23 Exactly, and she's a young, beautiful, beautiful virgin, and she gets in the bed with him, and her job is to warm him up at night. She's the one who's the hot woman.

Speaker 24 It has an interesting translation to 20th century care of U.S. presidents.

Speaker 24 This is mentioned in my father's TEDMed talk, which I didn't mean to plug this much,

Speaker 24 considering it's probably only got like 20 views because of the TEDMED talk.

Speaker 23 We'll post this talk a little bit. Yeah, don't post it.

Speaker 24 But Eisenhower had a lot of heart attacks.

Speaker 23 Just like constantly having heart attacks.

Speaker 24 Like he would wake up and he would go to a doctor and the doctor's like, yeah, he had a heart attack last night. And like,

Speaker 24 he was prescribed a prescription that he snuggled with Mamie Eisenhower.

Speaker 24 But that basically was his, like, it was a fair prescription for a long time that literally to have like a cuddle buddy would calm him down would calm anybody down.

Speaker 24 But like it was it was prevailed it's been prevailing knowledge up until pretty recently that having someone to like snuggle like teddy bears there was there are some papers that in New England they used to circulate a lot because I guess New England is where I'm from I'm from Boston is is like I guess teddy bears sort of started in Vermont and again I'm sure a QI question is whether or not Teddy Roosevelt yeah we think so do you really yeah do you think the sorry the teddy bear Teddy Roosevelt yeah yeah it's 1903 isn't it he refuses to shoot a bear is is that right?

Speaker 23 He's hunting and he refuses to shoot a paper.

Speaker 22 And Kermit Roosevelt was the first Westerner to shoot a panda or something.

Speaker 23 Really stupid like that. Really? Might be wrong about that.

Speaker 25 Just to interject: it wasn't just Kermit, it was Kermit and Theodore, Teddy's son, and they shot the panda together. So they both agreed that they weren't.

Speaker 23 They both shot. Yeah, family auntie.

Speaker 25 They both shot with their separate guns. And they both claim to be the first Westerners to kill giant pandemics.

Speaker 23 Isn't that touching? That's

Speaker 23 on that note.

Speaker 23 That's so.

Speaker 23 No, we should wrap up now, but if you want to ask any one of us any questions about the things we've spoken about today, you can get me on at Friday Land. And yeah, I'm on at eggshaped.

Speaker 23 Alex, what are you on?

Speaker 24 I'm Alex underscore Edelman.

Speaker 23 And this is all Twitter we're talking about, by the way.

Speaker 23 Greg. Greg shouted into the air.
Alex underscore Edelman.

Speaker 23 He will appear.

Speaker 23 Greg, we're. Greg underscore Jenna.
Yeah, okay. And Anna's not on Twitter, but she can be got on at at Wikipedia, which is the main QI Twitter page.

Speaker 23 We're gonna have a bunch of photos, I guess, and a Ted Med clip up on the QI. Oh, my father's gonna kill me.com/slash podcasts.
That's where you can find it.

Speaker 23 Thanks so much for joining us, guys. So, that was another edition of No Such Thing as a Fish.
I'm gonna call it special titled No Such Thing as the Middle Ages. That's gonna be the

Speaker 23 helpy like on the iTune thing. Yeah,

Speaker 23 cool. All right, thanks everyone for listening.
Catch you next week.

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