Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Habsburg Jaw

Episode Date: July 29, 2020

The Habsburg Jaw is the result of inbreeding. But what is it? Click play and learn! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck.

This is short stuff. Let's go. Hey-ho, let's go with the Habsburgs. Habs? God. Take two. Habsburg jaw. Yeah, the Habsburgs.

Oh, man. I hadn't said it out loud until just now. We're in big trouble. The Habsburgs jaw. I think the tendency is to want to say Habsburg with a P, but it's Habsburg with a B. Although in America, we've added the P, and it's just so prevalent now, and we're America.

That's what it is now. It's Habsburg. Yeah, with a B is in, boy, would you look at that jaw? Right. This is not to be confused. The Habsburg jaw is not to be confused with the Hellsburg jaw, which is what happens when you walk into a Hellsburg diamond store,

your jaw hits the floor because the prices are so reasonable on really great jewelry. Oh, man. If you don't get a kickback on that, I just see you next time and you've got the big love, hate diamond rings, like radio Raheem from Do The Right Thing. I want a love, hate diamond grill.

Sweet. I wonder how that sound podcasting. Probably not great. Well, Hellsburg diamonds, let's figure it out, you know? All right, so who we're talking about are the Habsburgs, and they were a big ruling family in, well, kind of all over the place in Europe. At the peak of their fame, I guess,

or the peak of their rule, they had Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Bohemia, Slovakia, Croatia, and a little bit of Italy, Romania, and Poland all under their purview. Yeah, like not just their purview under their thumb and their iron grip of this dynastic family that ruled these areas for hundreds of years. Yeah.

I mean, up until 1918, it took the First World War to break up the Habsburg dynasty. Yeah, that's a long time. It really is because they originally came to power, Chuck, in I think the 13th century in Germany, when a guy named Rudolf I became the Roman German king, which is, you know, nothing to sneeze at for sure, but apparently he had a rival in nearby Austria

in the form of Auto-Car-Ill-Premiesel. I'm going with Premiesel. Yeah, it feels like there should be another vowel in there, but there's not, so. That why he's doing like double or triple duty right there, but it's working. Well, anyway, we're going to call him Auto-Car. Auto-Car said, you know what?

I don't really recognize you as the Roman German king, so we're going to be rivals, which really doesn't matter in this story beyond the fact that it drew Rudolf I's attention to Austria. And so when Auto-Car was killed, he kind of moved in and set up shop and basically took over Austria. Yeah, and so that's where they got their start,

and then for the next century, basically, they really did a lot of conquesting, conquering, and they took over, I don't want to say something dumb in front of you. It's great, it's charming. They took over the Tirol, which is the place in the Alps that Austria and Northern Italy shared in the mid-1300s. Yeah, and also, Chuck,

where Uzi lived and died thousands of years earlier, he was Tyrolean. And by the time the 1500s rolled around is when they were really rolling, the Emperor Maximilian, or I guess future emperor, married Charles the Bold's daughter, Mary, and then all of a sudden they had control of Burgundy and also a little cache.

Yeah, from what I understand, that was an enormous move. So they were making all sorts of moves, right? They were making moves, gaining and consolidating power through conquering, through marrying. Well, just basically those two things, but it was working for them big time. I bet there was one more thing. Let's see, how would you do that?

You would conquer things, you would marry people, and then you would be known for sending really great thank you notes as follow-ups? Sure, that could definitely win you some friends. Yeah. Okay, that's what the third thing was. So here's the deal with this jaw, because you saw the title of the episode

and you've heard us say that a couple of times, is they had jaws that would make Jay Leno blush. If you looked up some of these folks, Joseph I, Charles I of Spain, Charles II, Leopold Wilhelm, they had this very, very prominent lower jaw and basically people got together and studied this over the years and we'll get a little bit more into why this happens.

And they said, we're just gonna go ahead and name this the Habsburg jaw, because it's so prevalent in this family line. Yep, and they did. That's why everybody calls it the Habsburg jaw. And if you have never seen it before, you probably haven't, didn't really realize it. But if you haven't, either way,

just go look up Habsburg jaw, H-A-B-S-B-U-R-G jaw. And it will bring up some old-timey middle ages, Renaissance-era oil paintings. And you will see quite clearly what people are talking about when they say the Habsburg jaw. So if you haven't seen it before, it's just a very prominent lower jaw and there's an underbite.

And it's just, it's very distinctive. Yeah, and if you don't, if you're driving or something right now and you can't look it up, you know, like the cartoonish characters of like the blue bloods who are like, oh, that's astounding. That face that the cartoon makes is they're drawn with the Habsburg jaw.

They're actually making fun of aristocrats, as we'll see in a minute. And here's the thing, we don't wanna make fun of anyone that has something like this, but we were just trying to figure out a good way to describe it. It's a prominent lower jaw, such that there's even an underbite.

Yeah, so, well, let's take a break real quick and we'll come back and talk about it a little bit more, okay? Yes. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

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Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

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Who you love? All right, Chuck, so we're back. And we were talking kind of describing the Habsburg Jaw. There's actually a medical term for it, because the Habsburgs aren't the only ones who have this jaw. And you can have it to varying degrees, but technically it's called mandibular prognathism. And that is where the lower jaw juts really far forward

so that you have what you would colloquially call an underbite, right? But with the Habsburg jaw in particular, it's to such a degree that the teeth no longer even line up. It's just really sticking out there. That's mandibular prognathism. And then what they also figured out is that the Habsburg also had something called mandibular deficiency too, right?

Yeah, and that can affect your ability to eat, your ability to speak. And I don't have anything to this degree, but if you remember from Bruxism, I've got a sort of an even bite and my lower jaw sticks out a little bit. I'm not Habsburgian. No.

But I feel their pain. With the Habsburg jaw in particular, it's pronounced enough to a degree that like the musculoskeletal composition is different. It's just a very prominent look, like you said. So what they figured out was that because of this, and based on some documentary evidence too, that some Habsburgs at least,

I believe Charles II, the ruler of Spain, there's a contemporary account of him from the 18th century that basically said like his jaw was so out of line, his teeth were so out of line because of this jaw, he couldn't chew, he had to swallow his food whole. Can we just read this? It's so great. Yeah.

This is from Spain under Charles II by Alexander Stanhope. That's Doug Stanhope's grandfather. Wait, who's Doug Stanhope? The Stanhope comedian. Oh, that's right. And he was speaking about Charles II. He has a ravenous stomach and swallows all he eats whole

for his nether jaw stands so much out that his two rows of teeth cannot meet to compensate which he has a prodigious wide throat so that a gizzard or liver of a hen passes down whole and his weak stomach not being able to digest it, he voids in the same manner. So he's just pooping out whole chicken gizzards. Gizzard and gizzard out.

Yeah, that's the old statement. So when people started talking about the Habsburg jaw, like it's because they figured out over time, like this is a real thing and it was very distinct for this family. And it became a thing years ago, centuries ago, people were aware of the Habsburg jaw and just remarked on it.

But it wasn't until I believe that the 21st century that people started doing studies on it, as best they could. I guess you could say they're kind of made up studies in that there was no actual genetic testing to figure out what accounted for the Habsburg jaw. But they were doing the best they could based on portraiture of prominent Habsburgs

and came up with some pretty interesting stuff. Well, yeah, I mean, do we need a drum roll here to say what's actually going on? If you haven't figured it out by now, then sure, we'll give you a drum roll. Dave, will you put a drum roll in, please? Alrighty, the Habsburgs like to keep it in the family. And when we say keep it in the family,

we mean really keep it in the family. This jaw was a result pretty obviously of inbreeding. Yes, which is not to say that anybody who has mandibular prognathism today is the result of inbreeding. Of course not. Yeah, I mean, it's a recessive trait. And when people that aren't in the same family get together,

you know, you're gonna have those heterozygous genes and they're gonna carry different traits and that's all how it's supposed to work. But if you are in the same family, that may not be the case if you have homozygous LLs and get together with a family member and make another family member, they're gonna have those same traits.

Right, right, because the chromosomes are going to be so similar that the chances of both parents having the recessive gene and donating that to the kid really increases the likelihood of that kid having that recessive trait. There's a guy that's quoted in this article. He's a geneticist named, this guy's name is great, Montgomery Slatkin.

That's a great name. He says that if you are a child of inbreeding, you have, your chances are hundreds of thousands of times greater of receiving these recessive traits than of children of parents who aren't related in any way. That's right. So that was it, the Habsburgs, they wanted to consolidate power so much

so that they just said, you're marrying your sister whether you like it or not. And the son would say, but done. And that's it for short stuff, everybody. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app.

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