Dan Snow's History Hit - Pre-historic Britain in Seven Burials with Alice Roberts

Episode Date: May 4, 2021

How much can a burial really tell us about our ancient past? Professor Alice Roberts is today's guest and, as her new book Ancestors demonstrates, old bones can speak to us across the centuries. Using new ancient DNA analysis techniques archaeologists are now able to uncover an unprecedented level of detail about the lives of our ancestors. Where they came from, what they ate, how they lived, what killed them and what their burials really mean. This is the story of unlocking the past of ancient Britain.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Alice Roberts is a great friend and colleague. She and I made a programme about the Terracotta Warriors together a few years ago and I got to go to China with Alice Roberts and watch her do her analysis of the skeletons that had been excavated there in the mortuary complex of Qin Shi Huangdi, the first emperor of China. My god, that was a great project. Oh, looking back, I tell you what. And since then, Alice and I have been lucky to work on a couple of things together.

She's a very brilliant scholar, a writer. She's a very brilliant broadcaster. And she's now on the podcast. This is happening, everybody. It's not a drill. Alice Roberts is here on this podcast. She's talking about the prehistory of Britain in seven burials. Going back and seeing what we can learn from the remains of some of the earliest Britons that we have ever discovered. She is absolutely wonderful. You're going to love this podcast. If you want to watch our documentary on the first Britons, we worked with a fantastic team of, I think they're paleoanthropologists, I think.

Anyway, whatever they are, they were brilliant. And it was top of our charts on History Hit TV for Ages, showing that you history fans, you like a bit of prehistory as well. You promiscuous lot. Anyway, head over to historyhit.tv, sign up to the World's Best History Channel, and watch all our documentaries about prehistory while you're there. But in the meantime, here is the brilliant Alice Roberts. Enjoy. meantime, here is the brilliant Alice Roberts. Enjoy. Alice Roberts, great to have you back on the podcast. Oh, thank you for having me back. I'm very excited about this new book.

I bet you are, man. But I look back on our days when we were running around China together about the terracotta warriors, and now here we are just talking remotely and locked up in our houses. What a time we're living through. I know, it's weird, isn't it it because that feels like a different era yeah it's only a few years ago but it just feels like centuries ago it's so different and i wonder sometimes if when we do get back to things being a bit more normal i think things will be different than before i don't think we'll ever get back to exactly what we had before and i hope that some things will change for the better as well but i I think when we do get back to it, I wonder if we'll just have a week where we go, this feels really strange.

And then it would just be like a nightmare. We'll have kind of forgotten about it and just settle back in. I'm sure we will. Because do you remember this time last year when we were all locked down for the first time? We were just doing these Zoom calls, looking at each other going, this is just bizarre. Now it just feels completely normal, doesn't it?

Our ability to respond as humans is so extraordinary. There you go. There's a little segue. That's probably what we're talking about today alice very elegant yeah so tell me you're looking at seven burials in prehistory presumably we're now able to tell loads more if i go hey alice the burial in my garden come and have a look you're like right we are going to find out what sex what they ate or do you like Tell me what you can now find out. Well, the book really focuses in on this revolution that's happening in archaeology,

which is quite profound, actually. And it is a collision between archaeology and genetics, and the astonishing amount of information that we can tell about the past and about people in the past and about all of these things that you just mentioned, because we can now extract ancient DNA and sequence it. And we're looking at whole genomes now. So if you go back 20 years ago, when people were starting to look at ancient DNA in various ways, and they started with looking at things like the Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA, and now we are literally looking across whole genomes. They could also target individual parts of the genome and do quite meaningful studies, actually looking at particular variations or particular mutations that had happened

throughout genomes. But it's just so powerful now, and it's much quicker as well. And so the book is also about this amazing project that's being run in the Crick Institute by Pontus Scogland, which is the most ambitious ancient genetic project in Britain to date. And he is aiming to sequence a thousand ancient genomes. So there's going to be some really big questions in archaeology that we'll be able to tackle as his project starts to produce results. But I think fundamentally, one of the biggest questions that genetics can help with in archaeology is about movement of people and cultural evolution. And in the past, whenever we found evidence of a new culture arriving in a particular place in a particular landscape,

we were never really sure whether that was new people coming in. And there were clues from my own discipline, from biological anthropology, so you could certainly look at skeletons and say, hmm, these latter people look a little bit different to the people that came before, but it was a bit hazy. Whereas now with genetics, what we can do is say, well, you know, are these different people? Are the people who were here in Britain in the Neolithic different from the preceding Mesolithic hunter-gatherers? Have they come in from elsewhere? When the beaker package of culture arrives, these wonderful beaker burials like the Amesbury Archer,

which features in the book, buried with beakers, buried with these pottery beakers, but also with lots of other elements of that culture as well. I mean, the Amesbury Archer is just amazing. He's buried with, clearly, a whole bunch of arrows because we find the arrowheads. He's got a cushion stone, which we think is the arrowheads. He's got a cushion stone, which we think is for metalworking. He's got a little fire-making kit. He's got gold wraps,

which might be hair wraps possibly, or something to do with the headdress. And in the past, when we saw this new culture arriving, it's like, well, is it just a few people coming over to Britain and then other people effectively picking up that culture, becoming accultured? Or is this just a load of people? I mean, we now know because of genetics, there was a massive population replacement in the Bronze Age, which I don't think archaeologists had really considered before. And also archaeology has gone through different trends as well. So early 20th century, there was a lot of this kind of idea that if you saw a new culture, that was definitely a new lot of people. And this idea that a particular group of people biologically would also be represented in a certain way by culture. Now, we've got a long way away from that. And of course,

culture can slip sideways as well. So I can share an idea with you and you can then go and share it with somebody else. We don't need to be related to share those ideas. But what we're now going to be able to do with genetics is really pick that apart and see how culture goes along with movement and migration of people. It reminds me, much more modern than your book, but obviously this age-old argument about the arrival of the Saxons, Jutes, and other Germanic peoples in the sixth century and onwards in the UK. Did they just replace all the Britons, the Romano-British? Was it elite replacement? Was it a genocidal migration of people? I find that's also fascinating. It is. I mean, I'm writing about that at the

moment because I'm just writing the follow-up to Ancestors. So the next bit gets us into history. So I'm just writing about Anglo-Saxons at the moment. And I also quite strongly feel that genetics is helping archaeology to resist history. Sorry, Dan. Because sometimes, sometimes archaeology is very much seen as the handmaiden of history. And it's like, here's the history, here's what was written down once we get into that period. And then here comes along archaeology to illustrate what the Venerable Bede is telling us. Rather than saying, hang on a minute, is the Venerable Bede being completely honest with us? He's writing about events which happened centuries before he lived and wrote.

The best way to approach it is to look at what archaeology is telling us independently of the history, and then to go, okay, how does archaeology relate to the history? Because it's surely more interesting if you end up saying, actually, what the venerable Peter was writing seems to be an awful lot of Anglo-Saxon propaganda and a kind of origin story for the Anglo-Saxon kings, which is what it is. We're not at the moment picking up any kind of profound signal of a big migration into Britain during those centuries when the Anglo-Saxons, whoever they are, are meant to arrive. So yeah, I think it's a bit of a fabrication.

Okay, so on that note then, so when you say ancestors, it's a kind of interesting title, but if there isn't a great population replacement in the area now known as England in the early medieval period, you mentioned there was though in the bronze age so are these people actually our ancestors who do i mean by our and we've had adam rutherford on the podcast saying that we're all related to somebody very recent and all this kind of stuff but like yeah are the burials that you've identified are they the ancestors of literally all of us of people with white british heritage like how's literally all of us or people with white British heritage? Like how's that all working out? Well, people with generally white British heritage will have

quite a lot of Bronze Age DNA knocking around. But as Adam will have said, we're so intertwined that actually trying to trace direct lines back doesn't really work. And also if you go back, I think I'm quoting Adam Wright on this. If you go back a thousand years ago in Europe, everybody's either the ancestor of everybody alive today or nobody. Trying to create those connections through to the past by following your own lineage, you just have to accept that your ancestors are going to double at every generation until you end up actually with more people as your ancestors than there would have been people alive on earth ever. So everybody's family trees start to collapse together. I mean, I'm very careful in the book to say what we're doing is looking at ancestors. I like the original meaning of the word, which is those who went before.

And you don't have to have direct genetic connection back to an Anglo-Saxon or somebody living in Britain during the Roman period or going back into the Paleolithic. The genetics is about understanding them better. It's about understanding where they came from, population movements, all of that. It's not about creating a kind of unbroken link between you and a person in the past. And I think it's really important to say that because you can end up with terrible, not just parochialism about it, but actually real kind of territorialism where people say, well, I come from a particular group of people and therefore I have certain rights

which go back into history. And I think those arguments are difficult. So I say in the book, the ancestors belong to everybody. We're all interested in them. They're humans. And so the stories in the book are about individual lives and individual biographies. And you're making contact with those people as a human looking at another human, thinking about what it would have been like to live in the depths of the Ice Age, thinking about what it would have been like to live in Britain as farming starts to take hold and the different lifestyles that were emerging then. So it's about that. It's about connecting human to human rather than having to find some kind of

genetic connection. Just choose one of them and tell me about one of our ancestors, our forebears, and tell me what we know about, like, just tell me what we now know thanks to this recent scholarship. Oh, choose one of them. That's really tricky, isn't it? One of my favourites is The Red Lady of Pavilland, which is the first story in the book. Yes, I like The Red Lady. Let's do The Red Lady. The Red Lady's lovely. Although we don't really have any genetic insights when it comes to the Red Lady, but we have lots of other insights. The revolution that's happening at the moment with genetics, I've argued in the book, is as profound as the last really big technological revolution in archaeology, which was radiocarbon dating. Because suddenly you had

the ability to pin an absolute date on something in the way that you as a historian would just expect to be able to do. And of course, reaching back into prehistory, archaeologists had never been able to do that. And they'd been able to assemble quite sophisticated sequences of events through time, looking at different cultures and how they changed and working out how long ago these things must have happened by cross-referencing from site to site. But it's so much better if you can actually just date a piece of charcoal and go, well, we've just got a really accurate date here within 70 years of when this event happened. So that was the kind of last big revolution.

And that was really important when it comes to the Red Lady. So the Red Lady is a brilliant, brilliant story. And the Red Lady, you scientists have come up with one very key piece of information about the red lady yeah yeah well she's not a lady but what's curious about that so she was discovered in 1823 by the reverend william buckland he's a famous antiquarian obviously the antiquarian's antiquarian honestly Honestly, he's just brilliant. He's lovely, Buckland. He's very entertaining. He wrote very entertaining letters.

So I had a lovely time reading all his correspondence with the landowner at the Gower, where the Red Lady of Paviland was discovered, Lady Mary Talbot. And she was very interested in archaeology and her daughters were as well. And they knew that Buckland had been finding interesting caves with extinct animals in them. And when they heard about that, they said, oh, I'm sure there are caves around the Gower where people have excavated or turned up interesting looking bones. So they contacted him and said, we think we've got some good caves around here. And he said, well, if you possibly could go and have a look, that would be brilliant. And they did. And they removed bucketfuls,

basketfuls of bones from this cave on the Gower, Paveland Cave or Goat's Hole, and sent some of it to Buckland. And he said, right, stop there. Don't do any more, but don't let anybody else go in the cave. And he came down very quickly and did a bit of excavating and discovered not only more what he calls elephant bones, which are mammoth bones, but also a human burial. And I think when he first found it, he thought it was a male and talked to Lady Mary and said, well, this may be the remains of an excise man, maybe, who's suffered a bitter end at the hands of smugglers, because there was a lot of fighting between excise men and smugglers at the time so they thought it might be a forensic case really rather than an

archaeological case but then he looked at the evidence more closely and this is a skeleton that he found lying in what he calls a red ruddle so ground that was stained red with ochre full of little pieces of carved ivory which look as though they might have been either bead blanks or part of a long rod of ivory. And there were a couple of what looked like toggles as well, all sorts of little bits and pieces. And he said, right, okay, I don't think that this is a man. I think it's a woman because she's clearly buried with jewellery. So that's why he changes his mind on that. Not looking at the skeleton and going, well, it looks like a male skeleton. And it does, it's in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. And I've laid it out and I'd looked at it and there's a fair bit of the pelvis there. So that's a really good indicator. No skull,

unfortunately, but the pelvis is even better than the skull for telling sex and it's quite definitely male. So he decided it couldn't be male because it had joy. And he decided it couldn't be of an age with the mammoth remains. So he accepted that the mammoth remains were very, very early. He was a reverend and he was trying to get archaeology to match up with the Bible. So as far as he was concerned, extinct animals in Britain were partly evidence of a different kind of fauna before the Great Flood. So his idea is that you have this one catastrophic event, which is the biblical flood. And before that, you're going to have different animals which

are now extinct. And then after it, you're going to have things which look more like what we've got today, including modern humans. So he's like, well, the human skeleton can't come from the same time as the mammoth. So it must be much more recent. So he decided it was probably a woman who might have been a witch because there's a scapula of a sheep, I think, in there as well. So he decided that she was using the scapula to do divination. I mean, it's just extraordinary. He had these scraps and came up with this amazing story about this woman. And eventually it kind of got to the point where he was pretty sure she was a prostitute serving the Roman camp on the cliffs above.

And he's just wrong about everything apart from the fact that it's human. It's not 2,000 years old. It's more than 30,000 years old. So radiocarbon dating has pushed the date back and back. And we had early radiocarbon dates in the 20th century, which were all slightly out. And we've now got a fix for that. So it's pushed the Red Lady of Paveland even further back in time. So more than 30,000 years ago, right back in the upper Paleolithic into the Ice Age.

And that's before the ice sheets come down over Britain. Because by about 20,000 years ago, we've got ice right down as far as the Gower, in fact, almost as far as Pavanang Cave itself. And then Britain would have completely depopulated. So we're glimpsing through that burial, a population that was here in Britain. And we can say that's our ancestor in Britain, that's somebody who went before without having any direct connection or genetic connection with that person. But these are people that were living in the landscape, which is still familiar to us today, but would have been very different back then. And before that great depopulation, and then before people start to return back as the ice melts.

depopulation and then before people start to return back as the ice melts. You're listening to Down to Notes History. I'm thrilled to have Alice Roberts on the podcast. More after this. Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week tell me about someone you've been able to get dna from and what that has allowed you to do over and above the dating and just the looking at the bones with your expert eye

there's lots of things you can do with ancient dna so one of the things you can do is look at these transitions and say are the people who are arriving or seem to be arriving with a particular culture are they really arriving have they come from somewhere else and that's what we've been able to do looking at the origin of the beaker package with the arrival of the beaker package for instance and that is fascinating because if you trace that back, that actually goes all the way east to the Pontic Steppe with an expansion of horse riders from the Pontic Steppe, whose culture spreads east and west, actually. But looking at Europe, it spreads west across Europe. And then by the time it gets to Britain, it has changed and become the Beaker culture. But when it first starts out, we think

these people are also bringing the first Indo-European languages into Europe as well. So it's this really kind of stunning coming together of archaeology, genetics and linguistics in that case, showing us how this culture, but also within that culture and language as well, is spreading across Europe. So that's kind of one thing you can do. It's really kind of big picture stories. And then another thing you can do is focus in really, really finely on the kind of detail and

look at, for instance, kinship. So there's some really interesting studies now looking at particularly the Neolithic and looking at long barrows in the Neolithic and these chambered tombs, which are communal tombs. And people have suggested for a long time, you know, there've been lots of hypotheses out there about what these chambered tombs are about. And one suggestion is that they're essentially like a family vault and that you would have maybe a particular elite family, a dynasty, if you will, and that these tombs are for those people. And what's really interesting now as we start to get genomes from some of the remains in those

tombs is that we are seeing connections so we are seeing relatives buried in some of those tombs and in some of them there'll be one tomb and then there'll be another one a few miles away with a relative and then there's one in Ireland where there's been evidence of incest as well so we're seeing some kind of bits of biographical detail that I don't even know if the people back then would have known through the genetics. So it is quite astonishing how much you can tell. And it's also not just about human DNA. So another strand of the Thousand Ancient Genomes Project is that Pooja Swali in Pontus's lab is looking at metagenomics. So she's looking at the genomes of all the things that you find in ancient human remains that aren't human. And that's just amazing because

we've had some really exciting revelations recently about things like the Plague of Justinian and being able to actually say, okay, well, we've got really good documentary evidence of this plague sweeping through the Byzantine Empire, but now we can actually say it was the same as the Black Death. It is Yersinia pestis, because we can actually extract and sequence Yersinia pestis DNA from skeletons that were the victims of that particular plague. And just a couple of years ago, one of the samples or a few of the samples included in a study of Yersinia pestis came from an Anglo-Saxon cemetery or early medieval cemetery in Essex, showing that that Justinian plague, I should just call it the Justinianic plague, not to blame it entirely

on Justinian, the plague of Justinian, it's not his plague, it's just the time. Those people in that cemetery had died of the plague. So it had come from the Byzantine Empire as far as the shores of Britain. So, you know, things like that, which you just never would have known. It's kind of frustrating for me because my background is as a biological anthropologist and a paleopathologist who's focused on what you can tell from the actual bones themselves. And I was amazed when I started doing this work. I was a medic originally. And when I started working with old bones, I was like, really, you can tell all this stuff? Because you can't talk to them. You can't ask them where it hurts. You can't do blood

tests and all that kind of thing that I'd expect to do as a doctor. You can do x-rays, of course, and those work on old bones just as well as they do on new bones, living bones. But there are some things which are really, really pathognomonic, great term, which means if you've got the sign of it on the bones, then you know what disease it is. And there are just a handful of diseases which leave really typical marks on your skeleton. And they are things like syphilis and TB. And then most other infectious diseases leave you with kind of non-specific changes on your bone. And either the bone gets eaten away a bit or it gets added to. So bone can only respond in one of two ways,

and that's what it does. So you end up an awful lot of time going, oh, you've got non-specific infection in these bones. And that's it. That would be the limit of what I could tell. But now somebody like Pooja can take a sample from that skeleton and sequence it and go, well, actually, this is what we're looking at and tell me specifically which organism was responsible for that infection so that's just amazing can i ask you to be very naughty and pretend that none of your esteemed colleagues are listening what do you think in the next 20 or 30 years is this pace of change going to continue or if we're like oh well that's everything we've discovered about dna like are we going to find out whether they liked you know turmeric what do you dare to hope that as this journey continues that we all discover it's a really interesting

question because focusing on ancient genetics about the limits of what that can tell us and there are elements which i quite often call them biographic elements, but they're not biographical in the way that you would expect in history, where you actually want to know what somebody's thinking. And I think that's where we just have to say, we don't know. And I think there've been so many developments over the 20th century into the 21st century in terms of archaeological science and things that we never thought we'd be able to do. I mean, you know, scraping little bits of residue off the inside of a piece of pottery and going, well, we know what they were eating. They were eating cabbage or they were eating something that had milk in it. Being able to analyse the lipids that are still there in the residue on

pottery. I mean, that, I think, probably 50 years ago would have seemed utterly extraordinary and beyond the bounds of what anybody would ever be able to do. But undoubtedly, there will be new techniques that come along, and there will be new revelations that come along. And some of the information that we'll be able to glean from archaeological human remains will draw, as it is drawing at the moment, on what we can tell about genetics here and now, and the relationship between things like genetics, and you're talking about interesting aspects of physiology. So the relationship between aspects of physiology and anatomy and genetics, I think there'll be more of that that we'll be able to pick apart. I mean, it's a bit of a dark art at the moment, being able to do things like say, Cheddar Man, who is in the book, 10,000 years ago,

had dark skin and blue eyes. It's a bit of a game of probability because your genes interact with your environment. So we don't know things in an absolute way when it comes to predictions like that. We can be relatively sure, but not absolutely definite. So we have to recognise as scientists when we kind of reach the end of being definite about something and then start to go, well, it's probable that Cheddar Man looked like that, for instance. But I think it's really important to be aware of the limits of your powers, as it were. I've worked in forensics as well. So I've worked on forensic cases and I've always got that in the back of my mind. So it's interesting to kind of speculate

and it's interesting to kind of push it and say, well, perhaps this is what the genetics is telling us. But I think in the back of my mind, I've always got this thing, would you stand up in court and say that? Would you see someone committed on the basis of what you're saying? And I think it's important for us to realise where the limitations are. But I think an absolute limitation is getting inside people's minds pre-history. The wonderful thing about writing is that people are telling us what is in their mind, or at least they're telling us what they want us to think is in their mind. Coming back to the venerable bead, it's not a kind of direct download of what's in their brains. So yeah, I don't think we'll ever know what people are thinking. And I don't think we'll

know why people were doing certain things. So one of the things I talk about in the book as well is approach to life and death and funerary rites why people are doing a particular style of funeral why they're choosing burial or cremation why with the Pocklington charioteer who's just the most astonishing chariot burial from Yorkshire why was it important to bury him not only in an intact upright chariot which is very unusual but also with intact upright horses how do you get a pony into the only in an intact upright chariot, which is very unusual, but also with intact upright horses. How do you get a pony into the ground in an upright position? It's just extraordinary. I spent a long time talking to the archaeologists who excavated that about how you would actually get a dead horse into that position or a living horse and then kill it without it

falling over. But actually the more interesting question, of course, is why? Why was it important to do that? And again, I don't think that lies within the grasp of science. And that's when archaeology starts to become an art, I think, and we engage with it on a human basis and it becomes much more subjective. But I like that because it means that anybody can look at that Pocklington Charity of Burial and say, well, I think he might have been this, or I've got an idea about that. And everybody's ideas are relevant. Yeah, I love having a bit of a dig.

Ancient history. And I love archaeologists like, it seems to me logical. This person must have fallen down whilst. It's like, what are you on about, man? You've got no imagination. As you say, it's like an art form. It's wonderful. Alice Roberts, you are a total legend.

Thank you very much for coming on this podcast. Tell us the name of your book. It is called Ancestors, a Prehistory of Britain through Seven Burials. And you're writing another one now about the early modern. That's so cool. I am. I am. Tell me, is there a Repton Viking in there with the boars, tusks, where his... You know, it's quite personal pulling these lists together because obviously you could... Everyone's got favourites.

...pick on so many different burials. And so some of them are ones I've worked on personally. And I think when it comes to the Vikings, I'm going to have to look at the Vikings that I've spent quite a long time working on and thinking about. And they are the Vikings from Llamydygoch on Anglesey, which is this amazing Viking settlement site that was excavated by Mark Redknapp over about 12 years. And I ended up looking at the bones for him mostly because my then boyfriend now husband was a supervisor and it was the only way i could spend any time with him in the summer was by going and volunteering on this viking dig in anglesey well listen those are your vikings i respect that but they're not as exciting as the great heathen army vikings of

repton obviously or down near me the old vikings on the old uh the old bypass down near weymouth those are my favorite vikings they're late vikings they're all beheaded perhaps by uh but also great Down near me, the old Vikings on the old bypass down near Weymouth. Those are my favourite Vikings. They're late Vikings. They're all beheaded perhaps by... But also, Great Heathen Army. There's no point in writing a book about that because there is a fantastic book about that out already. Cat Jarman's River Kings.

I mean, it's just brilliant. And can I tell you a secret? Cat Jarman is joining me on Digging for Britain this year. So we'll be back with Digging for Britain on BBC Two later this year. Breaking news, folks. Breaking news. That's great news. What a dream team, the two of you getting that done.

Well done. Well done. Congratulations. I will look forward to seeing you on Digging. And thank you for coming on the History of Podcast. Thank you very much for having me. I hope we can get together in a field looking at some bit of archaeology sometime soon and not just do it via screens.

I look forward to that enormously. Thank you, Dan. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. I've got just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy.

I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to

the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you. you