Stuff You Should Know - Who Gets to Name Continents?

Episode Date: March 22, 2016

America is named after Amerigo Vespucci, right? Maybe not. And who named Australia? Find out the unusually uncertain origins of the continents and other interesting stuff in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there. So this is Stuff You Should Know, geography. We are in North America. That's right Chuck. According to some. Yeah.

It's actually according to everybody. No, not everybody. Oh yeah? Yeah, we'll get to it. Okay. We don't want to spoil like basically the fact of the podcast already. This is as I said about geography and if this kind of thing floats your boat, I strongly suggest you go look at how maps work or read or listen to that episode.

Yeah. That was a good one. It was. Remember we found that like people, other people see the world, the map upside down? Sure. You know? Yeah. You look at it.

Agreed. And that actually kind of comes into play not just with how you look at a map and say, oh, I'm on top and you're on bottom. So therefore you must be developing. Right. Naming continents is a kind of a, well humans are kind of big on names I guess. Yeah. Agreed.

We're big on location. Sure. We're big on identifying with where we're from, with where we live, that kind of stuff. Yeah. And group out group BS, you know? Yeah. And boy, I have to say for a short-ish podcast, which this is going to be, it's not going to be our longest one.

Let's take an ad break. No, not yet. I hazard to say that I learned more in this than 10 Barbie podcasts and then 10 Barbie podcasts. Actually, that's not true. I learned a lot in that one too. I love that one. But this is just loaded with interesting stuff because I am not the biggest geography buff

for someone who is a math or a maps buff. Yeah. Well, you like maps for their artistry, right? Yeah. And I just ordered a great new map. I wish I could remember the guy's name, but it was, I read an article on this super detailed awesome map of the United States that this guy spent years and years drawing. Plotting the Arby's all over the country.

Not an Arby's map. That would be great though. Although you can just follow your nose. You don't really need. It always knows. You can just like smell the horsey sauce. I love that stuff. Although the Arby's sauce is by far the superior of the two.

Well, I think you got to mix them. That's the key. Not always. I'm more of a beef and cheddar mix with the Arby's sauce. It's delicious. Than the horsey sauce. Although I'm okay with horsey sauce sometimes. I haven't had Arby's in forever.

Oh yeah. I like it. It's delicious. I have a fairly disgusting roast beef sandwich. It's so good. Right. Yeah. All right.

Anyway, I ordered this amazing map and it hasn't arrived. I can't wait for it to get here though. It's going to actually, I'm going to frame this one I think. Okay. You don't have all your maps framed? No. You need like a huge, huge wing of your house and just have every map you have framed on the wall.

I should. And be like, I'm starting to see a pattern here. That would mean I have a huge room to my house all to myself and that's not true. Uh-uh. Unfortunately. You know how to swing a hammer, don't you? Yeah. Just build another room.

Chuck room. Uh-uh. I wish, my friend. So Chuck, we were talking about continents and their names and all that stuff, right? Yes. It turns out that when you think about the continent's names, some of them seem kind of ho-hum or whatever, but there's actually some really great stories behind these things. Agreed.

And we should probably start at the very beginning, way back, way, way back in 1948. Even further back than that. 1926. 100 million years ago. If you looked at the planet Earth, you would have seen that there weren't a bunch of different continents. So there was actually one huge continent that wore a headband and had enormous, like, forearms. Yeah.

They're Pangea. Yeah. What a stud. That continent was. Yeah. And there was one ocean. Uh, and the name of that ocean was Panthalasa. Yeah.

It wasn't all divided up. It was just one big chunk of land and surrounded by one massive ocean. Right. And then, as we'll see later. And this is a prominent theory, by the way. Right. Okay. We don't, like, no one was around back then, 200 million years ago, and be like, no to

2016. Right. This is the way things are land-wise around here. Yeah. Um, no. And this theory actually was, we've talked about it before. It had to have been in the Earthquakes episode. This guy was awesome.

Alfred Vegener. Yeah. Right. Back in, I think, 1915, he published his theory on Continental Drift. Yeah. It's pretty amazing. Um, the theory, well, there's some reasons behind it, but the theory is that, you know, the Earth has made up these big plates.

If you listen to our volcanoes or earthquake episodes, we talk a lot about that. And over time, these things cracked apart and shifted and drifted, uh, and we now have many continents. Right. And that's not what people thought for a very long time, like they, guess they just took for granted that the continents were the way they were. But Alfred Vegener, um, first of all, he noticed on a map like, wow, it looks like you could really tuck Africa, uh, East or West Africa into the Eastern part of South America really

nicely. Yeah. And in fact, the more I look at it, the whole thing looks like a puzzle that kind of fits together. Yeah. If you're, if you have a brain. So that's where he got his idea first. And then he started setting about proving it or supporting, coming up with evidence

about that. Yeah, that's good. And, um, one of the things he looked at was coal seams along, uh, edges of these puzzle pieces and found that they, uh, were composed of basically the same stuff. Yeah. Like coal in Pennsylvania, deposits in Pennsylvania were similar or the same to those in Poland and Germany and Great Britain. Yeah.

And that happened because what coal is, is basically compressed former organisms, decaying matter, right? Yeah. And so you would think that these different organisms would have evolved differently on different continents if they weren't together. And the fact that they were the same and decomposed in about the same amounts suggests that they were all part of the same land mass at one point. Pretty neat.

And then he also found fossils on different continents that really shouldn't have been the same. Yeah. He saw plant fossils and said, wait a minute, I'm finding this stuff in, in places that are wildly different from one another. Right. These fossils. So maybe again, that lends to my theory, uh, or how about this mountain range, the Appalachian

Mountains, very similar to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Maybe it was all one big mountainous mass at one point. And it turns out they probably were. That's right. What was the name of that mountain range? Uh, the Appalachians were part of. The central Pangea Mountains, uh, which apparently formed through the collision of the supercontinents of Gondwana and, uh, LaRusia.

Yeah. Because then we're also, um, in addition to this how stuff works article, you found a great article by Tia Ghosts, who writes for live science and writes some pretty great stuff. Yeah. This is really good. And Ghosts, um, is basically just broke it all out, like how Pangea formed, what Pangea broke into.

It's a really interesting article. Yeah. And concise. I like articles that it's not fluff, you know, right? Just like packed with. Yeah. Get to it right at the beginning. Okay.

I love it. And don't let up. Don't stop till you have enough. So, uh, in the article, they talk about the, uh, the process that spanned a few hundred million years, uh, with a continent called LaRusia. That's a great continent name. Part of it, which includes part of North America and some other microcontinents that formed eventually your America.

That's not bad. It sounds like a Kraftwerk album. Oh, it does totally. Your America crashes into Gondwana, which I mentioned before. And I like Gondwana too. I'm just going to say I like these, these pre current continent, continent names. Pre white dude names, right? I guess so.

But I think they were named by white dudes, probably more creative white dudes. And Gondwana included Africa, Australia, South America and Indian subcontinent. Yeah. So, like all of these, it's so hilarious that all of these, um, these ideas of nationalism and all this, man, if you'd just gone back a few hundred million years ago, you'd be neighbors. Yep. Let's all just lighten up.

Exactly. And that's actually a thing that we, we talked about in the maps episode two is like when you draw a map, you are, you're making a political statement. It's just, there's such a sense of otherness and togetherness based on geographical distribution. Yeah. And it is, it's, it's interesting. It says a lot about the human psyche. Yeah.

We should do a podcast one day on the human family tree. Yeah. We should. Super interesting. Yeah. Uh, so getting back to the super continent, a couple hundred million years ago, uh, Gondwana split off from Laurasia. Mm hmm.

That's a good one too. 50 million years later, uh, Gondwana broke up, uh, and then they had a 60 million years ago, North America split off from Eurasia. And these are all the prominent theories again. Yeah. Well, they follow the continental drift theory. Yeah. And I mean, it's not like they're just like, mmm, let's say, let's say the Indian subcontinent

broke off from this continent. It's like, no, they have gone through and done the, the geological comparisons and have seen like when this basically matched up to that and that's what they've come up with. It's pretty astounding that you can do that. If you have that enough patience. Yeah. And brains. Yeah.

Uh, so interestingly, they talked to a little bit in the article about a climate and what it might have been like back then and maybe the interior of this large supercontinent was completely dry because it was surrounded by mountains, uh, maybe parts of what is now North America used to be like the Amazon rainforest, like a super lush jungle. Right. It would be kind of cool. Yeah. And then by the interior, when you cross the, what was it, the central, um, the central

Pangea Mountains? Yeah. Like you were just, you apparently there was a ring of mountains that, that ran around the middle of the whole Pangea in the interior and, um, it just produced rain shadows that kept rain out from the interior of the continent. So it would have just been just a totally arid desert. Pretty cool. It is cool.

Uh, and of course this isn't over. They point out in the article that things are still changing, um, Australia's is creeping up on Asia. Yeah. Very slowly, of course. Yeah. Pretty cool. And, uh, part, uh, part of Eastern Africa is, is trying to get out of the rest of Africa.

Yeah. Eastern Africa is staying in so long, I'm, uh, I'm going off on my own. I'm going to seek my own fortune and adventure. Of course this is over the course of hundreds of millions of years. So you will likely not be around unless the singularity happens soon. Yeah, exactly. Then you may, and you can be like, this is pretty cool. The people of Sydney will have a docking party with the people of Hong Kong.

I love that. Uh, so you want to take a little break here and then we'll talk a little bit about these names on the podcast, Hey, dude, the nineties 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 going to use Hey, dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the nineties. 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, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the nineties. Listen to Hey, dude, the nineties called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikala, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life.

In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop, but just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world

came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Find the Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, that is the theory of continental drifting.

The whole idea is that there's a layer of magma and then on top of it are the continental plates and they're constantly shifting and moving, again, albeit very slowly, and when they do, they expose a fissure and you've got volcanic activity or two plates slide up against one another or one subducts below the other one and you have earthquakes. So there's a lot of evidence that continental drift is real and that things like hollow earth are probably not correct. Have you noticed every time we do any kind of geography, especially when we mentioned plate tectonics, the hollow earth people come out of the woodwork and just send us emails

and leave comments and they're like the high fructose corn syrup people. They're really active in the comment section. Yeah, Frodo and the gang. Oh wait, that's Middle Earth, different. In Pangea, we should mention is Greek for all lands or all earth. So that's a great name for the original supercontinent. And Panthalassa is all ocean, the ocean that surrounded it and Pangea was what's considered a true continent.

We should say this because it'll come up later, but a true continent is a land mass surrounded by ocean on all sides. I'm looking at you, Asia and Europe. I know. You know. I know. In fact, part of, actually, I think you sent this idea, didn't you? Yeah.

What? The whole idea for the show was from you, but not too long ago. I was, I think Emily asked me, she was like, what is Russia? Is that part of, is it Asian or is it European? And I was like, well, I don't know. Asia. Let's go look. Well, it depends.

Part of it. Really? Well, yeah. Part of it. Then same with Turkey. It's split. And, you know, some people identify with Europe. Some people identify with Asia.

Wow. That's why the term Eurasia. Well, no, I got that and I got it from this article, but I didn't know that like Russia itself was split. You know? Yeah, that's what it says. Like I could see like Kazakhstan or something being like straddling the sides, but I didn't realize like Russia itself was split, so that's pretty interesting.

Yeah. Maybe some Russians will write in. Tell us how you identify. Yeah. Are you Eurasian, Asian, European? Which one? Yeah, because obviously a lot of these lines are drawn culturally. Right, because they're mountain ranges that separate it.

That's not a, I mean, it's a geographical border, but when you're speaking in continents, it's not. In continents? Right. Should we tell them Jerry's bad joke? Yes. Before we started, Jerry said, I guess we're technically all in continent. And I said, no, technically we're all on continent.

And then she said, or within continent and none of the three things that we said were funny, but that's how things happen before we hit record. Yeah. That's why we don't release this stuff beforehand. It's usually much better than that. So let's get down to this, Chuck. All right. Let's talk about naming continents, right?

All right. Apparently with continents, if you are prominently involved with this discovery, you typically get some sort of naming rights. Yeah, and a lot of these are very just conjecture goes into maybe who named these and who didn't. One big exception is Antarctica, right? Because it's new-ish. It's like Pluto. Yeah.

As far as when people discovered it, in fact, you can go to the New York Times and read in 1904 about the naming of Antarctica. Yeah. If you were so inclined to be bored to tears. No, I love those old articles. I like a lot of them too. Like remember the subway accident where people got shot out of the subway tunnel that was being dug?

Yeah. That was an interesting article. This one is, it's bad. Oh, did you read it? No, just the synopsis one. Okay. Well, a man named Sir John Murray was a great explorer and oceanographer. He was part of the famous HMS Challenger expedition, which for my money is the greatest

of all ocean-going explorations. The Challenger? Yeah, man, 69,000 nautical miles. Wow. Unbelievable. If you look at the map of this thing, the route, it was just, it's staggering. Do you have a map of it? I don't own one, but I looked it up today.

Okay. It's pretty neat. And I never knew what HMS stood for. Did you know that? Her Majesty's ship? Yeah, I never knew that. Yeah. Oh, it's just like, yeah.

HMS. There's another one that I don't, like RMS. I don't know. And what is the USS, just United States ship? I don't know. I never thought about that either. Probably. Probably.

Someone from the Navy can maybe point us in the right direction. So anyway, John Murray, even though the expedition, the Challenger expedition did not, they kind of buzzed Antarctica. They didn't actually see the land, but they came close. But he would later go on to do, like, actually go to Antarctica. Oh, okay. I was going to say, like, then how did he know anything about it? I guess his interest was piqued.

He saw icebergs and stuff and he said, I'm coming back. Yeah. Because this place is cold. He's coming. I'm coming for you, Taro and Jiro. So in 1904, he actually was able to name it as a combination of Ant opposite and Arctic the North Pole. So it's opposite of the North Pole.

Okay. The South Pole. Pretty neat. And which one has penguins and so that Antarctica has penguins and the North Pole doesn't. Isn't that right? I don't remember. But that's like, that's the case, right? Doesn't one have one and the other one doesn't?

I know. We got a lot of emails. We did. I don't know why I'm doing this again. I know. I might as well just hook a car battery up to my nipples or something. It'll get the same effect. I got you on that one.

Yeah. That was good. So let's talk about America because I just realized something to check. This may be played in geography classes in like middle school and stuff. So if that's the case, I want to go ahead and apologize to all the middle schoolers. They just had to hear me say that. That's okay. And don't, don't try that at home.

Bad idea. No. It doesn't matter what grade you're in or how long out of school you are. Agreed. So America, the name America, if you went to, took civics class or geography and elementary school and high school, you probably got the story that Amerigo Vespucci was, it was named after him, European explorer. Yeah, that guy has been slandered, maligned, maybe worse than Columbus even.

Yeah. Apparently he had a lot of rivals back in Italy and they worked very hard to sully his name and it was quite effective over the centuries to the point where there was a big, almost a revival in, in hatred for Amerigo Vespucci and a lot of really inaccurate ideas were, were revived based on propaganda, contemporary propaganda against him. So, so what's the idea that he ripped off Columbus? Well, that's not, it depends on your definition of ripped off.

So I don't have the impression that he ever said, I discovered America. He said Columbus discovered America. But the distinction between Vespucci and Columbus is that Columbus didn't realize that he hadn't hit already, that he hadn't hit undiscovered or previously undiscovered by European land. Right. Right? He thought that he had just found another route to the West Indies, apparently until he died.

Yeah. Vespucci was the one to say, no, Europeans have ever seen this before. Please. That was great. No, it wasn't. I like it. And so he is the one who supposedly, this continent was named after because he was the one to recognize it as previously uncharted land.

Yeah. And it's on record in 1507, a cartographer, a German cartographer named Martin Waldsemeule. Our two favorite accents. Yeah. Italian and German. Yeah. Two of the only two you can still do these days and not get taken to death for sure. He very famously made a map, there was a big effort in France in the 1500s to really

bring the modern map into the forefront. And like these old maps, like these were made by a bunch of dummies who didn't know anything. So let's really expand our geographic knowledge. Well, yeah. This is when like Mercators started working. Yeah. So this woodcut map that Waldsemeule made was the first to depict a separate western hemisphere, the first to show the Pacific Ocean as a separate thing.

Oh, this guy. He's like, get that sea monster off of there. I'd leave a sea monster just for fun. But he... It's an Easter egg. Yeah. There was one of these maps. There is one of these maps still existing and in 2003, the Library of Congress bought

it with donation from Discovery Channel. Oh, is that right? Apparently. Nice. For 10 million bucks. It was in a castle for 350 years in southern Germany and they're like, wow, let's buy it and display it. I read about a guy who found an original copy of the Declaration of Independence folded up

behind a painting that he bought at a yard sale for like $4. I think I heard that. Amazing. And I think he sold it for like a few million and then Norman Mailer bought it for like eight million. Wow. But yeah, somebody just found the Declaration of Independence. I guess in much the same way.

That's amazing. Yeah. I got nothing in my attic. I even looked. Oh, you did look. I was gonna say, you don't know, but I guess you do. There's some old doors. Doors that can be worth 30, 40 bucks.

Yeah. The door from the early 1930s. Yeah. People love those things. They go crazy for them. I think it's neat, but I wanted like a stash of gold bullion or something. Like prohibition era money. Yeah.

My house ain't old enough. Where's your house built? Yeah. Like 1930. Prohibition. Yeah. I guess so. Maybe some old booze.

Yeah. Moon shine. Right. That'd be delicious. Yeah. The reason this map is significant by... Valsamula. ...is that it says America, like North-South America or designated America by this map.

And this map that is in question was from when was it? 1507. 1507. And somebody said, hey, buddy, why'd you call it America? And he said, I did it in honor of Amerigo Vespucci. Sure. So the first guy who really uses the word America is on record, apparently, is saying he named it America after Amerigo Vespucci.

Yeah. But a lot of people said that's a lie. It's a historical fallacy. It's inaccurate. Right. One guy went so far as to say that Amerigo Vespucci actually changed his name after America was named and that his real name was Giovanni Vespucci? No.

Yeah, Alberigo Vespucci and that he changed his name to Amerigo from Alberigo. To conveniently align with the naming of America. Right. But apparently... And again, this is contemporary stuff. People said, you changed your name, you big liar. Right. And then in the 1970s, I think some historian revived it and that was the idea.

But somebody else went back and apparently found his baptismal certificate that lists him as Amerigo Vespucci. The thing is, is that still doesn't mean that America was named after Vespucci. True. There is a long tradition among cartographers that had already been established by the time America was discovered to name new lands. If you were naming it after an explorer, you named it after the explorer's last name. If you wanted to name it after royalty, you named it after the royalty's first name.

So think about it. Georgia, Virginia, and then Columbus or Hudson, like the explorer's last name or royalty's first name is how you name states. So they would have named America Vespucci Land. The United States of Vespucci. Exactly, rather than America. Yeah, that'd be great. But if it's not named after Vespucci, then where did America come from?

Well, there are some theories. One is that it was named after the Ameriq. Ameriq? Ameriq. It's a Mayan word, actually. Yes, mountains in Nicaragua. This is where my money goes. You think so?

So people think that Columbus and Vespucci both went to these mountains after American natives said, hey, there's gold in them Darhills, which of course is really all they wanted anyway. Well, that's not true. They wanted to discover new lands, but hopefully new lands with gold. Right. So they could subjugate. So that they went there and that it was named after those mountains.

Not bad. And did you say both Columbus and Vespucci supposedly traveled to these mountains? Yeah, because they wanted the gold. So that's a pretty good reason to call it that. And when you combine that with the evidence that a cartographer likely would have named it Vespucci land rather than America after Ameriqo, it's entirely possible that America is actually named after a indigenous Mayan word for some mountains. I think it means place of wind in Mayan.

Interesting. Yeah. Another theory in this one, I don't think it holds water, but there was a British royal rep named Richard Ameriq, A-M-E-R-I-K-E and supposedly explorer John Cabot became the first. Well, this isn't supposed in 1497. He definitely became the first to sail under the British flag to the new world. And apparently when he got back, he got a big wad of cash from Ameriq and he was like,

hey, I'm going to name the country and continent after you then. But there's really nothing to substantiate that right now. And then Cabot retired to make some pretty decent butter. Oh yeah. Is that him? I think so. Okay. Surely it's him still.

Maybe. And he's several hundred years old. Do you want to take a break again? Yeah, let's break and then we'll talk about our favorite continent, Australia. 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 going to 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, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment

I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop.

But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology? It changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. So Chuck, you were telling everybody our favorite continent is? Australia. Yeah. That's what Lex Luthor, Gene Hackman, Lex Luthor wanted in Superman. He wanted Australia? Yeah. To his own?

Or Superman 2. Yeah, remember when the three Terrence Stam and the gang came down and Lex Luthor was working cahoots with them and they were like, well, what do you want in return for delivering Superman? He said, Australia. I don't remember that. Yeah. That's great.

I saw this, the beginning of a movie with Robin Williams and Walter Mathow, Robin Williams was like a baby at the time, but like they foil a robbery and like become heroes, I think. And then they, yeah, they go to like a survivalist camp or something. Yeah. I think it's called Survivors. I think so. I saw like the first 10 minutes. I totally know the movie, but I was like, man, there is no one, no one on the planet

like Walter Mathow. No, man. He was the best. He was awesome. And then I was like, God, I just can't imagine Robin Williams and Walter Mathow working together. And then didn't they do like Moscow on the Hudson too, wasn't that one? Well, I don't think Mathow was in that one. Oh, he wasn't.

I thought he was. Oh, maybe he was. I could be wrong because I never saw it. Those early Robin Williams movies were great. They were. According to Garp. I never saw that one. That was by the guy who did Cider House Rules, right?

Yeah. John Irving. Yeah. He's pretty great. Oh, yeah. And then I think about Couch Trip. You remember that movie with Dan Ackroyd and Walter Mathow? I didn't see it.

Is it good? Yes. It was so good. I haven't seen it in decades, but I guarantee it still holds up. I mean, it's Mathow and Ackroyd. Yeah. One's like a con man pretending to be crazy, and the other one actually is crazy, who is the only person who can sense that this guy's a con man.

You know, I've never been the hugest. No, I'm sorry. He's a con man pretending to not be crazy. Oh, okay. That makes more sense. It's great. I've never been the hugest Dan Ackroyd guy. He definitely is Dan Ackroyd, Dan Ackroyd in this thing.

I don't dislike him. But Walter Mathow is providing a nice slow burning distraction over here. If you don't like Dan Ackroyd, you'll still like Couch Trip. Yeah. And boy, the odd couple, Mathow and Lemon. I don't know if I ever saw that original one. So good. All right.

It's called Movie Sidebar with Josh and Chuck, and it started with Gene Hackman. We didn't even talk about him. Oh, I love Gene Hackman. He needs to un-retire is what I'm saying. Seriously. Like go make another movie. Yeah. Your swan song.

That's what I say. All right. We own you Gene Hackman. Australia, which is what Gene Hackman is like Luther wanted. It is a bit of a mystery too. Most people will point to Matthew Flinders in 1802 as the Namer because he was the first to circumnavigate it and create that map. And Australis means Southern, so it all makes sense, right?

Yeah. Back in the day, the cartographers were already aware of Australia before Matthew Flinders circumnavigated it, but they called it the Terra Australis, which is the Southern land. Matthew Flinders is like, I like the sound of Australia more. It's more pleasing to the ear, apparently, is how it was put. The thing is, and for a very long time, that's how Australia was named as far as anyone was concerned, but then Australia's National Library discovered a way older map before 1802 from 1545.

Yeah. From a German astronomer named Siriakko Jakob Zumbarth. That's a great name. Great name. Not at all German, if you ask me, except for the Jakob thing. Zumbarth is, but that Siriakko definitely doesn't look German. No. But yeah, 1545, that's like way, way before.

Yeah. And apparently there's maps that are even slightly older than that around, and one of them might have been produced by Mercator himself, that also refer to the area around Australia as Australia's something. So not everyone was referring to it exclusively as the Terra Australis. But it's probable that the Siriakko Jakob Zumbarth is the one who first labeled it Australia. All right. We should do a podcast on the history of Australia.

Sure. Super interesting. Starring Hugh Jackman for the World War II part. By the way, when I mentioned Hugh Jackman is P.T. Barnum. Okay. He is in fact playing P.T. Barnum in an upcoming musical version of the movie, but I either didn't know or I subliminally

knew. Okay. I thought, later on after I found that out, that you'd just been messing with me the whole episode. No. Well, I apologize for assuming that. That's all right. I either didn't know or maybe I had read that and just forgot or something.

Because you said it like three times, or maybe I should get into casting. If you didn't know, then hats off to you because that was prescient. So now let's move on to other comments. Oh, did you see some of the suggestions we got though? Oh, for P.T. Barnum? I think my favorite one was John C. Reilly. He'd be an odd P.T. Barnum, but he could totally do it.

Yeah. I saw one. Someone said Tom Hardy, like he'd be great in anything, but he's in everything right now. He's so hot right now. And then someone sent Colm Meany, who was sort of like the... That name's like, I know the name. Who is it though?

He's like the English John C. Reilly. He sort of looks like him. He's older though, right? Or he may be Irish. He's Irish. He's a little older. Yeah. Yeah.

I know who he is. They kind of look alike. A bit. Colm Meany's got a little more dapperness to him, a little more suave-ness maybe? Well, there's nothing about John C. Reilly to suave. Have you seen We Need to Talk About Kevin? Uh-uh. Oh, you'll love it.

The movie? Mm-hmm. It's a sleeper with John C. Reilly and Tilda Swinton about... They have a kid who's a bad kid and Tilda Swinton's having to deal with it. Interesting. It's a great movie. It's on Netflix right now. I love John C. Reilly, so...

He's kind of a prop in the background for this. It's mostly Tilda Swinton and the big kid. I'm sure they'll appreciate hearing that. He knows. Okay. There's no way he played that role and doesn't know. All right. I never knew we could talk so much about movies in this one.

I didn't see that coming. So let's talk about the other continents. Africa, Asia, and Europe, basically what it boils down to with the rest of these is they were likely named by sailors who had to call them something. Yeah, probably, and Africa has a few different contenders that are pretty good. There's the Afarak people who are in the northern part of Africa, they're a Berber tribe. Not a bad source. Yeah.

Makes sense. And apparently, apric in Greek or aprica in Latin means sunny. Right? Yeah. Makes sense too. And then there's... So who knows? The point is there's no documentation for when Africa was first named.

And it was most likely Africa, Europe, and Asia were named by seafaring folks who were like, we're going this place and they needed a name for this place. So their families would know where they were to go look for them if they didn't come back. Yeah. And so they came up with names like Europe and Asia. Yeah. Phoenician sailors, it's believed they may have used their proximity to the sun because Asia might come from a CU, a Q for sunrise or east, and Europe, which is of course west,

closer to the sunset if you're standing in the east. Right. And then there's the REB, Arab, which means sunset or west. That's a Phoenician word. Right. So it's possible Phoenician sailors named Asia and Europe. There's other ones too, like Europa is a Greek mythological figure. Right?

Yeah. And then Asia could have been named after a ruler named Asios, a Trojan ruler. Yeah. I don't think that's it. That's the fun thing about things where it's like, no one knows, you can be like, that's not right. Yeah. You read certain, you read theories and some make sense to you and some don't.

Right. I like that. That's why I don't, I think math never appealed to me. And why it does appeal to math fans is because it's rules apply and like there is a right and a wrong. Sure. I'm much more prone to be like, to think about something and have theories about it. Well, you know, they say you read a lot of fiction, right?

Yeah. I think that people who read fiction are much more open to ambiguous resolutions or non-resolutions or lack enclosure. Yeah. And because you so frequently get that from fiction, it leads to the question though, which is first, are you attracted to fiction because it usually has resolutions like that or have you been trained to accept resolutions like that from appreciating fiction? Well, back to movies, one of my favorite things, which really bothers a lot of people or movies

with ambiguous endings. If done right, I think it's one of the coolest things you can do in a movie is to not wrap it up in a little bow and kind of leave the end with the decision like what's going on here. Plus it leaves it open for a sequel. Well, maybe. I bet math majors hate that though now that I think about it. Oh yeah.

You know? Yeah. And then finally, some people still, depending on where you are in the world, don't recognize all the continents. No, and this actually makes sense to me because we said earlier, continent is a body of land surrounded on all sides by a body of water, right? So that means that a lot of the continents that we recognize over here in the West as continents ain't continents.

They're incontinence. So according to some parts of the world, North America and South America, that's just America. And then Europe and Asia, just Eurasia. Yeah. And that's it. I've got a great pavement t-shirt that has North America on it and it says Canada and then Mexico. And in the middle, it says pavement and I get a lot of compliments on it.

And I think it's from people thinking I'm making a statement like the United States is just a bunch of pavement and like, you know, Canada, Mexico aren't when in fact it's just the band. Yeah. Or maybe they're all just pavement bands. Yeah, maybe. You can't tell. You can never tell these days.

Did I tell you I'm Facebook friends with Bob Nistanovich from pavement? You didn't. I tricked him because we had some mutual friends. Your mom said that you have to be friends with me on Facebook. Yeah. It's pretty great though. I like seeing insight into these like people are Revere. Sure.

He's a big horse racing guy. Oh yeah. Yeah. He likes the ponies. Yeah. I don't like going to the track necessarily, but I like the big three. Yeah. Although I would go to the track, we just don't have them around here.

Yeah, we don't. And bring it on. Send the email about how I'm wrong for going to the track or wanting to. If you want to know more about naming continents or geography or any of that jazz, head on over to HowStuffWorks.com and type in geography in the search bar and it will bring up a massive great article. Since I said mass, it's time for listening mail. I'm going to call this road tripping.

We get a lot of emails from people that listen to us while they're road tripping. Yes. Which is very nice. Hey guys, my husband and I are adventuring on a road trip from Texas throughout Florida. I've been addicted to the show for a couple of months now, but my husband has not listened to a podcast in his life. I started the driving in the trip and he asked if I could make it all the way to Florida. First of all, husband, Tom.

Yeah, that's pretty serious stuff. All right. We're in Texas, honey. Can you make it all the way to Florida? Yeah. I got to catch some Z's. I need some sugar. I said that if I could listen to stuff you should know, then I wouldn't stop driving.

He sighed regrettably and then let me turn the episode on five days into the trip. Every time we get into the car, he now says, educate me on stuff I should know. Nice. Our biggest debates are deciding on which podcast to listen to next. We literally made it to one of our destinations and sat in the car for another 15 minutes after a three hour drive just to finish an episode. That's wonderful. Thank you so much for what you do and that is from Kim and Tom Kepler and since we are

not recording too far out these days, they are most likely still on their trip. Yeah. Enjoy the trip. Be safe. Have fun. Drive every now and then, Tom. Yeah, really, Tom. Let's get it together, shall we?

That's awesome. I hope they just heard this. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us because you love us on a road trip or you whatever, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K Podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. I'm Munga Shatikular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas

are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's to the great American settlers. That's all for today.