No Such Thing As A Fish - 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 paleoanthropologist. evolutionary biologist, general smart cookie and very good friend of ours. And we love having her on the show. It's always an absolute riot when she comes on. And the important thing to tell you about that is that she has a new series out. It is called Human and it is on the BBC I 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. Woohoo. At Cheltenham, the Cheltenham, the Cheltenham Festival. Oh 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 the 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.com slash live. If you live more than 200 miles away, there are such things as airplanes, 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 thing as a fish.com. Anyway, please sit back relax and enjoy this week's episode of No Such Things a Fish with Ella al-Shimahi.

Okay, on with the podcast. Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast. coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Treiber. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Ella al-Shimahi. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Ella. So my fact this week is that 50,000 years ago, humans, the size of penguins, hunted elephants, the size of cows. It's pretty cute. The past is cuter than I was led to believe. How tall are you? 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. I'm scary. They're all 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 hominid. 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 Florisianzus 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, it was a bombshell. 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. Yeah. 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, you know, six foot, et cetera, et cetera. And then obviously these minibu dragons. Elephant called Stegadons. 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... Same condition. Yeah, it's the same.

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 foot 7. Is he Warwick or Warwick? I think he's Warwick. Warwick. And also, is it Professor Flittwick or Flittick?

Because there's a place called Flittick. It is Flitwick, but Warwick. I can see why we've got confused. Let's all calm down. Well, okay. So it's the same height as Warwick Davis? 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 one inch. Yeah, it's very tight. I mean, if you're three and a half feet, I'm sorry, one inch is a big deal. That's true. Sure, sure.

But I thought there were penguins back in the day that were as tall as Kylie Minogue is now. So she's what, five foot? She's five and a bit. Yeah, okay. Five two maybe. So I'm sure that's right, isn't it? So these little guys of yours. That's interesting.

She's five two. Yeah, don't hold me to that, but she's about five to. The Australian in the family. Do you cover a lot of this in your few 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 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 so 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 So the thing that we think now is that it's a different species of human, just like a Neanderthal or one of these other species of human. However, when they first announced it, it was so shocking to people that there was a human with a brain the size of a chimpanzee, a brain the size of 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 the, 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 showdowns. Like, people would, I remember being it's won 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, no, it was wrong? No, it's pretty much everybody accepts.

I mean, I'm sure there are a few. But they've found too many examples of it from very different time periods. This also wasn't the only showdown, by the way. Because when this started happening, one of the scientists, who's part of the discovery, New 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. 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 again. He did like some of, who is it? Samway. Samwise Gamji. Ganji is the name of addressing 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. Okay. Even further back. So it's not like he invented it. But yeah, he had to stop calling it that. So actually we've run into that problem. Really? Really.

Yeah. So we have to be careful in how we use the word hobbit. If it's a purely marketing exercise, we've got to be really careful. Wow, well, we're a podcast, so Hobbit, Hobbit, Hobbit, Hobbit, Hobbit. That's crazy. Yeah. 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. A lot of Mordor was based on the Birmingham suburbs. All right. All right. I think it's a good case. So, like, big feet.

They do have big feet, right? The Floresiensis. Relative to their... Tick. Relative to their legs. So if you looked at their feet on the ground, 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. A huge. So they live underground. These ones are all found in a cave. So... Hobbit hole, tick. They might have been sheltering, maybe.

Not. Skilled rock throwers. Hobbits are. Are they? Are they? Hobbits are, yeah. And these guys, they use stone tools? Yeah.

Yeah. There we go. The archaeologist in me is dying right now. The idea that like stone tools and lithics are just throwing objects. Are they resilient against dark magic? Your lot. Were they friends with the elves? Oh, my God.

Are any of you guys going to bring up the local legend? No. What's that? 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 rumours of little things in the undergrowth. Small men with big feet. Small men with big feet. There's a professor called Gregory 4th. He studied them for about 40 years. And a few of the local people, the Leo people he'd spoken to, said they'd seen one of these things. More than one. More than one.

Yeah. And over to my cryptid colleague. Well, yeah, he wrote this book between a. and human. And he says the Leo people constantly say, yes, these, what you're describing are still out there. 30 different people have said that, that they're still out there. But you obviously probably think not. And so do I, just for the record. He's pointing at me. The scientist in the room destroying all joy. Okay. So when they first announced the discovery of the Hobbit, this folklore was talked about a lot, a lot, a lot, because people were basically saying,

look, the description, and what was it, it was something like 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 it's 17,000 years ago. It's a long time, but is that really unfathomable to think that an oral tradition would be passed down? Yeah, it's plausible. But now they think, but then they redid the dates and they actually think that Homofluoresioresexual. just 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 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 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. 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. 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 then as a collective hole, when you look at the planet and you see that that is just a pattern, we turn up, lower.

and behold, everything else disappears. 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.

You know, he's just going to fix something with an axe. World trips. Oh, no. Killed another. That's really funny. So are you saying that they're still here? Is that what you're saying? No.

Do you think, Ella, there are more potential human species out there that we haven't found in the fossil record. Oh, yeah. We were, like, having massive discussions in, in the series about what number to give. Because I was like, there was more than the magnificent seven. All right. Other few already found us are waiting for approval. Yeah, yeah.

Waiting for approval. I love that. I don't know what you think goes on in paleoanthropology. Like at the Natural History Museum, there's a man who sits there and you come to him and you present the case that there's a new species. He stamps the bone. Yep, approved. But, yeah, I reckon 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. Great shout. Yeah. 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 these. You get the like 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 humans?

Do you know what? You sound like my comments section of all of my social media Ella, what about giants, Ella? Keep talking about hobbits. What about giants? Why don't you cover giants? Also, 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 take this seriously, but... Excuse me? Wow. I became so dismalion there. I think the brain is so expensive and our brain is already way too expensive. Like our kids are basically born premature. Right. 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, blah. I just don't think. That would be my guess. I'm not sure how expensive my brain is. That was a discount deal my parents got. Okay, it'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. 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 can go to. It's just a way of bracketing certain science fiction books together in the way you would romantic fiction or Jurassic Park might be another example of mundane sci-fi, a very

achievable thing that is actually happening now where we're taking DNA and we're trying to play. No, no, but it's, but it's not loopy. Yeah. 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. 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 this conversation's getting mundane?

It's extra mundane. 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 it's like, oh, the writer of Jurassic Park's going to come in and in walks a fucking dinosaur. Like the guy is the height. Two and a half peguins. That's two and a half penguins. You know how women like men who are tall? You know, there's this like thing about, it's like caused a problem on the dating apps because it now means that like women are just skewing really tall, whereas if you met people

in real life, blah, blah, blah. So what I love about this is a bunch of us tall women started going around pointing out that leave the tall men alone because they will die younger. because statistically they will die younger. Why? They keep banging their heads off. So, okay, so the thinking is... Is it because the gravity collapses their heads into their body?

Asteroids hit them first. You're basically, there's just more of you for blood circulation and all the rest of it. More of your cells that can get cancer. Yeah, and it's just more of you. But it is wild because, like, basically, tall men have been told their whole life. that they're better and you've seen all the statistics on they earn more,

they this, that and the other and actually they do die younger. Like the plot points What height though? What height? It's just a gradual process. Oh, okay. And all...

Everything over six two, you tend to end up being shagged to death by women who adore tall men. Yeah. It's a problem. This mundane sci-fi thing, I think it 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 civilization 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 this stuff. So there's hard SF, which is where it's mostly about the science bit of the science fiction. And arguably Jurassic Park and the Martian sit in between mundane and hard sci-fi. Yeah. There's soft SF, which is much more about the human.

So even though Dune is kind of about, you know, it's a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away and all that, it is sort of soft because there's a lot of political stuff. Is that 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, S-F. 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, I do 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 good. I see the actual future and it's four of us heads in jars.

just blathering on about some facts or other. But they do it, 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 books? Well, that's the question. What is a good sci-fi writer?

Because you can have a lot of books, but they could all be terrible, but they're published. You might just have one or two crisp early career ones, though, which are terrific. And even though your fiction has moved in a different direction, those two remain very much pressing. Yeah. I really admire science fiction writers, though, who just go for it.

Like, there's a guy, Andy said, thank you, silently, listener. Just seen that. There's a guy called Lionel Fanthorpe. He's 90 years old. Fanthor. Yeah, he's still alive. He's a retired British priest. He's also 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 arty? 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 they would just take that cover and go, write that. I like it. I like that because it's hard to come up with ideas, isn't it? It is. Is it? Yeah. Anyway, so some of the words in sci-fi,

absolute bog standard sci-fi words, were used for other things in the past. Okay, so the word starship was used in the 17th century to describe a southern constellation of stars, the Argo constellation. So can you guess what the word blaster meant in the 16th century? I think that's a young man like out on the tiles. He's a blaster. He's a blaster. Yeah. No, it's not that. It's a bad case of diarrhea. It's not that either. It was someone who plays the trumpet. Oh, nice. Do you know what a trekkie 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's Dan's closer. It was a group of people who were on a trek. You would call the whole group a trekkie. Okay. So it's plural. What's the singular? Well, a trekker.

A trekker. I guess. And in the 19th century, do you know what ant-man meant? No. Can you guess? Was it like pest control? Someone who would literally come to your house. The ant man.

The ant man's here. It was. It had two meanings in the 19th century. It was a person who destroys ants' nests or a person who specializes in the study of ants. Right. And I'm sure that led to some hilarious mix-ups. And in the other direction, the word vape, which now means to smokey cigarettes, it originally meant to vaporize someone with a weapon.

And that was used in sci-fi in the early 20th century. That's great. Do you know that the word monobrow was first used in science fiction? Was it? Yeah. And it was used 10 years after Frieda Carlo died. So no one could have called Frida Carlo monobrow 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 that word. She wouldn't have known that word. That's crazy. That's incredible. Makes you think. Yeah. What does it make you think? Yeah.

What is 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, you know. I'd have read some. Yeah. But do you think that reading a science fiction text is any different to reading a standard fiction text, like literary fiction? Do you think the quality of the reading you do will change at all between those? I feel like probably, if I read like some Russian literature, I feel like I concentrate more. Okay, okay, exactly.

And if I'm reading, like I have read Andy We're saying. 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. So 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 books early 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 broke bad sci-fi

the first time round. Maybe, yeah, yeah. Maybe it was, you know. Like it's not even... Schlock. Yeah, what James are 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... 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 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, Ozi, you know they did a D&M. 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 eye. 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? Well, it'd just be the seeds from his stomach. His bacon. Looks 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 gay. But Ella, like preserving bodies and stuff, you must touch on that in your work occasionally. So, not particularly. 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 a woman had told me that. No, but okay. 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 some of my. 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, I'm like, that sounds kind of quite tasty. That sounds yum. That's stuffing, isn't it? It's basically, I remember reading somewhere that 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, is 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, yeah. Wow. And then that same paste is used to make a mask and a model of your sexual organs. and then you're painted black polished until you're shiny and given a wig.

Okay. What state are you in for the genital beer? 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 quite a lot of famous works were based on it.

Like, definitely monks to 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 Divinciusian. Inji 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 thought it was good. Don't judge me. Yeah. It's not bad. But so we were waiting to go in there.

We went to a cafe that's across the road, and it was called Dolly's Cafe. We start noticing lots of sheep imagery. And then on the wall are photos of a black and white sheep. And it is Dolly the Sheep. And because it Rosalind Institute right next to it, were the one. Oh, I didn't know that they were related. Yeah. So we bumped into a few people and one person told me, so this is some gossip.

Apparently when Dolly was getting a bit iller and so on later in age, they had someone on standby, a taxidermist because the idea was they were going to immediately do taxidermy and take Dolly to one of the museums in Edinburgh. 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.

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, and this is the kind of stuff you're talking about. Dan, if you're not going there and immediately opening another identical cafe over the road, you're doing it wrong. Brilliant. Here was an interesting thing to do with the Titanic.

that I've never heard before, which is that if you were first class on the Titanic, that actually mattered after the boat had sunk and you had died. So a boat was chartered to retrieve all of the bodies, and they found way more than they expected. They found over 300. Now, the idea was you were only allowed to bring them back if they were embalmed because health and safety regulations. Okay. Unfortunately, they didn't expect to find that many people, so they only had limited amounts of embalming fluid.

Oh, no. So the first class passengers largely got priestly. 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. 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 the passengers were first class based on them floating? Wrist buns. It's the wristbands. Identified them. They are. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow. Wow, wow. 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 join the permanent collection. But I think there is a... It's not. Like Madam two sons. 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, you know, a raised beer and people would walk by and all of that stuff. But in 1958, Pope Pius X, the 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. Whoa. Not called. What year was this? 58. 1958, yeah. Wow.

He tried to publish a diary of the Pope's last four days to kind of get some copy out of it. He also announced, I'm going to be doing something a little bit different with this pope's embalming guys. He said, I'm not going to be removing his organs, which was the traditional way of embalming someone after death. He said, I'm going to embody his holiness in the same way that Christ himself was preserved the traditional way using oils and resins. Okay. Now, unfortunately, this did not work. They basically didn't drain any bodily fluids. They didn't keep the body cold. It was extremely hot at the time. They were working

in Castel Gandalfo, which is the Pope. 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 11 herbs and spices we don't know

but they And no raisins I'm assuming 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 The sources vary But the Swiss guards who were standing guard

Around the coffer They started fainting And they had to change shift every 15 minutes Wow Like it was an absolute disaster I mean the doctor Galiatsili 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 Xioahe, and she still has her eyelashes, a hat, and her natural hair. streaming out. Wow. Because she's been so well preserved. Wow.

So she's in the desert? She's basically, well, in a cave in the desert, really. But it's so dry that, like, bacteria can't really live there

and so they can't eat up her body. She was buried with a cheese around her neck and a wooden penis on her stomach. That's all you need. That's all you need in the afterlife. That's a party.

Let's go. Okay. 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 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. 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 is, it's not like it's very common. But the most famous example of it, or the first really famous example, was in Iraq, in Shannadar Cave. And they thought what they were finding was flowers being put on the grave because they were finding pollen.

And it was like, it was, you know, they were described as the flower people. It was the first time people were like maybe Neanderthals like, well, it's the first serious time people were like, Neanderthals might have been emotional and might have a sense of the afterlife and blah, blah, blah. And then they were like, actually, it might just be rodents. Rodents might have just come in and basically brought pollen with them and be ruining an archaeological site. 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 in 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 a... What's in your life? Which cheese are you choosing to be buried with? 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. Nice crumbly Lancashire reminds me of my body crumbling away. That's really nice. And the archaeologist 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 slow cheese. You, Andy, obviously, you wouldn't have asked this question if you didn't have your own hilarious answer. Actually, I've got probably a reasonably soft cheese, but nothing too adventurous. No. 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. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is end. My fact is, halfway through the summer, wasps switch from liking ham to liking jam. That's brilliant. And when did they start liking lamb? Oh, lamb. It goes ham, it goes ham, jam, lamb, spam.

Well, basically, wasps are just written by Dr. Seuss, it turns out. Like, they're just... So this has been a terrific year for wasps, we should say. That's it? We should say. It's been warm and dry. 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 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. Do you have a date? Because some people like this will go out towards the end of the summer. People will be going on picnics.

They need to know whether to bring the sausage rolls or the... I think by the time this goes out, most wasp are 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 in the... 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... Yeah, contributions being welcome. This is a citizen science thing, basically. And I tried to fill it in because recently I was out with a piece of sponge cake and the wasps were absolutely bananas for it.

But unfortunately, I didn't bring my sausage. So my contribution is useless to science. What I love about this is the idea that, you know, you wake up from a coma. And instead of being like, what's the day? You're like, are the wasps after the ham? But isn't that great to know that if that did happen, you could 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. So I wonder what type of year. 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. No, I wonder. I'm a jammie. I dumped too much perfume on myself this morning. And I was like, in my head, I'm just like, is that the kind of thing that, you know, would be like, that's all we're going for?

Because they're not, they're certainly not trying to eat you. They don't eat live animals, basically. Are you wearing sausage from Chanel? Yeah. Yeah. 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 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 but 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. 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 and there. So I just want to give a shout out to the scientists 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 of veggie, bees are fluffy, they do honey, you know, and actually wasps are incredibly useful in all sorts of ways. They deal with tons and tons of pests in your garden every year. Yeah, we'd be overrun with pests if it wasn't for wasps. But they are pests themselves, so. Well, you know, we're getting into it. Take it up with Professor Sumner. No, no, that's really interesting. Her book is unbelievably good, all about the sheer variety of wastes. What does she think that hornets? I think she's pro. She's pro. She's pro. Anything waspy. Anything that's not a bee.

Yeah. The thing with the wasp wasting is really interesting. So basically you're saying that they end up with a liquid diet because they've got these tiny wastes. Yeah. 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 ribcage on Homo sapiens, the bottom ribs go in. Like think of an image of a skeleton. The ribs go in at the end at the bottom. Whereas on a Neanderthal, they just keep going out. Like a barrel?

So they technically, yeah, so they don't have wastes. Interesting. Does that make them less flexible? I mean, it makes them stockier. Okay. 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 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 Mohamed Ali, which, by the way, that went. Like, people were talking about it in pitches all the time,

and I should probably Google who the hell is going to. It's not kind of no idea what boxing is about. But yeah, that stockiness, that does change how you see. understand how you hold yourself. And who would win in a fight? We decided that it would be equal because the Neanderthals would be copping out.

The Neanderthals would be kind of just like heavy set, blah, 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. Oh yeah. 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. Or kind of. So these are potter wasps.

Potter? Potter, yeah, like Harry. And they've evolved sharp spines on their genitals. And when they're swallowed by a frog, they'll use their genitals to kind of stab the mouth of the frog so they let 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 says, 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 torrentula 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 by these things. The most dangerous one. In my opinion. Go on. The mud dauber. So the mud dauba is sometimes called the pipe organ dauber. And they make nests out of clay.

And they're like, they're shaped a bit like pipe organs. So they're kind of cylindrical, long cylindrical things. Cool. But they have a bit of a habit of making them inside aeroplanes. And their nests have caused the crashing of at least three planes causing the death of 200 people. Oh my God. By these wasps. Really?

Yeah. Oh my God. Wow. You've got to check your plane for waspness. 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 them to do.

What's going on? I was like snakes on a plane. There'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's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this

We're all online. I'm on Instagram. I'm on at Shreiberland. James. My Instagram's no such thing is 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. QI.com. You can send your emails there, Andy checks all of those. Some of those emails will make it to drop us a line. Bonus episode that we do is part of our secret members club, 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.