Dan Snow's History Hit - Sex

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

250 million years ago the armour-plated Placoderm fish invented the act of sex as we know it. Hubba Hubba. Dive into the historical sack as we go in search of the origins of nature’s greatest-ever invention.Dallas’s guest on this episode is Australian palaeontologist John Long, author of The Dawn of the Deed.Produced by Freddy Chick. The senior producer is Charlotte Long.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Father? Yes, son. Who invented Rumpy Pumpy? Well, a billion years ago, when I was young, there was no ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ah-bah-bah. Back in my day, times were hard. If we wanted to reproduce, we had to split ourselves in half, down the middle. And that was that. And then this tubular thing came along, sort of like a prehistoric drinking straw, and started reproducing by exchanging sex cells. Fast forward a few hundred million years to this family of armour-plated fish, some as big as sharks that could chomp right through you without thinking. Anyway, a pair of

these sharks loved each other very much. One was a daddy and had a male sex organ, and the other was a mummy and had a female sex organ. And it's been nothing but a hubba hubba. It's been nothing but shagging ever since. Hello, welcome to Patented, a podcast about the history of inventions from history hit i'm dallas campbell hey listen birds do it bees do it educated fleas they ruddy love it today we're talking to the australian paleontologist john long who spent his life careful trying to figure out how beings that lived hundreds of millions of years ago got it on. We'll hear when life came up with its greatest invention ever, sex.

And we'll learn which one of our ancient ancestors first did it, like they do it on the Discovery Channel. Enjoy. I'm with John Long, who is in Australia somewhere. Where are you, John? I'm in Adelaide, actually, Dallas. Adelaide. Nice. And John is wearing an Unknown Pleasures T-shirt with Jaws on.

Just tell me the origins of that. Well, it's from the Joy Division album. And because I work on Vossel Sharks, I like the theme of sharks, sharks will tear us apart. Ah, nice. I see what you've done there. Very good. Did you design that yourself? No, I bought it in Spain back in a few months ago

when I was over there. So, listeners, it's the Unknown Pleasures Joy Division album cover, which you'll know with the kind of pulsar thing on the front with the Jaws logo woven into it. Very good. And I should also point out that it's nighttime where John is, and he's been drinking Negronis because he's going to a dinner party.

So he may be – how many Negronis have you had? I'm only on my first, so it's okay. Oh, that's okay. Oh, that's okay. Well, that's okay. I thought we could do a sort of drunk episode of Patented. A sort of patented drunk. Let's do it two hours later.

Okay. Well, depending on how we go we'll see how we get on so i don't even where do we even where do we even start actually i tell you we'll start you've got a shark on your t-shirt yeah why do you have a shark on your t-shirt maybe we should start there well i'm a paleontologist i work on the evolution of fish especially early fish from about what's called the devonian period which is named after devon of course in england from about what's called the Devonian period, which is named after Devon, of course, in England, from about 400 million years ago. And the thing about these early fish is when fish first started to sort of diversify and radiate into the groups that would become the modern sort of fish fauna of sharks and bony fish like marlin and goldfish and so on. So armoured sharks

are called placoderms. And I'm holding up a model here of a fish that looks like Darth Vader wrapped around its head. It's got like an armoured plated skull and this thing is called Dunkleosteus which was about eight metres in length and was the largest of these early armoured, dare I say, shark-like fishes. And the reason I bring this along and why I'm wearing this t-shirt is because I'm an expert that has been studying these ancient armoured placoderm fishes for most of my life. And they're extremely interesting fishes. And they tell us a lot about modern behaviour. Like, you know, let's cut to the chase about sex. I've heard of sex, never done it. Okay. So, okay. Well,. So tell us what you've discovered.

Yeah, well, for many years, Dallas, I just went up to these sites in the Kimberley, the far north of Western Australia. It's like another planet. It's so alien and remote with these giant boab trees and wonderful limestone ranges that are jagged. And there's a site up there called GoGo, which is named after an indigenous stockman. And Gogo station's about the size of a small European country. In fact, there's nine European countries that are smaller than Gogo. Out in this vast area, you can find these rounded rocks with whole complete fossil fish in them. And the beauty of Gogo is the fish are perfectly preserved, uncrushed. You put them

in a weak bath of acid, acetic acid, which is the same thing in lemon juice or vinegar, and you dissolve the rock and get the skeleton out in like three-dimensional perfection. So I've been studying these fishes for many, many years. And then one day we found an embryo inside one of these fishes. At first we thought it was the last meal that this shark-like fish ate, you know, it ate something smaller. But then as I studied it further down the microscope, we realised, no, it's actually a mirror image of the adult fish. It was a juvenile of the same fish. And then lo and behold, we found a mineralised umbilical cord that connected it to a hole in the rock. Oh my God. So it was evidence of the earliest

live birth on the planet. Holy crap. What are the chances of that? I know it was. Well, I've been collecting up there for 30 years. I never found something. Crikey. And this even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records, the 2010 edition. Page 55. There's a picture of me holding this fish. Nice. I mean, apart from the astronomical improbability of finding that, what did it tell you? What did you learn from that? Well, at first we thought, wow, this is amazing. It's the oldest evidence of fish with a complex form of sexual reproduction. In other words, they were having sex, they were having copulation. So the males were depositing sperm inside the females. And this was the first evidence of it in the entire fossil record.

As we searched more deeply, we started finding more of these. And we found other fish with multiple embryos in them. And we realized that this was an early evolutionary specialization of giving birth to live young. So, okay, so let's sort of define our terms. Let's go all the way back to the beginning. We'll start at the last universal common ancestor yes things reproduced obviously because because here we are but they didn't reproduce sexually so what did we have before then we had asexual reproduction where things clone each other and they sort of split in halves like amoeba and hydra and things like that and everything is a perfect clone of its parent. And then sexual reproduction kicks in with the eukaryotes, which are the first celled creatures to have a nucleus inside that cell. So we know this because from eukaryotes today, you have all sorts of creatures, you know, algae and amoebas and things like that, that actually have a complex kind of cell chemistry.

But the beauty of being a eukaryote is you pass your DNA along to the next generation as a package. And so that's what's called the beginning of sexual reproduction. Okay, what did sexual reproduction look like then? I mean, it wasn't the kind of sex. Well, in terms of fossils, we have some of the oldest evidence for sexual reproduction in fossils from South Australia, in the Flinders Ranges, which is about, you know, 600 kilometres north of the town of Adelaide. Now, there, there are beautifully preserved animals that date back to 560 million years old, which is the oldest well-preserved assemblage, if you like,

of animals anywhere in the world. You also have these in England at Charnwood. You have sort of early pre-Cambrian kind of impressions of animals. But there's one particular kind of fossil that occurs in Ediacara, which is unique. And it tells us that these creatures were having sex because we have whole layers of rock with these coral-like creatures that are all at the same stage of development, all at the same height. And what this is telling us is that there was a spawning event. So think of coral today on the Great Barrier Reef. The coral opens up under the full moon and they shed their sperm into the water and their eggs.

And, you know... I do that. Yes, a massive reproduction event. During the full moon. Yep. We all like to do that. These are coral-like creatures? Yeah. So the evidence is simple, that if they were not sexually reproducing, you wouldn't have this one spawning event where everything grows at the same sort of discrete packages of growth.

Got it. Natural selection. I mean, this is a podcast about invention and about design. And I suppose natural selection is that great, in heavy inverted commas, that great designer. It finds solutions over time through generations. Why is, okay, why did we go from asexual reproduction, kind of cloning yourself, to sexual reproduction? Like, why did it find that solution? Like, what's good about it? Well, it comes back to Darwin's simple idea of survival of the fittest, that if your genetic makeup is all the same,

you're all clones of each other and a disease comes through, then all of you are either going to be resistant or non-resistant and you can all be wiped out kind of thing. So variation in genetics is a good thing. It means that if we have a population of a species where they differ, like today with coronavirus and COVID-19, basically some people are more resistant than others. And so species have a greater chance of survival with that variation in their gene pool. When people hear the word fittest, they always think of the idea of being fit as in I'm running

and therefore I'm fit. But didn't Darwin mean fittest as in fit as in a jigsaw puzzle fit, whatever fits nature best, if you see what I mean, or whatever fits into the niches that nature creates. So it's a kind of jigsaw puzzle fit rather than physical fit. Yeah, that's right. Fittest in nature really means the best reproductive ability. It's not who's the strongest fittest. No, I mean, a wonderful British biologist,

John Maynard Smith, invented... Am I allowed to swear in this podcast, by the way? You can swear. I can hear the heist of your Negronis clinking in. Okay. Okay. So John Maynard Smith invented this idea called the sneaky hypothesis. And that basically comes down to while the bull male stags are battling it out for who's going to sort of rule the harem the intelligent male that's watching is meanwhile getting on with the business behind the scenes with the most gorgeous females and so this is how the gene pool is not dominated just by the brute genes of the strongest but also the intelligent ones get in there as well so this is an important thing in evolution and there's wonderful work about sperm competition,

where all sorts of creatures from wasps to crabs to agouti and small rodents, they have the ability to remove the sperm of the previous male from a mating and deposit their sperm instead. Or chickens, for example, and birds that have the ability to hold sperm for months at a time and select the sperm that's the fittest, shall we say, for their fertilized eggs. So, you know, nature's far more complicated than Darwin thought. I was in Britain not too long ago, actually, only a few weeks ago, and I was at Down House and I was pondering about Darwin's idea of sexual selection. And it was always about the males were dominating the whole circus of

reproduction and the females did nothing. But we know so much more now that the females actually play the dominant role in nature, at least with, you know, the way they control the mating process and the way they control the fertilization process. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

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Wherever you get your podcasts. OK, so we've established that you get more diversity. I mean, it's a daft question, I know, but who invented sexual intercourse? It was the fish, was it? OK, well, all I'm saying basically for the fish were the ones that invented copulation and made sex intimate for the first time. This is what I want to get to. OK, so it was a Thursday sex was invented, I believe. Let's talk about why it's a good idea. So why, what...

Let's go back to the core of what we're talking about and the reason why copulation is important in evolution, because just think about it. If you don't copulate, what's your option? You can lay lots of eggs and you know the extreme of this a fish like salmon and trout that can lay tens of thousands of eggs and hope that one or two make it to survival and pass on the gene pool so it's really like a brutal kind of evolutionary formula if you're a fish but when you copulate you invest in much fewer young inside the female and so humans especially you know one two or three and sometimes you know up to larger numbers but normally you're going to bring that

baby to to a large state of advancement and it's going to have a much better chance of survival and say early mammals could give birth to live young that were already well developed and within a few days ready to, they would suckle off their mother for a while but then ready to feed and stand on their own two feet. And so that's the success of this kind of internal fertilization. It's the mothers are giving up a lot of their ability to flee and be fast in the wild instead to be big and pregnant and nurturing and give life to several young. So as a design solution, it just makes sense. It's a good way to do it. So this idea of sort of placoderms, these early sort of fish that first had copulated, what did their sexual organs

look like? Can you just sort of describe what we're looking at, the sort of male and female? I'm glad you asked that question because me and my team, not just me personally, but other colleagues I work with, we discovered the first male copulatory organs in these fish. And I had to go to Scotland to do this. Ah, the Scottish invented sex, did they? Well, actually, we found some from this site called Gogo in the Kimberley, but they were just disarticulated bits of male sexual organs. They're called claspers,

like a bony rod that had little hooks and barbs on the end, similar to a shark today has a cartilaginous clasp with little hooks and barbs to keep it inside the female while they deposit a package of sperm. I have that, yeah. Let's go to Scotland. I had three expeditions working in the Orkneys, which one of my favourite places on Earth. It's so beautiful. And the whisky there. God, the whisky's fantastic. And anyway, this little site in South Rinaldi,

we found this tiny little fish that's called Microbrachius dicki. Now, I'm not joking. I'm not joking. Because when it was named over 100 years ago, it was basically named after Robert Dick, who was a fossil collector that found the first specimens. So this is a tiny fish. Imagine it's about six inches long at the most. It's got a little bony armour, plates covering the head.

It's got weak little jaws and eyes in the centre of its head. It's a bit like a catfish or, you know, one of those simple fish. bit like a catfish or a you know one of those simple fish but the odd thing about it that doesn't make it a fish in today's sort of imagination is it had two bony arms that were segmented coming out the front of the fish where it should have had fins like a shark or a normal fish and what did these bony arms do they had little hooks on the inside of the arms so scientists pondered over this for a long time. And we realised when we found these fish that had these monstrous sexual organs coming off the back of the body, they had these hooked L-shaped bones with grooves to pass the sperm packages so they could fertilise the

females, that these bony arms were to interlock and so they could get into a mating position. Because otherwise, how does a fish with just little fins get those massive bony sexual organs into the right spot of the female it's awfully difficult to do if you're a fish but if you can lock yourselves together what i call the dotsy doe position the square dance position then you can actually mate and deposit that sperm and so they were highly successful because of that there you go so i'm gonna can we say with a high degree of uncertainty that sex was invented by two fish in the shetland islands well yeah the bbc had a headline saying sex invented in slimy scottish lake that's back i love that i love yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna go with that i've got the male

sexual organ we've got barbed lots of barbs to keep everything in place and to grab onto things. From the female point of view, what's going on? Well, this was the other big discovery, Dallas, with microbrachius. Because it was the very first time in evolution we'd found sexual dimorphism, where the males and the females actually differed with different sexual organs. So the males had the big L-shaped structures. The females had these small little bony plates with a very roughened surface. So it's actually like cheese graters, if you like.

And so these cheese graters would hook onto the little barbs and hooks on the macrobacchius male organ to lock it into position for copulation. So yeah, first time ever we have the female sexual reproductive organs preserved in a vertebrate, a backbone animal. Got it. I'm going to jump wildly in time now because I want to know, when did sex become fun? How did that evolve? Why did it become a kind of pleasurable pastime? Well, we know that many animals have orgasms because that's the purpose of why a female would let a male actually, you know, mate with them. The question is,

when did an orgasm first evolve? Yeah, who had the first orgasm? Well, it's hard to say. We know, for example, recent research published only two weeks ago shows that female snakes have a clitoris. So why would a snake want a clitoris? They have two of them because the female snakes have a clitoris so why would a snake want a clitoris that they have two of them because the male snakes have hemipenes or two two penis like structures for mating so you've got to have something that makes it worth your while otherwise you're not going to do it are you so we have to assume that all creatures have some sort of sexual pleasure that's really and and so from in the sort of evolutionary tree, is there, did your sort of ancient fish have pleasure from doing it in a way that we would kind of think about it? I like to think so, Dallas.

Are Shetland orgasms, Shetland fish orgasms? Well, there were so many of these bloody things in the rocks, they're everywhere. There are so many of them that they must have been doing it right. So the females must have enjoyed it. That's all I can say. I'll tell you a funny story about this. When this story broke through, we published the paper in Nature and it was massively big news.

It was on not the nine o'clock news, you know, the BBC. It was on Saturday Night Live in America. It was like, it was everywhere. I was interviewed by journalists from all around the world asking me all sorts of questions about microbrachiosdicai. But the most interesting and salient question came from a German journalist that said, oh, so it had one on one side and one on the other side. Could it have

done the two females at once? And all I could say to that was possibly, but we don't know. A fish threesome. It is kind of weird though, like beings as a as a species we've become so advanced the fact that we still copulate but not in order to reproduce we yeah as a kind of art form for pleasure a bit like kind of eating we we yeah we sort of eat but we don't need to stay alive we eat for sort of pleasure and it's become this you know the fact that we make tv shows about it it's become sort of something else maybe the next generation of reality tv shows will all be about sexual pleasure. Are we going to sort of un-evolve? Are we going to sort of stop? I read somewhere actually that the birth rate is declining massively and people have stopped having sex at the moment.

We're going through some kind of strange, but I don't think that's evolutionary reasons. Well, we're also losing the male Y chromosome. It's decreasing and fertility is decreasing massively across the world in males. So yeah, maybe this modern life is comfortable. It is. There's so many other chemical components coming into our lives that it's affecting our ability to reproduce. Who knows? I'm certainly not an expert in that area. Crikey. Listen, I think we're going to let you go, John. You've got a dinner party to go to and I don't know what else you've got to go to. You've got Negronis coming your way there. Yeah. But just tell us, you've got a book out, haven't you?

Oh, well, this book came out about 10 years ago. It's called Dawn of the Deed. There we go. Holding it up, there's a dinosaur shagging another dinosaur with a redactor over the particular areas. Good. So if you want to read about the history of sex in evolution, you know.

Dawn of the Deed, there we go. John, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Natural Selection, the great inventor. It is the great inventor. It is. Yeah. Sex is the best invention of evolution.

It's a really useful invention. It's for all kinds of reasons. Yeah. It's been great talking to you, Dallas. Thanks, John. Enjoy your dinner party. Thank you, mate. Bye bye.

Bye bye. That's it. Thanks for listening. Don't forget, get in touch with any suggestions and don't forget to leave a rating or a review if you can bear to. I will see you next time. Thank you very much for your company, as ever.