601: No Such Thing As Sausage By Chanel

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Hi, no one.

Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

I have a couple of very important announcements to say.

In fact, we have them because Andy's here as well.

Hello.

Hello, Andy.

But yes, we have a couple of very important announcements to make.

The first one is that today's episode has a very special guest, and that guest is Ella Al-Shamahi.

Now, listeners, regular listeners of No Such Things as a Fish will know who Ella is.

She is an explorer, a paleoanthropologist, evolutionary biologist, general smart cookie, and very good friend of ours.

And we love having her on the show.

It's always an absolute riot when she comes on.

And the important thing to tell you about that is that she has a new series out.

It is called Human, and it is on the BBC iPlayer right now.

If you're in the UK, but if you're not in the UK, fear not.

Because if you're in the USA, it will be on PBS from Wednesday, the 17th of September, which is actually a couple of days ago.

So, if you go to the PBS app, you will be able to find that in the US.

And believe it or not, it is also coming to Australia, India, and Scandinavia soon.

That show is called Human.

It's all about the history of Homo sapiens.

It's absolutely fantastic, just as Ella is herself.

Yeah, it's great.

We're lucky to have had her time, frankly.

And our second exciting announcement is that we are doing a live show

at Cheltenham, the Cheltenham Literary Festival.

Oh, yeah, it's going to be pot.

It's going to be wordy.

We're going to be talking book book stuff with big word.

No, it's going to be great.

We're going to be doing a show at Cheltenham on the 16th of October.

Our special guest is going to be Rachel Paris, who's absolutely terrific.

It's at 8 p.m.

Tickets are selling fast.

So if you live within a 200-mile radius of Cheltenham, this is your chance to see us this year.

We would love to see you.

So just get your tickets at no such thingasoffish.com/slash live.

If you live more than 200 miles away, there are such things as aeroplanes, and Bristol Airport is just a short drive away.

Slam take onto the show.

No, honestly, it's going to be a great show.

We're really looking forward to it.

And like Andy says, tickets are available at no suchthingasafish.com.

Anyway, please sit back, relax, and enjoy this week's episode of No Such Things as a Fish with Ella Al-Shamahi.

Woo!

Okay, on with the podcast.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Ella Al-Shamahi.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go starting with fact number one and that is Ella so my fact this week is that 50,000 years ago humans the size of penguins hunted elephants the size of cows

it's pretty cute it's cute the past is cuter than I was led to believe how tall are you you're quite he's two penguins yeah yeah

yeah you're about two penguins could you hunt an elephant the size of a cow No way you couldn't hunt a cow the size of a cow cows are big cows scary they are scary.

If I get to a field, we're off topic already, but if you get to a field with a cow in, you've got to take care.

But I think if you're an ancient hominid, then sometimes you just have to go for these things.

Yeah.

Fear isn't in your vocabulary.

You don't have a vocabulary.

You're an ancient hominid.

What are they hunting with?

So they're hunting with different kinds of tools.

This is, for those of you who haven't worked it out, it's Homo Floresiensis, who we nickname the hobbit.

They're these miniature humans.

They're different species.

They live on this one island and they lived, lived on this one island in Indonesia called Flores.

And when they were discovered, I remember being a student at the time.

It was like

just, it was a bombshell.

It was a bombshell of discovery.

Because basically, they were arguing that these tiny humans were human.

And you've got to imagine, they are like literally three and a half feet.

So that's one meter tall.

Like the size of a three-year-old.

Yeah.

A small, a penguin.

And what is even more fantastical is that they were on this island with giant Komodo dragons, standard, giant rats, giant maribou carnivorous storks that are taller than me, so like you know, six foot, et cetera, et cetera.

And then obviously these miniature elephant so-called stegodons.

So they and the elephants are the only small things on the.

It's really weird how so islands either make things very big or very small.

Island dwarfism, yeah.

So why do other things get big on islands?

Is it because there's no predators and they can?

So the theory with island dwarfism is that large animals get small because they have fewer resources and small animals get large because they have fewer predators and it's called island dwarfism sometimes island gicanticism depending on the same condition

yeah it's the same it's the same biological phenomenon that we think is happening

to see it with humans is wild

so i i was trying to picture what height a penguin is because there's lots of different sizes yeah penguins right um so if you want to picture it at home as a possible equivalent, picture an Ewok from Star Wars.

Picture a goblin from the movie Labyrinth.

Any real things?

Yes.

Professor Flitwick from Harry Potter, if you're familiar.

Well, can you work out the thread that I'm doing here?

They're all played by the same person.

Warwick Davis.

Warwick Davis is three foot seven.

Is he Warwick or Warwick?

I think he's Warwick.

What did I say?

You said Warwick.

And also,

is it Professor Flitwick or Flittick?

Because there's a place called Flittick.

It is Flitwick.

Is it?

But Warwick.

Oh my god, I can see why we've got confused.

Let's all calm down.

Wow, okay.

So it's the same height as Warwick Day.

He's three foot seven, and that's roughly the same height.

I'm just saying, that's a teeny bit taller than the hobbit.

Well, 1.1 meter.

Yeah,

it's like one.

Yeah, it's

not much.

One inch.

Yeah, it's very tight.

I mean, if you're three and a half feet, I'm sorry, one inch is a big deal.

That's true.

Sure, sure.

But I thought there were penguins back in the day that were as tall as Kylie Minogue is now.

So she's, what, five foot?

She's five and a bit.

Yeah, okay.

Five two maybe.

So I'm sure that's right, isn't it?

So that

these little guys of yours.

That's interesting.

She's 5'2.

Yeah, don't hold me to that, but she's about 5'2.

She's more the Australian in the family.

You cover a lot of this in your new series.

Yeah, we were looking at Ewoks.

Okay, so this series, Human, it's going out right now on BBC iPlayer.

Also, Americans, if you're listening, it goes out on PBS.

One of the interesting things that was happening is that I was so aware of all the politics that goes on behind the scenes with these new discoveries, but it doesn't necessarily make the cut of

a landmark science series.

So, for example, one of the things that happened when they first announced these hobbit species is that there were like showdowns in anthropology conferences, like people screaming at each other because there was absolute disbelief.

These are massive names in paleoanthropology.

As in, how did we miss?

How could you miss this in the fossil record?

Like, this is not a new species of human.

This is just a Homo sapien with microcephaly.

And when you say a new species of human, I'm sorry to be dense.

It could be just a small

Homo sapiens.

Yeah, so the thing that we think now is that it's a different species of human, just like a Neanderthal or one of these other species of human.

However, when they first announced it, it was so shocking to people that there was a human with a brain the size of a chimpanzee, a brain the size of orange.

The size of a chimpanzee's brain.

There we go.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Weedlies.

Connie Minogue has a brain the size of a full chimpanzee.

Yeah.

All right.

Yeah,

people couldn't fathom the idea that these humans were able to walk upright, were making stone tools, were possibly using fire, but had brains the size of grapefruits or oranges.

And so they were just, there were showdowns, like people would screw.

I remember being at this one conference in America where these big professors were screaming at each other.

Can I ask a question?

Is it now everyone agrees that it's a new species, or are there still some outliers who say no, it was wrong?

No, it's pretty much everybody accepts.

I mean, I'm sure there are a few, but they've found too many examples of it from very different time periods.

This also wasn't the only showdown, by the way, because when this started happening, one of the scientists who's part of the Discovery New Zealander called Brent Alloway, he started going on tour talking about this, and the word hobbit started being used immediately.

And he effectively got a cease and desist from Tolkien's estate.

Yeah, saying you cannot call this hobbit.

This is our trademarked word.

Because the word pushes, they might have been joke pushes, but to call it homo hobbitus.

Right, right.

Like that was part of.

You can't stop scientists from calling things what they want.

That's what people were saying.

Things crazy things.

No, but hobbit here.

Like, so Brent Alloway was saying this is a word that's in the dictionary now.

Like it's gone beyond this bit of fiction.

Also, Dickens used the word hobbit because hobbit was an existing word.

It was a

well, he didn't use it for an animal but it was for uh like weight of barley if he was selling it or it was a it was a unit of measurement oh yeah because tolkin was a bit hack like that wasn't he

like some of oh who is it samwa what's samwa's gamji gamji is the name of a dressing for um first aid or something like he got lots of his words from like unusual english words yeah and i think there's even folklore where hobbit is connected to a creature as well but even further back so it's not like he invented it but yeah, he had to stop calling it that.

So actually, we've run into that problem.

Really?

Really?

Yeah.

So we have to be careful in how we use the word hobbit.

If it's a purely marketing exercise,

we've got to be really careful.

Wow, well, we're a podcast, so hobbit, hobbit, hobbit.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

GP is strong.

Yeah.

Stronger than SP.

And I feel really conflicted about it because I was brought up in Birmingham right next to some of the oratory and a bunch of other kind of buildings where which Tolkien based.

So there's all this love for Tolkien.

And I'm like, come on.

Well,

a lot of Mordor was based on the third.

Literally.

All right, all right, all right.

I think it's a good case.

So like big feet, they do have big feet, right?

The floor is

relative to their

relative to their legs.

So if you looked at their feet on the rain, you wouldn't necessarily think, oh, those are massive feet.

But when you understand that the legs are really short, you're like, okay, relatively, those feet are huge.

So they live underground.

These ones are all found in a cave.

So,

hobbit hole.

Tick.

They might have been sheltering, maybe.

Skilled rock throwers.

Which hobbits are?

Are they?

In the book?

Are they?

Hobbits are, yeah.

And these guys, they use stone tools.

Yeah,

there we go.

The archaeologist in me is dying right now at the idea that

stone tools and mythics are just throwing objects.

Are they resilient against dark magic?

You're not.

Were they friends with the elves?

Are any of you guys going to bring up the local legend?

No.

Okay, gone.

You say it because I've spoken low, it's gone.

No, are they still around, Ella?

Because, look, it's a small and densely occupied island.

Yeah.

But there have been strange rumours of little things in the underground.

Small men with big feet.

Small men with big feet.

There's a professor called Gregory Forth.

He studied them for about 40 years.

And a few of the local people, the Leo people he'd spoken to, said they'd seen one of these things.

More than one.

More than one.

Yeah.

And over to my cryptid colleague.

Well, yeah, he wrote this book Between Ape and Human.

And he says, the Leo people constantly say, yes, these, what you're describing are still out there.

30 different people have said that, that they're still out there.

But you obviously probably think not.

And so do I, just for the record.

He's pointing at me.

The scientist in the room destroying all joy.

Okay, so when they first announced the discovery of the hobbit, this folklore was talked about a lot, a lot, a lot, because people were basically saying, look, the description, and what was it?

It was something like the small

big feet,

resistant to dark magic.

Love a second breakfast.

You could chuck the hell out of a rock.

No, I mean, it matches the description basically to what they're saying with height and a type of human that are not like us.

Yeah, I got a question now.

Did humans, Homo sapiens, and Floreensis ever hang out together?

Okay, so there's two things.

One is, with regards to that legend, people were basically saying, Look, is it possible that them still living on the island feels far-fetched, but it's an oral tradition being passed down over some generations.

When they first discovered the hobbit or Homo fluoresiensis, they did think that they died out about 17,000 years ago.

So it's 17,000 years ago.

It's a long time, but is that really unfathomable to think that an oral tradition would be passed down?

It's is plausible.

But now they think, but then they redid the dates and they actually think that Homophlerisiensis died out around 50,000 years ago.

So it does become a bit more far-fetched.

However, we truthfully don't know how long oral tradition and memory is retained within human communities.

50,000 years is...

That's a stretch, but we truthfully have no idea.

And there were humans living there around that time.

So yeah, for about 50,000 years, we think we turned up.

Right.

So if you look at the actual archaeological layers, you've got loads of the hobbit and then basically there's this massive volcanic eruption.

The hobbits and their stone tools disappear and then on top of that

we turn up.

So you can argue that they went extinct and then we turned up.

I think it's more accurate to say they were on their last leg and then we turned up.

Yeah, I read that there was maybe a problem that volcanoes might have caused climate change.

They had to move to the edge of the island.

And when you move to the edge of the island, you're going to come across seafaring Homo sapiens and then they might kill you off to the point.

the final blow came from humans yeah right like yeah but like you say of course we don't know it feels but it feels powerfully convenient doesn't it like the way homo sapiens turns up everywhere and all other large mammals die mysteriously very shortly like the ground sloths in south america and the giant kangaroos in australia like it's yeah yeah that whole narrative is really contested within paleo but i just find it really it's a pattern so it's every single case yes individually every single data point you can take apart and you can go well technically there's not enough evidence but but then as a collective whole when you look at the planet and you see that that is just a pattern, we turn up, lo and behold, everything else disappears.

Yeah, you kind of go, oh, come on, guys.

Like, okay.

We just might be just really bad luck.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Norman Bates is just a normal motel owner, and people keep going missing.

It's not his fault.

He's just going to fix something with an axe.

What trips?

Oh, no.

Killed another.

That's really funny.

So are you saying that they're still here?

Is that what you're saying?

No.

Do you think, Ella, there are more potential human species out there that we haven't found in the fossil record?

Oh, yeah.

We were like having massive discussions

in the series about what number to give because I was like, there was more than the magnificent seven.

All right.

Are there a few already found that are waiting for approval?

Yeah, yeah, waiting for approval.

I love that.

I don't know what you think goes on in paleoanthropology.

Like,

at the Natural History Museum, there's a man who sits there and you come to him and you present the case that there's a new species.

He stamps the bone.

Yep, approved.

But yeah,

I reckon already that's an underestimate.

I think what you need to do is go to a part of the world and then work out when humans arrive there and then look in the fossil record at that exact moment and then that's how we find them.

Yes.

Great shout.

Great shouts.

How small could we get?

Like, why are there not people the size of wasps?

Is there no evolutionary advantage to us getting really small already?

Can I ask another question that's related to Andy's question when you look in the fossil records you get these

you get the like uh lizards and then you get enormous dinosaurs yeah and then you get sloths and you get enormous sloths and all these animals have enormous versions of them from history but why are they not enormous humans you know what you sound like my comments section of all of my social media ella what about what about giants ella you keep talking about hobbits what about giants why don't you come giants why are the government holding this from us

like you know how trees can only get so high before gravity stops them Do we have a height limit as hominids?

See, if I had to hazard a guess, I know you guys aren't taking this seriously, but excuse me?

Wow.

I think the brain is so expensive, and our brain is already way too expensive.

Like, our kids are basically born premature, let's be honest, because our brains are too big.

So, I think if you start looking at giant humans, that brain would just be so expensive and every take up too much energy and nightmare for childbirth.

Blah blah blah.

I just don't think

that would be my guess.

I'm not sure how expensive my brain is.

I feel that was a discount deal my parents got.

Let's be real.

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Okay, on with the podcast.

There's no way a sober man would buy an electric green Bugatti.

Move on with the show.

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

My Fact This Week is that there is a hugely popular sub-genre of science fiction novels called mundane sci-fi.

Very good.

Some of us might think all sci-fi is mundane.

Well, we've, yeah,

listener, something happened in the break just now.

Mundane sci-fi.

This is a sci-fi genre for people who don't like aliens or interstellar travel, time travel, all the things that are not, as it were, realistic.

Mundane sci-fi brings you back to what is the near future.

A lot of people will be saying for whatever books I'm about to say, that's not mundane sci-fi.

That's hard sci-fi.

So there's a little bit of gray area between what qualifies for each sub-genre.

Say like the Martian, Andy Weir's The Martian.

So we make it to Mars, which is possible.

you get stuck there how do you survive on mars that count as mundane yeah does it even though humans can't go to mars yet because it's it's it's a very achievable near future thing so it's not like you know i bought a new alarm clock like that far in the future it's much further than yeah no it's trying to take existing technologies and enhance them to

it's plausible whereas you can't just say i whacked on warp drive and went over to alpha centauri for the fatig or whatever like so hold on this community do they police each other and themselves like no but everything has sub-genres, right?

So if you go into a sci-fi and fantasy shop, it's easier to be going, I'm going to head to the hard sci-fi section, or I'm going to have, you know, there's anthropology science fiction that you can go to.

It's just a way of bracketing certain science fiction books together in the way that you would romantic fiction or Jurassic Park might be another example of mundane sci-fi, a very achievable thing that is actually happening now where we're taking DNA and we're trying to explain.

No, no, but it's

like it's not loopy.

Yeah, then like it is the idea of using DNA to get dinosaurs is loopy, right?

It's about where the line is.

But it's still science fiction, isn't it?

So it's not like saying that the science is definitely going to work.

It's still science fiction.

The word mundane used to mean, and I still use it this way.

Yeah.

Anything that's in the universe is mundane and anything that's outside the universe is extra mundane.

Lovely.

And it was like used in religious settings.

So like we live on the mundane earth.

earth but heaven where god is that's in the extra mundane and that's the original use of that word because mundus is the earth.

For the earth in Latin, yeah.

Like contra mundum against the earth.

Precisely.

In my opinion, anything that's mundane should be on the earth.

And anything that's like Andy Weirs, the Martian, should be extra mundane because it's off the earth.

That's good.

That's a sub-subgenre within the mundane genre.

Do you think this conversation's getting mundane?

Quadra-mundane.

Well, here's a good fact to lob in, just going back to the last fact about the height of penguins.

So Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton, the writer of Jurassic Park.

Yeah.

Do you know how tall he was?

5'2 ⁇ .

He was 6'9.

Okay.

Imagine.

It's like, oh, the rider of Jurassic Park is going to come in and in walks a fucking dinosaur.

Like the guy's the height.

Two and a half penguins.

That's two and a half penguins.

You know how women like men who are tall?

You know, there's this like thing about

it's like caused a problem on the dating apps because it now means that like women are just skewing really tall, whereas if you met people in real life, blah, blah, blah.

So what I love about this is a bunch of us tall women started going around pointing out that leave the tall men men alone because they will die younger.

Because statistically they will die younger.

They keep banging their heads up.

So okay, so the thinking is.

Is it because the gravity collapses their heads into their body?

Asteroids hit them first.

You're basically there's just more of you for blood circulation and all the rest of it.

More of your cells that can get cancer.

Yeah, and it's it's just more of it.

But it is wild because like basically tall men have been told their whole lives that they're better and you've seen all the statistics on they earn more, they this, that and the other.

And actually they do die younger.

Like the plot points are.

What height though?

What height?

It's just a gradual process.

Oh, okay.

And all...

Everything over six, two, you tend to end up being shagged to death by women who adore tall men.

Yeah, it's a problem.

This mundane sci-fi thing, I think it's, it was written in 2004 as a class of sci-fi writers doing a

sort of thought experiment, really, because they were sick of really escapist sci-fi.

They said this doesn't reflect the actual, you know, interests and problems and fascinating stuff that you do get in civilization these days.

So

Jeff Ryman was the only person who put his name to it.

He's the only person named on it.

So it's not totally serious, but it did really annoy a lot of people at the time.

Because you'd be amazed to hear that sci-fi fans get irritated about classification and genre and all of this stuff.

So there's hard SF, which is where it's mostly about the science bit of the science fiction.

And arguably, Jurassic Park and the Martian sit in between mundane and hard sci-fi.

Yeah.

There's soft SF, which is much more about the human.

So even though Dune is kind of about, you know, it's a long time ago in a galaxy far far away and all that, it is sort of soft because there's a lot of political.

Is there NSFW where it's not science fiction for work?

Actually, lots of it these days.

Oh, yeah.

But lots of science fiction fans say that sci-fi, they call it skiffy rather dismissively, they say that's not proper science fiction because that's not based in science.

So Star Wars is not sci-fi, it's just fantasy.

They call what they like SF.

But then people say, what do you like reading?

And they say SF.

And they say, oh, do you mean sci-fi?

They say, no.

And they say, oh, I like sci-fi too.

And they're like, no,

no, not sci-fi.

I like SF.

It's a big world.

All I'll say is, Andy, is you deal with the emails.

I know.

I write mundane sci-fi.

My first two books are mundane sci-fi.

I would agree with the first half of that.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

The idea of sci-fi, we have the books that 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's books and Arthur C.

Clarke, 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...

So then Hershey reads this sci-fi and they think, oh, maybe we could make a chocolate that orbits the Earth.

Yes,

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 aware of it.

I see the actual future and it's four of us, heads in jars,

just blathering on about some facts or other yeah but they do and even armies do it so the um 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 it they have a team of five or six science fiction writers they might be defunct now but in 2019 they certainly did 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 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 have a lot of books, but they could all be terrible, but they're published.

You might just have one or two crisp early career ones, though, which are terrific.

And even though your fiction's moved in a different direction, those still remain very much

present.

Yeah.

I really admire science fiction writers, though, who just go for it.

Like there's a guy, Andy said, thank you silently, listener.

I've just seen that.

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 1858 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 artie and it might be like a 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.

He's a blaster.

He's a blaster.

Yeah.

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.

Do you know what a trek he was in 19th century South Africa?

So it's not someone just walking, like a tour guide walker.

Pretty close.

Trekking animals?

No, it's Dan's closer.

It was a group of people who were on a trek.

You would call the whole group a trekkie.

Okay.

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?

The 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 makes 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, wow.

And that was used in sci-fi in the early 20th century.

That's great.

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 carlo died so no one no one could have called frida carl a monobrow in her lifetime because the word didn't exist we just did frida carlo on a previous that's why i broke it out 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

that's crazy that's incredible makes you think yeah what does it make yeah yeah yeah

you know sometimes you don't know your legacy yeah yeah

um so you you two uh uh ella and james you said you don't read fiction

particularly science fiction.

I mean, I have read some, obviously, 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?

I 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.

But 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.

I said, my alien.

It said, my robot.

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.

So what are we saying here?

I think think people read pulpy sci-fi less well.

I 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.

I think 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, yeah.

Like, it's not even schlock.

Yeah, what James is saying.

It's just that they didn't write very well.

But we still talk about Andy's books here.

Okay, okay.

okay 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

So you'd put it up your bum in the hope that it would

not your own bum.

It was the bum of the dead.

The bum of the dead.

The top of the dead.

That was the ancient Egyptian book we all wanted to read, wasn't it?

Bum of the dead.

Yeah, so this is a study from this year 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 quite a lot of wood chips, twigs, fabric.

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 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 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 side it's a plug it'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 uh taxidermy i would say that kind of thing.

Yeah, you know, taking the animal and taking the insides out and shoving stuff up.

Yeah, you're putting the rice in the phone, actually.

Exactly, that's the difference.

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 Schreibers in the ground with twigs up their ass.

I'm very excited by that.

Talking about famously preserved Austrians, you know Otzie.

You know, they did a DNA, 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?

That'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.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Is there an inheritance that you're dishing out?

Like, um, it'd just be the seeds from his stomach.

Yeah.

That'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?

Absolutely.

Of course, yeah, I'm gay.

Um, 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.

Am I a dollar for every time a woman had told me that?

No, but okay, so 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 some of my favourite stories are like 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, but 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 materials.

So, for example, in Yemen, they have a local mummy culture and they used raisins and camel fat.

And as an Arab, I'm like, 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.

Yeah.

What period is this?

Like, 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 Chinchoro people.

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.

Yeah, and the chinchoro...

they had a well see if you 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.

Oh.

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.

Okay.

What state are are you in for the genital beard?

You're not feeling a bone or so.

I've seen some of those mummies for sure.

I think they had them in Bolton Museum, I think, for a while at least.

Really?

And they were quite big in the early 20th century, weren't they?

There was one in Paris that was really famous, and there's quite a lot of famous works were based on it.

Like, definitely Monk's the Scream was based on he saw this mummy and thought, I'm going to paint something like that.

Whoa.

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.

And yeah, 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 Rosalind Chapel.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

It's a temple.

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, that I read.

I'm not going to lie.

That I read.

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 started noticing lots of sheep imagery.

And then on the wall are photos of a black and white sheep.

And it is Dolly the Sheep.

And because it Rosalind Institute, right next to it, were the ones who closed.

I don'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, 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.

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.

I've tried.

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, haven't we?

And 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 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 okay 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 bucking tickets

because you see the prices and it's like first class, I can't do that.

Maybe 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 that passengers were first class based on them floating wristbands?

It's the wristbands.

They identified them.

They are.

They identified them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then they.

Wow.

Yeah.

Wowie.

Madness.

Can I

lift the mood mood a bit by talking about Pope Pius XII?

Oh, yes, please.

Right.

So the Vatican has its own embalmer.

Okay.

I imagine it's not a full-time gig,

but it's...

Did they embalm people?

They embalmed 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 a few.

So they're not on display permanently.

They don't join the permanent collection, but I think there is a...

It's not like Madame Toussard.

It's not.

It's...

Oh, dear.

It's a good technique, though.

They're quite animatronic as well.

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 doesn't happen.

I don't know if it still happened with the recent Pope after he passed away.

But so it used to happen that there would be a raised beer and people would walk by and all of that stuff.

But in 1958, Pope Pius XII died.

And he had his own personal doctor in life called Riccardo Gagliazzi Lisi.

And he was not a good good posthumous doctor.

So point one, he gave photos of the dead pope to two magazines.

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.

They 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 not.

It was 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.

But they're serious.

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.

Sources 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.

Like it was, it was an absolute disaster.

I mean, the doctor, Gabriati Lucy, was sacked.

I mean, I would hope so.

It was an absolute disaster.

Yeah.

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 Zhiohahe.

And she still has her eyelashes, a hat and her natural hair streaming out.

Wow.

Because she's been so well preserved.

Wow.

So 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 of this.

Let's go.

Okay, so

any wine?

No, no.

But I do have a wooden penis.

We're going to have a quiet night in tonight with some cheese and a wooden penis.

And that'd 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 soul.

Oh wow, that is heavy.

Good lord.

But 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, you bury, 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, da-da-da-da.

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 their hobbits and stuff.

What did they do with their dead?

The Neanderthals, did they, I think,

buried them and put like gifts there and stuff?

Or is that really contentious?

So it is contentious.

I think some of them, I find it really hard to interpret some of those caves 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 grave riders, it's really hard to interpret.

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, like, maybe Neanderthals that, well, it'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 story?

Or not you, but people just get enticed by it.

Absolutely.

So I actually worked on that in that cave, and I have to say, you could see those animal burrows.

It was really, really good.

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?

Is that brilliant sci-fi brain working again?

Sorry to think outside the box here.

Sorry, the French army are calling me again.

If you could only be buried with a wooden cheese once in your life,

which cheese are you choosing to be buried with?

Oh,

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.

From 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.

Mice love cheese.

You, Andy, obviously, you wouldn't have asked this question if you didn't have your own hilarious answer.

It's probably a reasonably soft cheese, but nothing too adventurous, you know.

Which penis would you like to be buried with?

Take the XL.

I have the 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 the Gladys.

Come on.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, we've all got theories.

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On with the show.

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.

This is

brilliant.

And when did they start liking lamb?

Oh, lamb.

It goes ham, 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.

That's it.

We should say.

It's been warm and dry.

Good conditions for wasps.

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 drawn to the smell of that.

And they'll take bits off it and back to their brood.

And then halfway through the summer, the larvae pupate.

They go into the pupa.

They don't need food anymore.

They're dealt with.

So the worker wasps think, well, I'm going to turn to feeding myself.

And wasps, they have that tiny waist, you know, they've got an incredibly 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...

they think by the time this goes out, what most wasps are going to be on the jam.

Absolutely.

So you'll be safer with the ham.

Right.

But yeah, but UCL, the scientists at UCL are doing a survey.

This is an online survey.

If you Google Wasp Ham Jam survey, you'll probably find it.

What's the survey in the?

They're trying to find out, like, have you been out recently and noticed at a picnic and noticed what...

So this is new science.

They're still asking for people to see.

Yeah, contributions are being welcome.

This is 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'd work that out?

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.

Yeah.

And I'm making plates for us with whatever 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.

But they're plate over there.

I went camping this weekend, and the wasps around me only went for my wine.

So I wonder what type of thing.

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.

I wonder if some people have like a more meaty odour.

Some

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 you were going for?

Because they're not, they're certainly not trying to eat you.

No, they don't eat live animals, basically.

Are you wearing sausage from Chanel?

Yeah.

Yeah, but they do they not go for live like insects and stuff?

Because I thought like 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 be you can't really be general about all wasps.

Like some wasps, the classic wasps that we have, yellow jackets.

No, they go for carrion and a bunch of wasps can strip a rat to the bone in a few hours.

Oh, yeah.

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.

She's written a book called Endless Forms, which is all about wasps.

And the first, I'd say, two chapters are predominantly slagging off bees and says, everyone loves bees, don't they?

Oh, they're so cute.

And people, 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.

Oh, my God.

Bees are veggie.

Bees are fluffy.

They do honey.

Oh, you know, 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.

But they are pests themselves.

Well,

you know,

we're getting into it.

Take it up with Professor Sumner.

But that's really interesting.

Her book is unbelievably good, all about the sheer variety of wasps that they make.

I think she's pro.

She's pro anything.

Anything waspy.

Anything that's not a bee.

Yeah.

The thing with the

wasp waist thing is really interesting.

So basically, you're saying that they end up with a liquid diet because they've got these tiny waists.

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.

Oh.

Because we have waists.

Neanderthals don't have waists.

Neanderthals' rib cage just keeps going out.

So it's like us after Christmas, like it just keeps going.

Wow.

We have waists, 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 that's interesting

yes so our waists are the rib cage stops and then no so if you look at if you look at a rib cage on homo sapiens the bottom ribs go in like think of think of a skeleton an image of a skeleton yeah the ribs go in at the end at the bottom whereas on a nenderthal they just keep going out so they technically yeah so they don't have waists

so do does that make them less flexible um i mean it makes them stockier okay it makes them stockier so like they'd be a good prop forward right

And Homo sapiens would be a good...

Winger.

What's interesting because actually the first TV show I ever...

Listener, he did not understand.

I think I know enough about football to understand.

What'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 this guy.

So I've got no idea what boxing is about.

But yeah, that stockiness.

Like that does change how you stand,

how you hold yourself.

And who would win in a fight?

We decided that it would be equal because the Neanderthals would be

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 light on their feet like Muhammad Ali.

We have tested this in a global sense, haven't we?

I mean, the results are in.

Yeah, exactly.

But just the waist thing, the benefit of that wasp's narrow waist, which bees don't have, stupid bees,

is that it makes wasps very agile in terms of moving the lower half around?

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 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 an egg-laying org.

Oh, 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 that it lets them go.

So this is the first evidence that we have of the defensive role of male genitalia in the whole animal kingdom.

Wow.

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 if it's the artist.

Apparently, this has been anecdote from people out in the fields talking about that that could do this.

And one person who had been saying it for years was Schmidt, Justin Schmidt.

The Schmidt paint index.

I believe so, unless it's a different Schmidt, but he wrote.

Justin Schmidt.

Ella doesn't know who Justin Schmidt is, I don't know.

And possibly one or two of our listeners might not know.

Yeah, sorry, we were reacting like he's an old friend.

Sorry.

Justin Schmidt 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.

He was the one who found out how bad the tarantula 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?

The vapors 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 dauba.

So the mud dauba 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 cool 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 oh my god by these wasps really yeah

oh my god wow you've got to check your plane for wasps nests yeah yeah i'm not i'm not blaming the wasps they didn't know what they were doing i have to say but you know interesting because like the the captain will have the door closed, right?

So, are they coming through cracks?

What are they coming through?

Because that's 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 to death.

What's going on?

It's like snakes on a plane, that's for wasps in the cabin.

Wow,

just check out the passenger in 3B.

I think he's a million wasps.

I'm not sure.

I thought he was three bees.

B.

Ladies and gentlemen, unfortunately, we're out of fish and chicken.

Today's meal will be sausage or jam.

No!

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 have said over the course of this podcast, we're all online.

I'm on Instagram.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James.

My Instagram's no such thing as James Harkin.

Andy.

My Instagram is Andrew Honduran.

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.

We start going out.

Very exciting.

And then if you're in Britain, it's on the iPlayer.

So do check it out.

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 is part of our secret members' club, Club Fish.

So, go to our website, no such thingasafish.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.

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