No Such Thing As A Fish - 601: No Such Thing As Sausage By Chanel

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

Dan, James, Andy and Ella Al Shamahi discuss Sci Fi, vespidae, real life hobbits and real death habits. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.  Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans! Use code [fish] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/fish

Hi everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Things 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-Shemahi. Now, listeners, regular listeners and No Such Things of Fish will know who Ella is. She is an explorer, a paleo. anthropologist, 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 Eye Player 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, 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. Ooh, yeah, it's going to be posh, it's going to be wordy. And we're going to be talking 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 8pm. 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 and no such thing as a fish. If you live more than 200 miles away, there are such things as aeroplanes and Bristol Airport is just a short drive away.

So I'm taking on to 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 such things of fish.com. Anyway, please sit back relax and enjoy this week's episode of No Such Things of Fish with Ella al-Shimahi. Woo! Okay, on with the podcast. Hello and welcome to you from the QI office in Hoiburne. My name is Dan Triber. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Ella al-Shemahi. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a number. And in a number of people, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a number of

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. 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 are 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. And scary. They're 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. Fear isn't in your vocabulary. You don't have a vocabulary. You're an ancient hominidish. What are they hunting with?

So they're hunting with different kinds of tools. This is, for those of you haven't worked it out, it's homo fluorescence who we nickname the Hobbit. They're these miniature humans. There are 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 Maribu carnivorous stalks that are taller than me so like six foot, etc, etc. And then obviously these miniature elephant called stegodons. So they and the elephants are the only small things on the... It's really weird. 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 giganticism depending on the same condition. Yeah, it's the same biological phenomenon that we think is happening. But to see it with humans is wild. So I was trying to picture what height a penguin is

because there's lots of different sized penguins, right? 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 all play by the same person. Warwick Davis. Warwick Davis is 3'4 7. Is he Warwick or Warwick? I think he's Warwick. Warwick. He said Warwick. And also, is it Professor.

Actually, Flitwick or Flittic, because there's a place called Flittic. It is Flitwick, but Warwick. Oh, my God. I can see why we've got confused. Let's all calm down. Well, okay, so it's the same height as Warwick. He's 3'7, 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? That's sure.

These little guys are yours. That's interesting. She's five two. Yeah, don't hold me to that, but she's about five two. You're the Australian in the family. Ella, do you cover a lot of this in your view series? Yeah, we were looking at Ewat. Okay, so this series, human that's going out right now on BBC I player.

Also, Americans, if you're listening, it goes on, on, on, uh, 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, you know, 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, but... It could be just a small one of us.

Homo sapiens. Yeah. Yeah. So the thing that we think now is that it's a different species of human just like a Neanderthal or, you know, 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 and orange.

The size of a chimpanzee's brain. There we go. Thank you very much. Thank you. Weirdly, Kylie 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 grapefruit or oranges. And so they were just, they were showdowns. Like people would, I would, I remember. remember being it's one, a 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 now it's 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 Zealand are 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.

They're always calling things crazy things. No, but Hobbit here, 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. No, I didn't know that. Well, he didn't use it for an animal, but it was for like weight of barley, if he was selling it. It was a unit of measurement.

Oh, yeah, because Tolkien was a bit hack like that, wasn't he? Say that. Say that again. He did like some of, who is it? Samway. Samwise Gamji. Ganji is the name of a dressing for 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. 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, it's, it's, we've got to be really careful. Wow. Well, we're a podcast. So Hobbit, Hobbit, Hobbit, Hobbit, that's crazy IP is strong stronger than science 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 base and so there's all this love for Tolkien and I'm like come on well a lot of Mordor was based on the Birmingham suburbs

I think it's a good case so like big feet they do have big feet right the Floresseansis. Relative to their... Tick. Relative to their legs. So if you looked at their feet on the road,

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. Hobbits are, in the book. Are they? Hobbits are, yeah. And these guys, they? Stone tools? Yeah. There we go.

The archaeologist in me is dying right now. I have the idea that like stone tools and lithics are just throwing objects. Ella, are they resilient against dark magic? Your lot. Were they friends with the elves? Are any of you guys going to bring up the local legend? No. Okay, go on.

You say it because I've spoken loads. No. Are they still around, Ellis? Because, look, it's a small and densely occupied island. Yeah. But there have been strange. rumors of little things in the undergrowth. Small men with big feet.

Small men with big feet. There's a professor called Gregory Fourth. 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. 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, because people were basically saying, look, the description, and what was it, it was something like this, 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, Ella, did humans, homo sapiens and Floriancis 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 oral tradition being passed down over some generations. When they first discovered The Hobbit or Homo Florisiansis, they did think that they died out about 17,000 years ago. So 17,000 years ago, that's a long time, but is that really unfathomable to think that an oral tradition would be passed down? Yeah, it's plausible.

But now they think, but then they redid the dates and they actually think that Homofluoresiensis 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 not a single data point. And there were humans living there around that time.

So yeah, for our 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. Right.

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, last leg and then we turned up. Yeah, I read that there was maybe a problem that volcanoes might cause 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. Okay. The final blow came from humans maybe. Yeah, right. But like you say, of course, we don't know. But it feels powerfully convenient, doesn't it? Like, the way homo sapiens turns up everywhere and all other large mammals die. Mysteriously, very short, like the ground slots

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 hole when you look at the planet and you see that that is just a pattern we turn up low 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 Norman Bates is just a normal motel owner and people have to keep going missing

it's not his fault he's just going to fix something with an axe world trips oh no killed another so are you saying that they're still here is that what you're saying 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 are there a few already found that are waiting for approval and yeah yeah waiting for approval I love that but I don't know what you think goes on in paleoanthropology like 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 stamps the bone yep approved but but yeah I reckon that I reckon already that's an underestimate based on 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. There you go. How small could we get?

Like, why are they not people the size of wasps? Is there no evolutionary advantage to us getting really small or really big? Can I ask another question that's related to Andy's question? When you look in the fossil record, you get the lizards and then you get enormous dinosaurs. And then you get slots and you get enormous slots. And all these animals have enormous versions of them from history. But why are they not enormous? us humans.

Do you know what? You sound like my comments section of all of my social media. Ella, what about giants? Let me talk about hobbits. What about 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 became so dismal. 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.

I'm not sure how expensive my brain is. I feel that was a discount deal my parents got. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everyone. We'd like to let you know that this week we're sponsored. sponsored by car gurus. That's right.

Now, James, you and I, we buy a car or two a week. Oh, I've got them coming out my ears. Oh, but it can be a very confusing process. Yeah, and last time I bought a car, I went into a car dealership, and they almost wouldn't sell it me because they insisted that I do a test drive. And I just went in with cash and said, I just want a car. No, you have been drinking, to be fair, and you still had the bottle on you. So, yes, we are sponsored this week by car gurus.

It's basically a website service designed to make it easy and simple to find out what car you would like to buy and to make it easy to buy that car. Yeah, the website's absolutely amazing. They have very good advanced search tools. They have transparent deal ratings. It just means that when you make your decision, you can be really confident that you've made the right one. They've got hundreds of thousands of cars to choose from. And over six million buyers have found their best deal with car gurus. And you could be one of those six million by go to car gurus.com.

dot UK to make sure that your big deal is the best deal. That's right. Do try it. Go to car gurus.com.orgas.com. dot UK. Search, buy, sell, sorted. And I just want to say that Andy is a very funny man,

but I definitely have not been drinking when I bought that car. Okay, on with the podcast. There's no way a sober man would buy an electric green Bugatti. On with the show. Okay, there's time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that there is a hugely popular subgenre 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 grey area between what qualifies for each sub-genre. Say like The Martian, Andy Wears the Martian. So we make it to Mars, which is possible. You get stuck there. How do you survive on Mars? So does that count as mundane? Yeah.

Does it, even though humans can't go to Mars yet? Because 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 that. 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 fatigue or whatever. So hold on. This community, do they police each other and themselves? No, but everything has subgenres, 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 you can go to. It's just a way of bracketing certain science fiction together in the way with 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, but it's not, it's not loopy. But then, like, it is the idea of using DNA to get dinosaurs is loopy, right? Yeah. 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, 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, 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 contramundum against the earth is... Precisely. Yeah. In my opinion, anything that's mundane should be on the earth and anything that's like Andy Wears the Martian should be extra mundane because it's off the earth.

That's good. That's a sub-sub-genre within the mundane genre. Do you think there's conversation's getting mundane? It's extra mundane. Well, here's a good fact to Lobbin. Just going back to the last fact about the height of penguins. So Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton, the writer of Jurassic

Park. Do you know how tall he was? Five two. He was six foot nine. Okay. Imagine. Imagine. It's like, oh, the rider of Jurassic Park's going to come in and in walks a fucking dinosaur. Like the guy is the height. Two and a half penguins. That's two and a half penguins.

Do you, 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, blah. So what I love about this is a bunch of us tall women started going around pointing out that leave the tall men alone because they will die younger. Because statistically they will die younger. Did they keep banging their heads off something? 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. More of your cells that can get cancer. Yeah, and it's just more of you. 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. younger, like the plot points and the date. What height though? What height? It's just a gradual process. Oh, okay. And all everything over 60, you tend to end up being shag to death by women who adore tall men. Yeah. It's a problem. This mundane sci-fi thing,

I think 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 interests and problems and fascinating stuff that you do get in civil

these days. So Jeff Reimann was the only person who put his name to it. It'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 like 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 going, a galaxy far away and all that, it is sort of soft because there's a lot of political stuff. Is there NSFW or it's not science fiction for work?

Actually, lots of it these days. Oh, yeah. That's great. 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, oh, do you mean sci-fi? They say, no. And they say, oh, I like sci-fi too. And they're like, no, not sci-fi. I like SF. It's a big world out there. 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 books and Arthur C. Clark, 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.

Do you know what? 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 quite a bit of this. I see the actual future and it's four of us, heads in jars. Just blathering on about some facts. But they do.

And even armies do it. So 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, absolutely. So they have a team, 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 it. Are they getting the best sci-fi writers to do these jobs, or are they getting people who can't sell their bucks? Well, that's the question. What is a good sci-fi writer?

Because you can be, 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 has moved in a different direction, those still remain very much pressing. Yeah. Yeah. I really admire science fiction writers, though, who just go for it.

Like there's a guy, Andy said, thank you, silently, listener. There's a guy called Lionel Fanthorpe. He's 90 years old. Fanthor. Yeah, he's still alive. He's a retired British priest. worked as a lecturer, a teacher, a 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 158 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? It might be like an alien pointing a laser gun. They would have those covers commissioned. and in some cases already attached to other books and then we'd 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, nice.

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. Is somebody tracking animals? No, it stands 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 trekk. 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' nest.

or a person who specialises in the study of ants. Right. And I'm sure that led to some hilarious mix-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. And that was used in sci-fi in the early 20th century.

That's great. And do you know that the word monobrow was first used in science fiction? Was it? Yeah. And it was used 10 years after Frida Carlo died. So no one, no one. no one could have called Frida Carlo

Monabrow in her lifetime because the word didn't exist we just did Frida Carlo on a previous episode 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

Monabrow that's crazy that's incredible makes you think yeah what does it like you think yeah yeah it's funny isn't it you know sometimes you don't know

your legacy yeah so you two Ella and James you said you don't read fiction particularly science fiction I mean I have read some yeah but do you think

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 stand a 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 that.

What are we saying here? I 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 bucks Ellie in their career, then you would pay attention to that one. You'd hope so, yeah. That also just sounds like potentially,

an obvious interpretation of that is that they wrote bad sci-fi the first time round. Maybe, yeah, yeah. Maybe it was, you know. Like it's not even... Schlock. Yeah, what James is saying. It's just that they didn't write very well.

But we still talking about Andy's works 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 preserve their dead by shoving twigs up their bum. Wow. So you'd put it up your bum in the hope that it would, your dead relative. Not your own bum. It was the bum of the dead. The bum of the dead

That was the ancient Egyptian book We all wanted to read, wasn't it? The bomb of the dead Yeah, so this is a study from this year In the journal Frontiers in Medicine And they analysed 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 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 try 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 but 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 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 taxidermy, I would say, that kind of thing. You know, taking the animal and taking the insides out and shoving stuff up there. 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 shriber's in the ground with twigs up their ass.

I'm very excited by that. Talking about famously preserved Austrians, you know, Otzi, you know they did a DNA. They did some DNA on him a while back. 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 ice. man. 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, well, it'd just be the seeds from his stomach. His bacon. Yeah. That's these 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 game. 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 if I had a dollar for every time I want me to tell 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 are 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 material. So for example, in Yemen, they have a local mummy culture and they used raisins and camel fat. And as an Arab woman, that sounds kind of quite tasty. That sounds yum. That's stuffing, isn't it? It's basically, I remember reading somewhere that it was, they described the Yemeni culture as artisanal mummification. Small batch. 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 ways, the Chinchoro people.

That's Latin America. Yeah, Chile in 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 this is as appealing as raisins and camel fat. You get your organs removed. Then they'd be replaced with a paste made of ash, water and sea lion blood. Oh, 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 you in for the genital bit? You're not feeling good. I've seen some of those mummies for sure.

I think they had them in Bolton Museum, I think, for a while at least. 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 Monks the Scream was based on, he saw this mummy and thought, I'm going to paint something like that.

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. 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 Roslyn Chapel. Oh, Jesus Christ. It's a temple. From the Da Vinci Code. 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 to...

That I read. I'm not going to lie. That I read. I'm sorry. I thought it was good. Don't judge me. Yeah. 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 start noticing lots of sheep imagery. And then on the wall of photos of a black. white sheep and it is Dolly the Sheep and because it Roslyn Institute right next to it were the ones who cloned Dolly.

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. Right. 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 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 yeah 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 booking tickets, isn't it? 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. Identified them. They identified them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow, wow, we. Madness. Can I lift the mood a bit by talking about Pope Pius the 12th? Oh, yes, please. Right. So the Vatican has its own embalmer. Okay.

I imagine it's not a full-time gig. But it's... Do they embalm people? They embalm 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 enjoy the permanent collection, but I think there is a... It's not like Madam Two Sards. It's not. Oh dear. It's good techniques, 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 I'd 12th died and he had his own personal doctor in life

called Ricardo Galiatsilisi and he was not a good posthumous doctor. So point one, he gave photos of the dead Pope to two magazines. What year was this? 58, 1958, yeah. 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 Gander Dolpho, which is the Pope, so... Oh, Gandalf. No, no, 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... And no raisins on the scene.

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 coffee, they started fainting and they had to change shift every 15 minutes. Wow. It was an absolute disaster. I mean, the doctor, Gaviatsi Lucey 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, 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 Giojahe, 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 the 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 in the afternoon. Let's go. Any wine? No, no. But I do have... A wooden penis.

He's going to have a quiet night in tonight with some cheese and a wooden penis and that would 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 stomach. 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 communities. 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. Where 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 they 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 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 other animals, I'm sorry, guys. What is that other than grave offerings?

It's really hard to interpret. But 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 Sharnadark Cave. And they thought what they were finding was flowers being put on the grave because they were finding pollen.

And it was like, you know, they were described as the flower people. It was the first time people were 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, 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. 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? Not you, but people just get enticed by it. Absolutely. So I actually worked on. that cave and I have to say you could see those animal burrows it was really really

clear 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 there's 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 once in your life which cheese are you choosing to be buried with And 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. A nice crumbly Lancashire reminds me of my body crumbling away. That's really nice. And the architectologist 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 Lancasterians might have been buried with cheese, or it could have been my spring in them. My slough cheese. You, Andy, obviously, you wouldn't have asked this. question if you didn't have your own hilarious answer. I've got probably a reason to be soft cheese, but nothing too adventurous, you know. For the afterlife. Which penis would you like to be buried?

I'll take the X-L. I have a 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 would be booby-trapped. Have we got anything around here? We got that Gladys. Come on. Yeah. Yeah?

Okay. Well, we've all got theories. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everybody. Just let you know this week, we are sponsored by Saley. Yes, Saly. When you're going abroad, you might sail there.

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saley.com slash fish and you can get that 15% discount on a Saly. data plan by using the code fish. Yes. Say goodbye to Crunchy Sok Mayhem with Saly. On with the podcast. 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. That's brilliant. I'm 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.

And 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, wasp will be drawn to the smell of that. And they'll, you know, 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 go 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 I think by the time this goes out

what most wasp were going to be on the jam. So you'll be safer with the ham. Right. But, yeah, but UCL, the scientists at UCL are doing a survey. There's an online survey. If you Google WASP ham jam survey, you'll probably find it. What's the survey? They're trying to find out, like, have you been out recently at a picnic and noticed what?

So this is new science. They're still asking for people to send in their... Yeah, contributions being welcome. Yeah, right. 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 banana. 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 know, you wake up from a coma. And instead of being like, what's the day? You're like, all the wasps after the ham. But isn't that great to know that if that did happen, you can 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. 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 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. Put their plate over there. I went camping this weekend. And the wasps around me only went for my wine. Oh. I wonder what type of... 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... Are you? Not always, 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 odor. I wonder 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 would be like Are you going for? Because 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 wasp. Like, some wasps, the classic wasps that we have, yellow jackets. No, they go for carrion and a bunch of waspmen 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 Serian Sumner. She's written a book called Endless Forms, which is all about wasps. And the first, I'd say, two chapters are predominantly slacking off bees

and say, everyone loves bees, don't they? Oh, they're so cute. And 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. Bees are veggie, bees are fluffy, they do honey

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, so Well We're getting into it, take it up with Professor Sumner But her book is unbelievably good All about the sheer variety of wastes

What does she think about hornets? I think she's pro, she's pro anything waspy. Anything that's not a bee. The thing with the wasp waste thing is really interesting. So basically you're saying that they end up with a liquid diet because they've got these tiny wastes. 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 because we have wastes, Neanderthals don't have wastes. Neanderthals' ribcage just keeps going out. So it's like us after Christmas, like it just keeps going. Wow. We have wastes, 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 equation Yes, so our waists are the ribcage stops and then No, so if you look at a rib cage on Homo sapiens The bottom ribs go in Like think of a skeleton, an image of a skeleton The ribs go in at the end at the bottom

Whereas on a Neanderthal they just keep going out So they technically, yeah so they don't have waists So does that make them less flexible? I mean it makes them stockier. It makes them stockier. 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. 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, should probably Google who the hell is going to know 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 kind of just like heavy set, blah blah blah and quite 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. Exactly. The results are in. But just

the waste thing, the benefit of that wasps narrow waste, 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 a egg-laying organ. Really? But new research, they found males that can sting with their genitals. Well, 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. 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. That's huge. Apparently, I don't know if it's huge. 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.

Of the Schmidt Pain Index. I believe so, unless it's a different Schmidt, but he wrote Justin Schmidt's. Ella doesn't know who Justin Smith is, I don't think. And possibly one or two of our listeners might not know. Sorry. We were actually like he's an old friend. Sorry. Justin Smith 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 he worked with who got stung by the torrentula 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? His papers are just outstanding. Bullet ant, someone is pouring lava into your ear.

You know, all of these amazing descriptions of what it's like being stung with these things. The most dangerous wasp, in my opinion. Go on. The mud dauber. So the mud dauba is sometimes called the pipe organ daubber, 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 airplanes, and their nests have caused the

crashing of at least three planes causing the death of 200 people by these wasps. Really? Yeah. Oh, my God. Wow. You've got to check your plane for wasp-ness. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not blaming the wasps. They didn't know what they were doing, I have to say.

But, you know. Interesting, because the captain will have the door closed, right? So, are they coming through cracks? What are they coming through? Because 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 the same. What's going on? Or those like snakes on a plane. It's for wasps in the cabin Wow You just check on the passenger in 3B I think he's a million wasps I'm not sure

I thought he was 3Bs 3B Ladies and gentlemen Unfortunately we're out of fish and chicken Today's meal will be sausage or jam No Okay

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've said over the course of this podcast, we're all online. I'm on Instagram. I'm on at Shreiberland. James. My Instagram's no such thing as James Harkin. Andy, my Instagram is Andrew Hunter.m. Yeah. And Ella. Ella underscore Al-Shemahi. 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 I player, 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, and he 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, clubfish. So go to our website, no such thing as a fish.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. You know what I'm going to be.