Radiolab - Asking for a Friend

Episode Date: March 1, 2019

Last year, we ran a pair of episodes that explored the greatest mysteries in our listeners’ lives - the big ones, little ones, and the ones in between. This year, we’re back on the hunt, tracking down answers to the big little questions swirling around our own heads. We reached out to some of our favorite people and asked them to come along with us as we journeyed back in time, to outer space, and inside our very own bodies. This episode was reported by Rachael Cusick, Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, and Annie McEwen and was produced by Rachael Cusick, Simon Adler, Matt Kielty, Becca Bressler, and Annie McEwen. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.   

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y.

C. See? Yeah. Oh. Pull the microphone in your front of your mouth. There you go. You might want to hear me. I do want to hear.

I want to hear the deep Delset. Delcent tones. You know what it is? It's like, it's like 80 hertz. Was that an 80 hertz? Is this an 80 hurt difference? Is this 80 hertz better? Well, because when you move off.

80 hurts better. Just think about that. Let me just tell you this. When you move off mic, I lose like 90 to 150 hertz of Robert Crulwich. You do. When you, when you get off. This ladies and gentlemen is the geek talking to the dumb dumb. When you get off mic, Robert, you rob me.

You take away my appreciation of your 80 hertz. And it hurts me. It hurts me. It literally hurts me. H-E-R-T-Z me. See, this is the thing. And it H-U-R-T-S is me. Oh, the sublime, whatever you call a word that sounds.

It sounds like another word that isn't the same word that sounds the same when you say it. It's a homily. Homalum. Homonym. Homonym. Yeah. It's a hominem. We're having a hominem conversation.

Actually, I think it's a different word. I think it's homophone. Homophone. Oh. Anyhow, this is Radio Lab. I'm Jad I'm Rod. I'm Robert Krollich. Robert, are you ready for this?

What are you about to get me ready for? So, just to put a frame, just off the top of my head frame. Uh-huh. So, last year, we decided to do a thing. where, you know, we went to the inbox, the radio lab inbox. For years, people had been sending us questions that they wanted answers. Stupid questions, as we were calling them colloquially. But we say that lovingly.

Sometimes they would say that. This is a question. I don't know. It may seem too simple to you, but why do and then some sort of thing, why is the sky blue sort of thing? Yeah, why is the sky blue kind of thing? So there were a lot of these kind of questions that accumulated in the inbox. last year we took a bunch of those questions. We emptied them out and we tried to answer them.

And it was very fun. Everyone got to do one. Everyone picked a question and then ran after it. And there were some questions left over. There was also the questions that we ourselves had that we had kind of like filed away. And so we decided we were going to do this again. Except this time, broaden the constraints so that it's not just questions that are sent to us, but questions we ourselves had, questions that were given to us by friends of the show.

Or that had just came into our heads and never gone away. Yes. Here's the deal. If you were wandering through your life, reading a book, talking to a friend, browsing a magazine, and some question came up that you thought, hmm, I don't know. And it never left your head. Take that question, the one you still think about and have never answered, and answer it, baby. Exactly.

That's the idea. Yes, right. We have four questions in this episode, and then there'll be another episode with a few more questions in a couple of days. But starting us off. Do we have the levels all right? Yeah, you sound... Is producer Simon Adler? Try now. Talk now.

Okay, I'm looking at my checkbook while we're doing this. What's going on in the checkbook at the moment? Oh, I'm just checking. And a close relative of his. So how are the levels? Oh, you sound great. Very good. Yeah.

So for my question, a little while back, I gave my dad a call. I'm Tim Adler. I'm Simon's father. And this is not your first time being on the show. That's correct. I've been on before with imponderable questions. And I wanted to bring him back on because since his last appearance... It's an honor to be back. A little over a year ago, you could kind of say he's become a new man. All thanks to a phone call.

Okay. It was June 25. Okay. And it was a gorgeous day, sunny day, good temperatures. And I had decided at about 1 o'clock in the afternoon to take a watch. And as he was strolling along, across the river from our house, I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket for a text message. And I looked at it. And saw that he had a voicemail. And it said, hi, this message is for Tim, or Timothy.

This is Kerry calling from UW Hospital in the transplant department. And we're calling because we have an organ offer to discuss with you. It said something to the effect of we have a lot. lung available. There's a couple of numbers that you can call. Reserve for you. If you could please give us a call back and ask to have the transplant coordinator on call page.

Something like that. And I'm thinking, wow, this is hard to believe. Thank you. Bye. If I can back up here. About 25 years back, my dad was diagnosed with sarcoidosis. It's a relatively rare disease with no cure that essentially triggers the immune system to attack the body. Typically, it targets and wreaks havoc on the lungs. Now, usually

sarcoidosis goes away on its own after a few years, and that's what we're hoping would happen with my dad. But in his case, the disease became chronic. And so year after year, breathing became harder and harder. He had to stop running. He was a marathon runner at the time, and suddenly just walking a mile became difficult. About 10 years back, he started, using oxygen to help him get around. And then five years ago, things finally got so bad that he was placed on a wait list for a lung transplant. And so that call was the transplant team calling him to say that after five years of waiting... They had awarded this lung to me if I was still on board.

So it was almost like you're a sweepstakes winner. It may be. And did you feel like a sweepstakes winner or were you like, oh... Well, I had to actually tell myself that I always said that if one was made available, I would take it. And it's going to make a great story when it's all said and done. So on the walk back, I called and I said, we're in, and damn the torpedo is full speed ahead. And from there, this year's long glacial paste process started moving very fast. It was pretty much honeypack your bag.

My folks hopped in the car, drove the three and a half hours south to the hospital in Madison, Wisconsin. We got down there about 5.30, and, you know, within 45 minutes, I was basically immobilized because I had things coming out of every orifice. And then just a couple hours after that, very early that next morning, the surgeons came in and said, it's time. And they just told me to relax. What's the next thing you remember? Well, I woke up and my arms were strapped to the gurney and I had a breathing tube down my throat and you just got hit by a bus basically with that operation.

But that was the beginning. Now, sitting in my dad's hospital room as he was coming to, I really realized for the first time then that this was, like this wasn't over. The phrase is, you're just exchanging one major set of problems for another major set of problem. The biggest being the threat of rejection.

In fact, about 50% of folks who get a lung transplant only live about five years. And you can always be on the wrong side of that. I'm sure that that had sort of been explained to us, but I didn't really imagine what that meant until we saw him lying there. So there were all these sort of terrifying questions surrounding all of us. And I think we wanted to find a way to talk about all those terrifying questions without having to actually discuss them.

And so the way we decided to talk about this was we inserted. this intellectual or legal question. The question was, who had ownership of this lung throughout this entire process? Because, like, I don't know, if they're transporting a suitcase full of $100 bills, like, somebody has to be responsible for that suitcase every step of the way. This organ is essentially valued as much as a suitcase full of $100 bills. So who the heck was responsible for it? Who owned it?

Who was liable for it each step of the way here? And when did I have complete ownership of the lung? That was the ultimate question. Wait, so you and your, is this you and your mom and brother talking about this? Or is this like, are you talking about this with your dad? It started between Barbara and I. Barbara, you're. My partner.

Your partner. Yeah. Okay. And from there, the circle of conversation grew as sort of as the week went on. And, yes, eventually my dad was roped into it and my dad was a lawyer, so he had some thoughts on all this. Oh, it's funny. Yes. So wait, but isn't it kind of a simple matter?

I mean, I would imagine that when the lung is in the donor. By the way, do you know anything about the donor? We don't know. It's all kept quite confidential. Essentially, there's a process through which my dad has sent a thank you note sort of into a black box that is the nonprofit organ donation machine. and that will be delivered to them, and then if they would like to reach back out to him, they can do so. But up until this point, that hasn't happened. I see.

Okay, so getting back to it, so I would think that when the lung is in the donor's body, it is in that person's possession, then it's taken out. And then at that sort of intermediate stage, it's in the hospital's possession as they transport it. And then when it goes into your dad's body, he then immediately assumes ownership. Wouldn't it be as simple as that? Well, you'd think so, right? Okay. So nothing that really looks simple ever is very simple, at least when lawyers get involved. This is Fred. Yeah, I'm Fred Kate. I'm a professor of law at Indiana University, Mauer School of Law.

He's the guy I ultimately called to try to tease out an answer here because he's written a lot on the law's surrounding organ transplants. And he said the first thing you've got to understand. Well, first of all, property is a really special thing in the law. Code of Laws by Hamarabi. And by that he means, many of the oldest written laws we have, as humans, were about protecting property. Historically, protecting property was, you know, very much at the heart of it. Without witnesses or contracts, he has no legitimate claim. They set out to settle disputes over ownership.

If an enemy take away from him anything that he had. Assess damages. The broker shall be free of obligation. And over time, the number of things the law protects has only grown. You know, intangible things like intellectual property, you know, I can own a copyright now. And so we have a respect for property that's reflected in the law that is really quite distinctive. Okay. But having said all of that, we don't really allow property rights in most body parts.

And moreover, the law doesn't let us call the human body property. Now, obviously in this country, there was a time when it did. But then you had the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery. and since then... It could be sort of a squeamishness. It could be a reaction to the prohibition on slavery that we don't want to ever give the notion that one person can own another person's body.

Since then, Fred says, U.S. law has gone very silent on questions of ownership and bodies. And so, as a consequence, when someone donates you an organ, legally, you have no ownership claim over that organ. Yep, yeah. We're just not willing to call it property.

Okay. I think I get that. Where it gets sort of strange then, however, is that apparently that same prohibition applies to your own body. Yeah. You don't have property interests in your body. And so although you can donate them and you can leave them in your will, we don't really treat them like property. Wait, so you're born with a lung in your body. You don't own that thing that's been with you since birth?

Correct. It is yours, but you don't own it. Well, and are we quibbling over the word property here or ownership? This is what lawyers do. We don't call it quibbling. This is what we make our money doing is arguing over property. If it's not property, what is it? What's the term at that point? Yeah, I don't think we really have a term for that.

Now, can you hear me? I can't. When I relayed this to my dad. You don't own your own organs. Right. Yes. Yes. He was as confused as I was.

At the risk of a pun, they've certainly carved out an interesting concept here. Yes. And it turns out the consequences of this legal carve-out are spectacularly strange. Let's say you drew a little bit of blood out of your arm one evening for, I don't know why. And you put it in a vial in your refrigerator. And that night, a burglar breaks into your home, your apartment, goes into the refrigerator, and steals that blood. That thief would not be charged with theft for stealing that blood. There might be criminal claims like breaking and entering,

but I just don't think there's going to be a property claim there. Because they didn't actually steal something that was your possession. Equally strange. This has come up a couple times where... Richard Batista, his wife Donnell went into renal failure. A husband, in this case a guy by the name of Richard Batista, donates his kidney to his wife. My priority was to save her life.

The operation goes well, her life is saved. True love. True love. But then. Batista says his wife began having an affair about two years after the transplant. The marriage falls apart. About a bitter divorce. They enter divorce proceedings.

It's a stunning demand. And the husband. Batista wants his donated organ back. Wants the kidney back. Shut up. True story. And of course, it was thrown out by the judge, in part because it was ridiculous. But also because the judge never said this, but he could have that like,

sorry, Bub, you never owned your kidney to begin with, let alone after you donated it to your wife. So I don't think you would ever find a situation where that would be treated as marital property. But ironically, and this is just going to make it even more complicated, blood, skin, and corneous tend to be an exception in the way we think about this in the law. Meaning what? That you can sell your blood or your skin. The law allows that? Don't ask why. That's just the way it is.

Even still, in these cases... You cannot call it property. I don't own it, but I could sell it? Exactly. When they took the blood, I would assume that they don't own it either. Well, the purchaser... The folks who do buy it from you, the blood bank or the hospital that has collected it, they own it. Huh.

And here's the kicker. So if you then broke into the blood bank to steal back your own blood, you could be tried. with theft. Right. And we have cases on this. Okay, that's definitely strange. Very odd. All right.

Well, what I think's interesting here is, like, I think we first started wondering this question as a tangible way to think about this far more abstract, impossible to answer question, which was like, when would we feel like this lung was really yours? Like, when would we feel like we didn't have to be worrying all the time? Right. And I don't know. I guess I'm not fully there yet. Oh.

Are you? Well, three months ago, I received a call from the nurse that's been handling all of our transplant affairs. and she just almost, as an aside said to me, I think you're going to stick around a long time with this lung because it's going so well. And I didn't know what she was talking about at first, and then she went on to explain that, you know, there's a mortality rate after five years.

Yeah, 50%. Something like that. And then she said to me, but I don't think you have to worry about that. I think you're going to be one of our 30, year candidates. Well, I'd never considered a 30-year plan in anything. I've always lived on about a five-year plan because when I was 45, given the decline of the pulmonary functions, I said to myself, I am going to be lucky. I'm going to be the luckiest man in the world if I could reach 60.

and in order to get to 60, I had to get to 50 and then to 55. And then at age 60, when I got lifted or thereabouts, you know, then I was on a five-year plan where no lungs came along. So I've always lived in these five-year gaps and have been happy to reach those goals. So anyway, it was, I was dumbfounded and it was pretty awe-inspiring to hear. those terms. Right then and there, I said that this is it. This is what this is all about. It's working this lung. And it's mine. I'm really happy for you. And for us, I'm happy for us. Well, thank you. I'm pretty pleased myself. Thank you. Good. Good.

And his dad. I'm listening to that, I said to Simon, I said, you know what? You know what this story doesn't have? Shakespeare. Oh, boy. Here we go. Well, because Merchant of Venice is about this very thing. Is it really?

Yeah. Remember the guy lends money to someone like Shylock lends money to Antonio. He says, if you don't pay me back, I get a pound of flesh. I go, sure. Is that what that phrase comes from? Yeah. And then he doesn't pay back. So Shilok goes to court and says, I want a pound of flesh, a pound.

A pound? A pound. I want it to, in a way, well, that will kill this guy. He said, that's the deal he signed. I own a pound of flesh from this man. Give it to me. And the entire play then turns on a court case about this very question. No way.

What happens? He wins. He gets his pound of flesh? Well, it's a trick ending. Oh. He wins. And then the judge says, of course, you can have the pound of flesh, but the contract did not include any blood.

So no blood. See if you can get the pound of flesh. But if any blood of Antonio comes your way, you have violated the criminal laws of Venice. You can have a pound of bloodless flesh? There is no such thing. So he's caught. That's some twisted shit.

I just said, I don't know. Like, you've been, like, this is not, this has been thought about by really smart people before this moment. That's interesting. Well, okay, so let's go on to the second big little question. This one was told to you by our producer, Becca Bressler. Hello. Hi. Did I tell you anything about what I want?

Nothing. Okay, great. I am talking to you about my question. Right. Comes from this guy, Jason Pfeiffer. Test us, says, says. Okay, I'm recording now. Is that always how you test your mic?

Yeah. This is Jason. Oh, that's fine. He hosts this podcast I really like called Pessimus Archive, which is a little too hard to explain right now, but it's really great. You should go check it out. Anyways, I reached out to him. I just sent him an email, and I said, you know, I'm a fan of your podcast. You seem like a really interesting guy.

I imagine you have some fairly interesting questions. So what keeps you up at night? What burning questions do you have that maybe I can help you answer? Yeah. All right. So you want to give it a shot? Your question. Yeah, my question.

Okay, so here we go. So, okay, so here's my question. How far back... Now I've psyched myself out because it's such a complicated question. I don't even know how to start. I do have a question. Okay, so here's my question.

My question is, how far back in time could I go and say a word that, you know, like an English word, a word that means, whatever it means to me in English, that, no, I'm going to do it again. It's hard. It's so hard.

I know. I came up. How did I even write this in an email so that it was communicated to you? I don't know. Okay, so here's my question. If I could walk into Bill and Ted's time machine and go back as far as possible, step out and say a word in English, what word could I say that the person who's hearing me would understand exactly what it means because the same sound and meaning have been retained across time.

So, like, what is the oldest word that I can say in English that the furthest possible person from a totally different type in culture? Like, I'd say the word and they'd be like, yes, I understand. I don't know how they would respond because I don't know their language. But they would know what I'm saying, right? They would know what I'm saying. What is that word? Does that make sense?

Yeah. I think that's it. I think it's great. great. What an odd question. What is the oldest English word that hasn't changed? Yeah, and I asked Jason, do you have a guess? Oh, uh, he was like, maybe something basic? Like a tree? Like something just elemental. Grass, dirt, water? That's probably where it would go. Okay, so I just started calling around. Hello? Sarah? Can you hear me? Sarah? Hello? First person. Hi. Okay, I can hear you. Sarah Thomason.

Professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan. And she told me, I can get you 6,000 years back. 4,000 BC. Okay. Yes, which is when you have this language known as Proto-Indo-European. Proto-Indo-European is the ultimate ancestor of English and all its relatives. English and all its relatives are known as Indo-European languages.

So Proto-Indo-European is like the great, great-great-grandparent of... Latin, Greek, German, Danish, Dutch. Most languages in India. It's all over the world, thanks to colonization. And who spoke it, by the way? What we call the proto-Indo-Europeans. So we're talking about, like, tribal forest people from in the... So they would have been people in Eastern Europe near the Black Sea.

Sort of fishermen, a little bit of hunting. Let's go with that. Let's say that. Okay. And so... And how long ago was this again? Six thousand years. Yep.

And I think my best guess, for a word that would have been understood way back then is, is. The word is. Huh. And why did she think that was the oldest one? So the way that she was thinking about it was certain consonants like T and K. Over 6,000 years. Changed a lot.

But S with like... Didn't change very much. It's just hung around. But Sarah told me that the way you would have pronounced is is... S-D. S-D. Well, that's not the same. It's not the same.

No. I know. I know. It's not the same. So I kept calling around. Yeah, sure. My name's Claire Bowen. Got a hold of another linguist at Yale University.

And I work on language change and language documentation and things like that. Okay, great. And so told Claire my question, and she was like, okay, how about... The word for me. Me. Yep. It's simple. It's elemental.

And it turns out that 6,000 years ago, me... In Proto-Indo-European was me. Me? No. I know. So, next up was Robert. Hey, Robert, can you hear me? Robert.

Linguist at the University of Toronto. Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you now. Okay, good. I can hear you now. And Robert's word was sack. SACK, you know, something we hold things in. Which would have been pronounced.

SAC. Oh. Called up another guy. Do you mind just introducing yourself? Right. My name is Yaroslav Gorbachev or Slava Gorbachev. Linguist at the University of Chicago. I came up with a few words.

that really have not changed that much. So the English words, three, six, eat, and apple. Yeah. And so what would those, like, proto-Indo-European pronunciations be? Yeah, they're basically the same. So, for example, three is creyes, and six is swax, and apple is Hubble, and eat is ed. No, none of them. Yeah.

Well, maybe the answer is there is no word that has survived, so they're just going to get as close as they can. Well, this is... Panumbral is the fancy way for that club. I can't answer your question exactly, but I can get under the cloud that covers this subject. Yeah, which is not super satisfying, right? No. What I want is a very precise, you know, literally the exact same word.

And so I thought, like, well, maybe I can't go back 6,000 years, but I can go back like 600 years or something. Right. And so how's it going? Going wonderfully. I got in touch with this guy, Andrew Raven. Professor of English at the University of Louisville. He's an expert in the Anglo-Saxon world. Literature and law of the period in England, pretty much between 500 and 1066.

Oh, very modern now. Okay, what's the word? Yeah, well, so I asked Andrew. Yeah, well, I was thinking my initial thought was, oh, the word must be an old English word. Like so much of our language, obviously, comes from old English. The thousand most common words in modern English, roughly 80% or so come to us directly from old English. So I thought, gee, it has to be old English. But then I started thinking...

What if not? Yeah, what if it were something all the way back with proto-Indo-European? No, that's... No, we've already done that. Just hear me out. Just hear me out. Because Andrew went about this a different way. The way that Andrew was thinking about this is he was looking for an English word that sounds the same or really similar in a bunch of other Indo-European languages. Because if he could find that one...

that was shared amongst these languages, that it would mean that they were all holding on to something from Proto-Indo-European. And I remembered that one of the things that sort of binds many Indo-European languages together is similar words for father. So Latin has pater, old English has Fader, old Norse Thar, German Vater. And then he also realized that mother...

Moutur German, Mata is Polish, is the same way. Fairly consistent. So he went to his dictionary of Protoan-European, and he looked up father and mother, and they're not quite the same. Mother is something like Mother, and Father is something like Pad. But what he did find is that in the dictionary, right under the words, mother and father, were these two other words. Mama and Papa. Mama and Papa.

Mama and Papa. So, yeah. It would almost, you know, almost certainly if we got into a time machine and went back to East Eastern Europe. Back on the Black Sea in the fourth millennium BCE, and we said, Mama or Papa, they would have understood us. Hmm. That's just a little too pat.

Oh, God. Are you raining on my break? Mama, Papa. Of course. Why did I think of it myself? Of course it would be. Yeah, sure. Sure.

It's like baby's first words, obviously. But the thing that did surprise me that I thought was really cool in talking to Andrew is that the words Mama and Papa occur. in virtually every language. So obviously all the languages that come from proto-Indo-European. Papa in French. Mama in Norwegian. Papa in Latin.

Mama in Italian. Greek papas or papas, grandfather. But also... You'll see similar sound patterns in Chinese. Mama and Baba. Or in Korean. Ama and Appa. Like, it's not just Indo-European languages.

These sounds show up in Swahili, in Eskimo, in Hebrew, Arabic. The technical term for this is their linguistic universe. They just go right across the board. So you just came up with an answer that's like that for everybody. Yeah, you find these sounds in a vast majority of languages. And why is that? Well, Andrew, Andrew says that no one's really quite sure. It may be that the M sound, because it only involves the lips and the vocal cords,

same for Papa, the P sound, is just particularly easy for babies. It's been guessed that perhaps the lip movements involved in saying, mama are similar to the lip movements involved in latching onto a woman's breast. Ultimately, we don't really know why, or at least the babies know, but they're not telling. But, you know, with the very fact that the first words we learn to say as babies are also the oldest words, that's actually a really lovely thought. Oh. I called Jason to tell them what I learned.

That, is that where they come from? Are we saying Mama and Papa because those are sounds babies can make? Yes, the easiest sounds they can make. Yeah, exactly. That's awesome. That's really awesome. You know, what's so cool is that I was thinking at first about basics, trees and stuff. But actually, that wasn't basic enough.

The most basic thing is the first relationship that you can understand and the first sound that you can make about it. that's the most basic it gets. Becca Bresler and Matt Kilty produced that story with her. You know what's funny is that most of the time I feel like Dada comes first for some reason. Does it? Yeah. It shouldn't. Well, I know.

I mean, it's always a great, it's always like this classic moment of offense where the mom's like, what? Why are you saying him first? This is what happened with me. It was that she was like, oh, really? Really? You're going to go to him. first. Not to the person who birthed you and who is feeding you.

And I said, I didn't. And what look do you put on your face? Sheepish pride? I was like, he doesn't know what he's saying. Anyhow, let's go to break. Shall we? Yes, let's shall. Let's do, let's shall.

Let's do that. Let's shall. Let's shall. Yeah. This is Carrie Klune from LaGrange, Illinois. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Albert P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.

Okay, ready? Three, two, and hey, I'm Chad, I'm Brumran. I'm Robert Krollovich. Radio Lab is what we're doing. Yes, and we are in the midst of Big Little Question, Part 3, Friends and Family Edition. And you know how we said at the beginning that we're going to give, we're going to nod to the questions we can't get out of our heads and that maybe are a little bit embarrassing. Right. I don't know if we said that last part at the beginning, but we're saying it now.

And this next one satisfies both of those. Griteria, it comes from producer Annie McEwen. She delivered it to producer Matt Kilty. Are you recording yourself right now? Yeah. Okay, great. So this is a McEwen to Kilty? Oh, yeah.

Okay. I don't know. I guess maybe we could start by, like, how would you feel if I called you a Neanderthal? I would feel like a dummy. Dumb, dumb, yeah. It feels like something you say it to big, dumb men is how I feel. And then so if I say the word Neanderthal, what do you visualize? Like a bigger head, like a big blockhead and a really big barrel chest.

And what is that, what is the person doing? Punching stuff. Like what? Anything around. I think the image that comes to mind is something hairier, clums. She's punched over, brutish. This is Evelyn Gigoda. I am a PhD student in Harvard Human Evolutionary Biology Department.

And like most people, you know, researching a topic she's got a Google alert set up for the word Neanderthal. About half the time, it's an actual science story about Neanderthal. And the other half of the time is... Trump is an absolute Neanderthal on trade. People using the word Neanderthal to mean... Knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. Stupid. The Minister of Finance referred to her.

as, and I quote, a Neanderthal. Honestly, it makes me angry. Evelyn says this image of Neanderthals is just, it's just not quite, I don't know. It needs an update. Yes. I remember you saying last time we spoke in the phone, kind of the way that we think about Neanderth. Do you say Thal or tall? I honestly can never decide what I say it, which is embarrassing because I talk about them all the time.

What have I been saying? Have I been saying Neanderthal? I think Thal, but I feel like a bit of. of a weaner when I say Neanderthal. Same. I feel like such a weiner. That's why I say doll normally. Okay, let's say dull. Okay, great. Yeah. So like when did the wrong image get like stuck in our brains?

Yeah, so it got stuck in our brains about a hundred years ago back in France with this guy named Marcelam Boul. He was a paleo paleoanthropologist. And one day he was in his lab in Paris and he was brought to this

this, at the time, was the most complete Neanderthal skeleton. never found, which was very exciting. And so he takes a look at this skeleton, and what he sees is something small, something curled over, hunched, decrepid. And he interprets that. And the sort of famous drawing based off his interpretation turns out to look like this hunched over eight man.

That is where we get our idea. So that one skeleton then became what we now think of today, colloquially, as what an NFL is. But it turned out that this particular skeleton actually had a great deal of arthritis. Oh. Yeah. Actually, this skeleton was diseased.

Oh, but he just thought that's the way it was. Exactly. Yeah, it's like imagining an alien species coming to Earth and finding the skeleton they find that represents humanity is like an 85-year-old woman in a wheelchair or something. And they're like, oh, everybody looks like this. Yeah. And so tell me a little bit about what do we?

know about Neanderthals now? What are the things that are we are learning? How are they evolving in our minds? I would say that going from that brutish, woolly mammoth primitive Neanderthal picture, I would say a lot of scientists today have more of a sense of Neanderthal as a different flavor of humans. And this brings me to my question. Okay, so, I don't know, a few months back, Lattif Nasser and I, we were making this story. about these things called Pizzley bears, these hybrid polar bear grizzly bears. I remember. Yes, you were there.

And while we were hanging out in the studio, have offspring. Wait, wait, I thought that two different... I was trying to explain to you just how far apart evolutionarily these grizzly bears and polar bears are. They branch off evolutionarily like hundreds of thousands of years ago. And I threw out this analogy. Pretty much the same time, though, we broke off from the Neanderthals. Weiner. And so it would be like us meeting a Neanderthal out in the, you know,

the Crown Heights Bar or something, and going home with that person and creating an office. This is really specific. It sounds like you've had... Franklin Ave. April 10, call me. So I made that kind of dumb joke and it was very silly. But then, so that just sort of became a little bit, I don't know if serious is the right word, but the question kind of stuck around my mind, like a little Thorne. Like, wait, what would that be like? That's such a funny image meeting in Anatole in a bar. Yeah, could you even relate to each other?

Yeah. What would we have anything in common at all? Are we at all similar? So is that your question? Like if you met at the end at the bar, what would it be like? Yeah, like could we communicate? What would it sound like? Huh.

This is why I originally called Evelyn Jigoda. Okay. To help me imagine this. We can be so speculative here. So you're like free to step out of your like scientist hat and put on your artist's hat or whatever you want to do. Okay, but promise they'll betray me as taking off my scientist's hat. I will even say, I will even put that. Part inner. I will. Yeah, I will. I will. I will. Okay. Do you want to tell me, you want to set the scene?

Okay. So... Where are you? Okay, let's just say I'm at a jazz club. Cool. The lights are like dim. The music is kind of like that like steamy, um, like brush on the symbols type of jazz music. Maybe it's raining outside or just finished raining and I'm, you know, shaking my umbrella. Um, and I look around and I see like sort of a scatter. of homo sapiens. Some are playing pool. Are we living in a reality where it's like sometimes there's homo sapiens and sometimes there's Danderthals?

Or is this just how you... This is a special night. I'm looking around at all the people and my eyes come to rest on this one guy. Looks strong, very robust. He's got red hair. Red hair? Red hair? Yeah.

So Evelyn says they could have had red hair, brown hair, and most of it was on their head, so they didn't really have much more bodier than us. The implication of that is that Neanderthals must have had fire. Right. They must have had some sort of clothing. And are you playing it cool, or are you just like gawking? What are you doing? How close are you?

I'm playing it cool. I kind of like sidle up to him and slip into the stool next to him. You notice his head is kind of a weird shape. The back is protruding out. Got a pretty big nose. Smallest chin, brown eyes. Maybe he's working on, he's grinding up a medicinal plant to, you know, take the edge off. It's been a long day.

Evelyn says that there's now evidence that Neanderthals use plants to make medicine. And more incredibly, they also looked after they're sick and they're elderly. Aw. Such good people. Yeah. I know. He's got to get home soon to care for his grandma. And you're captivated.

You're like, this is something different but familiar. Who is this? You don't realize until he gets up just how short he is. It's about 5'4 foot 4. Completely by car. And he turns to me. And I'm like, oh my gosh, here we are. We're in my question.

We're just looking at each other. And? And I just wonder, like, what's the next step? Can he talk? Could Nandthal talk? I mean, this is one of the great debate. about whether nanosols had language. So we don't technically know if they could talk.

Right. It's really hard to tell just by looking at their DNA and their skeletal remains. But there's, like, check out all this stuff. Evelyn says that they had a variety of tools. They're able to hunt. Mammoths, the rabbits, this small game. They had art? Yes, like geometric cave painting.

And furthermore, the other really human things, that there's evidence of the Anasol's burying their dead. And you'd think, like with all of those things, how could they have done it without communication? That just makes me think they had language. Yeah, yeah, it makes me think that too, to be honest. Okay, so if they could talk, what would that sound like? What would this guy at the bar?

What would his voice sound like? Oh, goodness, that's very interesting. This is a human, this is a human throat. This is a Neanderthal. There's actually this BBC documentary made. back in 2005 where they tried to answer this question. So I imagine that they wouldn't have subtle sounds. It would be loud, very loud or very, very loud.

There's this vocal coach, and she is sort of interpreting all the things that they then knew about Neanderthals, bigger head, bigger nasal cavity. And a fantastic chest. And then giving direction to an actor. So Elliot. So this voice that they create, well, okay, let's just like bring it back into my bar scene. And imagine I ask this Neanderthal, can I have your number? Uh-huh. According to the BBC, his response would have sounded something like this.

Now speak. And two, three. Now let's make a sound. Just let's make a huge R. And again. That was the voice they came up with based on the science. Yeah, I mean, it's, but, you know, I thought like 14 years have passed, you know, probably the sciences have updated. What is, what is the better answer to that question today?

What is a more up-to-date version of this voice? Dr. Barney, are you there? Yes, I'm there. Oh, great. So I called up Dr. Anna Barney. I'm a professor at the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research in the University of Southampton. And she's one of the scientists that has tried to answer this question, partly by focusing on this tiny little U-shaped bone. The Neanderthal hyoid bone, the bone that supports the tongue.

It's right at the base of your tongue. Anybody who reads murder mysteries will know about it because it's the one that cracks when you're strangled. Ew, really? So this bone is a very, very important little bone for making sounds with your mouth. And Neanderthal skeletons have it too. But it hasn't really been clear exactly how they used it. Like, did they use it in the same way we do? So Dr. Barney's team, using computer modeling, they sort of diddle a bunch of things

to figure out where the high-eyed bone probably sat in the neck of the Neanderthal. So that gave us a slightly different shape of vocal tract to a modern human. And so then they took that shape and they sort of digitally pushed something like breath through it. Yes. Puffs of wind. Yes. What sounds were you going for? We were interested in what are called the quantal vowels, R, E, and O. So those are the ones, if you can produce those, then you've got the range of sounds that a modern human can make in terms of vowels. It's sort of like the primary colours of the basis of speech, is that right? That's right. Yes, you could think of them as analogous to the primary colors.

So the idea is, if they could say these three vowels, R-E, U. They would have been physically capable of some kind of language. That's right, yeah. Okay, and what did you find? So for E and O, we found a very good match. Oh. And for A, it sounds a bit dull compared to the modern human A. What does it sound like?

A bit flatter. A bit more like a. Oh. So they're like their as become aaws. Yeah. So are they still screaming and yelling, like the thing in the BBC? Well, when I asked Anna about that, she said, based on what we know now, there's no real evidence to support that.

I can't see why they wouldn't have the whole range of being able to whisper and being able to shout. Okay, good. Okay, so let's take a step. Oh, sorry, yeah. I'm just trying to say one last thing that I didn't even get to the- Again, Evelyn Jigoda. I feel like neonazole women are just like excluded from the depiction of the, you know? That is very true.

Totally the word neonosal colloquially implies, I think, in my head. Definitely, yeah. There were neon-inthal women. Wow, okay. Maybe I should meet a Neanderthal woman across a bar. Ooh. That's my kind of story. Okay, so let's return to our Neanderthal.

Except for this time, instead of a man... All right. It's a woman. Oh, fun character switch. That's right. Okay. And like the BBC, 14 years ago, I brought in a voice actor, Zandra Clark. So let's stand up, actually.

Okay, yeah. To be my Neanderthal. How tall are you? Five, two, and three quarters. Perfect. So beforehand I'd actually workshopped a couple of, I don't know, bar-appropriate phrases, I guess you could say, with Anna Barney, the sound scientist. Basically, like, what could we have this Neanderthal say? I was thinking like, hello, you are beautiful, or did it hurt when you fell from heaven, that kind of thing?

But she had kind of a different idea. And she gave me this one that's kind of weird, but it really does highlight that special vowel. Because there's a lot of ass in it, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, lots of ass. What was her phrase? Patience. Okay.

So I'm standing next to this woman at the bar. Just imagine the sister of the other guy. Uh-huh. She's a little bit shorter. She's got, like, brown hair, the same piercing brown eyes. And I just say, hey. And she pauses for a moment. And then she says,

The cot sought on the mott. The cat sat on the mat. Yes. That's the first thing she says back to you. There's vowels in it. You got your vowels. And that's almost like it's so opaque. You probably kind of lean in, you know?

It's mysterious. So come here often? Yes. I'm Annie. Annie. That's right. My name. That's my name.

Annie. Can I have your number? Can I have yours? Yeah. It's one, two, three. I thought your eyebrow is like Well I'm picking you up No it's cool

Go for it I'm not going to just have No facial expression So it's not a dramatic difference Which I think is itself dramatic Right because I don't know I just think it's so totally amazing

How similar they are to us And like the more and more we learn about them The closer and closer they become To being our very close cousins The cot Sought On the Malt Not only a close cousin

they're actually a part of us. For a lot of humans, we have literally Neanderthal ancestors. For a lot of us, we have like 2% Neanderthal DNA in us. And when I spoke to another scientist... My name is Elr al-Shimanihani, I'm a paleoanthologist. About, you know, I was just asking all these scientists, what would it be like to meet a Neanderthal at a bar? She actually had this to say.

What we think about if a Neanderthal was around today, some people would argue that Neanderthals are all around today. Because if we each carry about 2%, you know, Neanderthal DNA, in us, are they really that extinct, especially when you consider that the 2% that I carry isn't the same 2% that you carry. So actually, amongst humans living today, we have, I mean, the estimates vary right now,

but some estimates go up as far as 70% of the Neanderthal genome within Homo sapiens living today. Wait, is she saying if you take all the 2% that are in various individual humans and atom up, you get to 70? Up to 70% of a Neanderthal walking among us, the ghost of a Neanderthal. Wow. That is cool.

I know. It's super cool. So when you say, you know, what would happen if you met a Neanderthal and my boss today, you've kind of met bits of a Neanderthal involved. That explains so much. Yes. All right, Annie. Annie.

Any. Ani. The cart. Sought. On the mott. Producer Anna McEwen Oh boy So in Neanderthal reading Dr. Seuss

It would just It would strangle It would be a form of murder I sentence you To reading the cat in the hat That would be like a Neanderthal prison Dr. Seuss Oh my God

Shall we round things out? We have one more big little question. Yes, we should go to the final question. This final question... Oh, I really like this one. Yes, it comes from our... I mean, not that I didn't like the other ones, but this one just is so wonderfully weird.

It's very crullochy this one. So if there's time, which they won't be, I want to dedicate what's about to happen to people who were living in New York when I was growing up, may Mr. and Mrs. Purple. They were these people who just drove on a purple bicycle dressed in only purple

and lavender tie-dye clothing, had purple-colored hair, purple kind of makeup, and they were just very purple, and they were always here and there in New York, and they became a kind of legendary couple. This is pre-Prince? Way pre-Prince, and I'm sorry to say Mrs. Purple are now in heaven. Maybe with Prince. But their heaven might very well be perfectly described by what you're about to hear. Interesting.

Interesting. Okay, so let me set it up. So this comes from producer Rachel Cusick, and... Rachel, in addition to making radio with us, formerly was a professional maker of food. She worked in a restaurant for two years. I would call her a professional cook, although apparently that is maybe putting it too strongly,

according to Rachel, but she's a food wizard. And regularly, every couple of weeks, will bring in these, like, food inventions that she makes in the wee hours of the night, like hallucinogenically colored rainbow, shortbread cookie things that are incredibly delicious

but also incredibly weird. That will set you up for what's about to happen for sure. Yes. So she ran into this question that I guess you could say combines all of that and throws in a bit of science as well. It was like a science meets food meets journalism like intersection

that I like was like yeah this is my wheelhouse. Question really begins with this guy. How are you doing? Oh hi. How's it going? Oh it's excellent. Can I ask you to introduce yourself? So I'm Anders Sandberg. I'm a senior research fellow at the Oxford Martin School at University of Oxford. So I guess to start, I was wondering if you could tell me how you first stumbled across this question. Like set the scene for me. Where were you? What were you doing? Well, I was going back to my office in Oxford.

He was on a bus coming back from a meeting. It's summer, it's warm, and I'm tinkering with my laptop because the countryside is pretty boring. So he's surfing around Does they have like Wi-Fi on buses? I don't know. I was wondering that. I guess that's a thing now, right? I think it maybe is the thing,

but maybe I think he's so dedicated that he brings his own form of Wi-Fi with him. Anyhow. So he's on this bus and he starts answering questions from this website called Stack Exchange. What is that? I think of it like Yahoo answers, but for like science nerds where people post questions,

some are science-related. And then anyone can come and answer them. Who are these people? Are these all smart? like academics? No, I think it's kind of a mix. There's like teenagers who want help with homework and then there's just random Joe Shmos who like are taking a break from Reddit and they're like, let me show you how I can disprove Einstein right now. And then there's Anders on this bus. And he's like scrolling, maybe looking out the window every now and then. And then he like at a certain point on the ride, he sees this question.

What if Earth turned into blueberries? It was posed just like that. Like what if the Earth turned into blueberries? More or less, there was a note that, of course, it's unpacked blueberries rather than already compressed blueberries. In other words, take this earth we're living on, replace that dirt and water and rock with an earth-sized ball pit of blueberries. What would that look like? What? Why would someone ask that question? I want to take a moment right now because I think who would not ask that question?

It's a fundamental. I think there's two kinds of people in this world. It's like people who think it's an amazing question. And people who are like, get out of here. No, and there's also the kind of person who just needs to be convinced. Why is this an amazing question? Because it's like hardcore science. It's on this website next to serious science questions.

But it's also like the most fantastical form of that. It's like, let me work within this structured world. Like the laws of physics, planetary science, and see where we can go. I love what if questions. I'm a big fan of taking some assumption and see where does it lead. So Anders says the moment he saw that. question pop up. I just felt, oh, yes, I can totally see how one can answer this.

But as soon as Anders got started, the people over at Stack Exchange, the moderators, closed the question because apparently they thought it was too stupid. When the moderators on Stack Exchange took down the question, I got really angry. Why? Wait, tell me why you were so angry. This is a good question because it allows us to exercise what we know about physics. He's not even a physicist. I'm a dilettante.

I'm an amateur. He's just like, look, I'm not. not even in this world, but these formulas are out there for everyone to use. This is like why we have lots of physics is so that we can imagine these new worlds. Yeah. That's actually why I wrote the paper. A very technical paper. Indeed.

About this blueberry world, the physics of it, how it would behave, what it would look like, what it would feel like. Can you walk me through just so I have an image in my mind? I'm on this blueberry earth. What's the first thing that I would notice? Well, you would feel light. All right, okay. Because suddenly gravity got much smaller. Why exactly?

Well, results show that the density of acerola pulp in the temperature range between 303 and 353 calvin. Andrew says if you calculate the density of uncompressed blueberries. They're about 700 kilos per cubic meter. Take that, plug it into another formula. You can immediately calculate how much less mass would blueberry earth have. than Earth. And from that... GM divided by R squared. There is a simple formula to calculate the surface gravity,

and it turns out that you get about the same gravity as on the moon. Blueberry Earth would have 16% of the gravity that you would have on regular Earth. So we can bounce. Exactly. So you would be able to bounce around on the surface of blueberries. Sounds so amazing. It does. But there is an interesting problem.

Of course, blueberries, well, they're squishable. So Andrew says what will happen is that as you're bouncing on the surface of blueberries, you will radiate pressure downwards into the center of the planet's core. Blueberries will reduce its mass to point. And there, blueberries at the center of the planet will start to burst. So now the squishing stars. They burst and burst and burst until it's more liquid than it was. Blueberries at the center.

And as that happens, the whole planet starts. to compress. And normally when you pack these blueberries, there's like little corners of air tucked in between each one. But once that's being replaced with liquid that is being squeezed and squeezed, that air has to go somewhere and it gets pushed up, up, up, up, like a volcano through the core up to the surface of blueberry Earth. What happens then? Then... And then the gacer start.

The total gravitational energy of a constant density sphere. Remember, it's lunar gravity, so you're going to... get gazers going very far. This is going to have big effects. This is the energy output of the sun over 20 minutes. Wait, tell me how high up. I've never seen a geyser. This is not a puny little geyser in Yellowstone that has just a kilometer of rock and

water boiling out. This got thousands of kilometers of moving air and blueberry pulp. So it's going to be tremendously dramatic. These blueberry geysers, are they hot? They must be hot. Well, yeah. One of the things you might have noticed if you're pumping up your bike is that when you compress a gas, it gets warmer. So this implosion heats up things.

You're going to get boiling blueberry jam all over the place. I just want to get like a piece of toast. Totally. And the gazers, I think some of them are likely to launch that some of the blueberries into orbit. Wow. So these blueberry comets are sure. streaking across the sky. They will turn into the weirdest shooting stars you could possibly imagine.

And meanwhile, geysers are exploding everywhere. And because all this jam is, like, shooting out from the center, it has to go somewhere. And when it drops back down to Earth, it just covers the Earth in warm blueberry jam. And so it's no longer, like, a surface of full blueberries. It's just like an exoplanet, like an ocean planet of blueberry jam. Oh, you mean like the whole thing is now an ocean? Yeah. No land.

No land. Oh, that's pretty cool to imagine. And is it like an ocean like we would think of an ocean? Okay, so it's kind of similar, but it's going to be like a little bit more epic. Like there's going to be massive waves. Like here on Earth, at some point the waves got like squished down because gravity's like, no-uh. Gravity pulls them down. Yes.

But here is less gravity, so they can be actually much taller. Can you go surfing on blueberry jam ocean waves? I think you can. The tricky thing, and this might be easy, for us who are not used to surfing is that they're going to be moving more slowly too. Ooh, that kind of sounds like my ideal to learn how to surf is just to like go slowly in a jam wave. Yeah. And then if you fall in, you just get to like lay in jam.

Oh yeah, it's quite delicious. Okay, so as you're surfing these jam waves, which by the way is now your amazing life, you notice a few things first. You notice that the air is pretty thick, about 10 times thicker than it is on regular earth. Which means that you're going to have enormous clouds. The scale height of the atmosphere, H equals KBTMG, where M is the mean molecular mass. It's a little bit hazy. The sky is this blue, purple, white, milky color, like swirls.

I think you will probably find that it's going to be relatively dim. Another thing you'll notice is that the days will be a little bit shorter because the blueberry Earth is compressed. So you spin a bit faster. We end up with a planet with 0.887.9 times angular momentum. gives So you're there, you're surfing, and then you look up and you notice the moon.

You forgot about the moon. The problem for the moon is it's bound to Earth right now. But only because the Earth is heavier. If Earth turns into blueberries, the mass goes down a lot. And as it does, the Earth can no longer keep hold of it.

It's got a lot of other things that has to worry about. So it will go off into an orbit around the sun. So you see the moon kind of just recede into the sky. But now you have an interesting problem. Blueberry Earth is going into an orbit around the sun, and the moon is also orbiting the sun, and they're roughly in the same orbit.

Not quite, but they're very close. So from time to time, you might just see the moon swirl by at nighttime. And then eventually, according to the math, there will come a time when they sink up, get closer, closer, closer. A kilogram of lunar material has potential energy GMBE. So over long periods of time, it's pretty likely that... later. They will collide.

The blueberry earth and the moon will collide? Oh yes. It's going to be a big splash. Who's going to win? My big guess is that the moon ends up as a core under the now fried ocean. It's as if we just absorbed the moon and put it into blueberry earth and this moon gets to live within blueberries forever. More or less, yes. Even imagine the moon splashing into it

is probably going to send blueberry jam across the solar system leading to all sorts of very hilariously colored craters on other planets. It's like the messiest food fight of the universe. Indeed. Oh, man. So the calculations I've been describing

you do them when you do planetary science. There is no life I know to compare with your imagination Our brains developed to handle the normal world around us. But in some sense there was an overshoot. We can imagine things that are not here. We can think about stuff that ought to be here or could be here and must not be here.

And then we supplemented imagination with science. So we got ways of reasoning about strange situations. So this is an expression of being human. Imagining other worlds, I think, is what really makes us human. Thank you so much for coming in on a Saturday to talk about blueberries. This is great. I think it's totally awesome. Producer Ray Cusick, also special thanks in this episode to Sandra Clark and Alexander Glacier.

Well, look, I'm on team blueberry now. It's not like I'm an antagonist anymore, but maybe I've just lost my joad fever, robber. I don't think so. You think? I don't know. You did succumb. Some people get joie early, some people get joie middle, and some people get joie thrust upon them. Shakespeare.

Yeah, of course. No, but maybe the distance one has to travel. You pick a person out at 333 on any given Tuesday, and you say, how far emotionally and spiritually do you have to travel to get to joy? How far is that journey? My journey used to be like, I'll just take one step to the left. I'm there. Now it's like I got to board a plane. I got to take off.

I got to fly all the way across the world. I got to land the plane in Tahiti. And then I'm in joy. Do you know what I'm saying? Yes. You have slid further from the ideal than you wish to be. It's troubling me. But see, that's the advantage of a story like this.

This is a story that can gently tug you the way gravity does and then land you in a totally magical place. A jammy soup of glory. A jammy soup of glory. All purple. Thank you, Rachel. Yeah, yeah. But you know what I will say, just be just as a closing thought. Your 80 hertz is really good right now.

Is it? Yeah. Yeah, you got a little bit of a gravel happening. Well, that's because I have a lot ofitis or something. Under the gravel, I hear some really good 80 hertz. Well, thank you, Jay. You're welcome. All right, let's get out of here on Chad.

I'm Rod. me. I'm Chad Ibumrod. I'm Robert Krooovich. Thanks for listening. More questions coming at you in a few days. To play the message, press 2. Start of message. Hi. Hi. This is Evelyn Schoto. This is Jason Pfeiffer. Hello. This is Timothy Adler from O'Clair, Wisconsin. Okay, I'm going to do the credit. And I'm sitting here with my baby call it. Radio Lab was created by Jad Avamrod and is produced by Soren Wheeler. John Keith is our director of sound design. Suzy Lekdenberg is our executive producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler Becca Bresler

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