The Rest Is Science - What Was A Mammoth Doing At The Bottom Of The Sea?

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

Hannah surprises Michael with a mammoth bone from Doggerland, the lost Ice Age land that once joined Britain to mainland Europe, and now lies beneath the North Sea. Who lived there, what roamed it, and how did an entire landscape disappear under the waves?Then it's your questions: where did "cool" come from as a word for style, and how did it stick around for so long? What on earth is "skank face"? And what are Hannah and Michael reading right now?-------------------For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscienceCancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.-------------------Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠-------------------Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack MeekAnimator: Sam BensonVideo & Social: Bex TyrrellAssistant Producer: Lucy LipscombeProducer: Simona RataSenior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-CarterChief Digital Officer: Samuel OakleyExec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to The Rest of Science. I'm Hannah Frye. And I'm Michael Stevens. I have just been on holiday for the summer. And while I was on holiday, I was, of course, thinking about you, Michael. And I saw something on a shelf and a shop and I was like, I know who would like that. Michael Stevens is a few-forth beastful fame. What is this?

Can I hold it? Yes, I want to guess. Are you going to lick it? I will if you tell me to, oh, my gosh. It's more stony than I thought. I thought it was, is it like a coral? I've handed Michael something that looks sort of like a cross between a stone and a bit of wood, I guess. Yes, it's like wood-colored, but it's like a giant shape of a shark's tooth.

Right, that's a nice way to put it. But it's not a shark's tooth. It's not a shark's tooth. How large is it? It's larger than my hand. And it's not that heavy. No. I thought it was either going to be much heavier or much less heavy.

It's quite porous, isn't it? Yeah, it looks like it would be really poor. porous, but it's denser than if it was wood. It's got quite organic shape to it. Is it bone? It is bone. Yeah, okay, it's bone, but it's not a tooth. It's not a tooth.

It looks like it's like a hip bone because it's so smooth here, like a ball joint. One section of it is very smooth. I don't think it is a hip joint, but you're getting close. Okay, I'm going to smell it. Mammalian? Mammalian. Yep. Female.

No, what if I could smell a bone until I just made that up as a joke? Amazing. Where did you go on this holiday? I was in France. Oh. So, yes. Jerry Lewis. I'll give you a bit more of that in a minute.

Okay, let's think about this, right? It's an animal bone, a fossilized animal bone. How big is the animal? The animal's big. Right. How big? Bigger than a human. Correct.

How big? Three times as big as a human. I'd say bigger. Really? I'd say really big. Like whale? Whale big? Dinosaur big?

Well, it depends which dinosaur. It depends. There's some chicken-sized ones, I know. Mammal, though. Stay on mammal. Land-mammal. A land-man. So, elephant?

You're closer. Rhinoceros. Bigger. Hippo. I mean, their name means big. Oh, a mammoth. Yes. Really?

There's a mammoth vertebrae. Whoa, a vertebrae. Isn't that cool? That's so cool. Isn't that cool? Not a mastodon, a mammoth. A mammoth. A mammoth. Now, the thing that I think is...

Oh, shoot. There's a sticker on here. I know, I took it off because I didn't want you to. But if I look, why did I not look closely? Because I can tell that that's the back of a mammoth. Oh, I would have looked like a genius if I noticed that. And I could have smelled it and been like, whoa, a mammoth. Cerm your hair. Yeah, it's a mammoth.

How amazing is that? That's amazing. Isn't it? Okay, now here's the thing, right? Let me tell you where it came from. This was dredged from the bottom of the North Sea. But that's water. Why is there mammoth, detritus, at the bottom of the North Sea?

And this is what I really want to talk to you about. I want to talk to you about the secret lost land of Doggerland. Doggerland. Basically the silliest name of all time. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. All right, here's something really cool. The earliest written description of cancer that we've ever found is from an ancient Egyptian papyrus that was around before even Cleopatra was on the throne.

It described tumors being removed by a tool that they called the fire drill, which we think was used to burn off disease tissue. Beating a disease that's so ancient and complex, with over 200 different types, It's not going to happen overnight. But thanks to research, cancer treatment has advanced a lot. And Cancer Research UK is driving further innovations like cancer-sniffing robots and drugs made from gut bugs that could change the future of medicine. Over the past 50 years, Cancer Research UK's work has helped double cancer survival in the UK.

And today it's continuing to save and improve lives around the world. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancersearchuk.org slash rest is science. I love the name though. I've heard it before. It is the like prehistoric landmass that used to connect the UK to continental Europe. The British Isles used to be like accessible to all the mammoths. So all the mammoths wandering across it. They could just wander to and Now, somehow, I went through almost all of my life not knowing that the UK used to be a connected landmass with mainland Europe. Wasn't always an island.

It wasn't always an island. And we are talking really recent. Yeah, because mammoths were around when humans were around. Yep. Oh, we're talking more recent than this. Wow. We're talking super recent that Doggerland disappeared into the sea. When?

We'll get there. Okay. But really recently. Wow. I mean, put that in perspective. That was sort of written about it. Okay, so the whole idea that there used to be this landmass between the UK and Europe, the beginning of it started in about the 1930s.

So for generations, fishermen, when they've been trawling their nets in that part of the North Sea, they would bring up kind of all sorts of detritus, lots of mammoth, you know, limbs, teeth, that kind of thing. Lots of reindeer antlers, that sort of stuff. So people sort of knew vaguely that there was something weird going on but people just didn't really care about it, right? They sort of would just like chuck it on the fire, use it as extra firewood. Yeah. And then in the 1930s, someone pulled up this reindeer horns that had been sharpened into a tool.

Ooh. Right? And then they were, okay, something's going on here. Yeah. This is like, this is evidence of they're being a human here. So this artifact was passed around for Pillar to Post, different museums. no one sort of wanted it, kind of forgotten in the archives. But smartly, some people had the idea to test the mud that it had come surrounded in,

specifically the pollen that was embedded within the mud. And what was interesting was that it was fresh water mud, which is like, well, how can this possibly, we're just taking it from the bottom of the ocean, of the sea, of the salty sea. So over the years, like sort of nothing really happens. People are like, yeah, maybe there was some lost land there, but whoever, who, who, really cares. But also, while all of this was going on, in Holland, what they would do when they would, when they were, the trolls would like bring up all of this stuff, they would dump it onto beaches, which they need for their flood defences. And while all of that was going on, some paleontologists

went through it and started finding really interesting objects in there, including a Neanderthal skull, right, that had like been sitting at the bottom of the North Sea. So now we know that there's like, There's humanoids. There's, you know, down there somewhere. This particular Neanderthal, they aged him to be about 50,000 to 70,000 years old. Okay, so we're talking like long civilizations. And he had a little cyst sitting above his right eyebrow, a little version of Neanderthal cancer. So all of this is going on.

Fishermen and I bring up this stuff being like, what, another Neanderthal skull? Like, what another, like, woolly mammoth vertebrae, whatever. Anyway, then in the late 90s, early noughties, It was the oil and gas industry. Oh, sure. Who finally demonstrated that there really was this lost land because they had been mapping the terrain of the North Sea for a really long time. The bit that they care about is further down, right? It's sort of beneath the superficial layers where there is pockets of oil and gas.

But they had these three-de-seismic surveys all across the North Sea. And when they looked at them, they realize there are hills and valleys and estuaries. There's like all of this incredibly detailed. detailed geographic terrain under it. They've got oak, there's elm, there's hazel, all of this stuff is growing in Dogaland. And that changes the mindset because people were like, well, maybe this is just a little rat run that comes between Europe and Britain. When people are sort of escaping the ice age, they kind of ran across it. But the fact that all these forests, it actually looks like there was this abundance of life.

It was like proper forest land. Proper forest land. So it's about, by the way, the North Sea average is about 95 meters. But the doggaland half is about 40 meters deep. Wow, that is not deep. Not deep. If you told me it was eight miles deep, I would have said, yeah, sure. Yeah, it's nothing.

I mean, you could free dive that. 40 meters, that's it. 40 meters. Yeah, that makes more sense because you wouldn't have to have much change for that elevation change. I mean, obviously, that's a big one. Like, this was a quite cataclysmic geological event that erased doggarland. It's even less, actually. Sorry, the western end is 15 meters below the surface.

15. It's nothing. It's nothing. You could just walk across that. You could walk. And they did. And they did. It was higher up then, or there was less water in it.

Less water. Quite a lot less water in it. Okay, so here's the thing, right? Now you know that there is this abundant land where humans and neonathals and mammoths and reindeer and forests were all present. Where the hell did it go? What happened? And it turns out there is more evidence in the geological record because in the north of the North Sea, this is like really recent research, by the way.

We're talking like 2018 or so that people have like fully established their stuff by taking cores from old rivers and then looking through them. It looks as though there was a continental shelf about the size of Scotland that there was a big earthquake and it collapsed. This gigantic volume of mass that just sank, I mean, sank all at once and created a gigantic tsunami that came over and just wiped out Dockland. Just flushed that space cutting off the British Isles from continental Europe. Exactly. And this happened, by the way, about 8,000 years ago. Noah's Flood. We found it.

Vlad, I know. Genuinely, I think there's something in that because we know that there were people around there, around that time. You know, you have like, you've got the French in the caves of like, sort of 15,000 years ago, they've been there for thousands of years by this point. You've got evidence of human settlements up in the north of Scotland. You definitely had people there. I mean, that is recent enough that it could survive in sort of, in folklore. Eight thousand years ago? Eight thousand years ago. So like 6,000 BCE.

Right. Wow. I mean, the thing is people weren't writing yet. Agree. There was no history. This is prehistory. And yet it's, yeah, within, easily within oral tradition range. Mm-hmm.

So the reason why we can be sure that this happened, incidentally, is that when you take these cores, sort of across this whole section in northern Scotland, in particular, but also across Norway all around there, you see in land you have evidence of human settlements and then on top there is sediment of like crushed seashells as though the tsunami brought in this incredible amount of silt. Right, right. And then you have more layers on top. There is some evidence, a little bit of evidence that suggests that not all of Doggerland was swallowed at once or that perhaps some of it came back and then sea levels rose and then

sunk the rest of it. But this really was like, I mean, in one day, it sort of disappeared. Wow. Imagine that you're, you know, living in where Pinsans is now. And you're like, oh, we've got to go down to Paris. Oh, I hate traveling. And you get your whole family ready. And you're like, an old, you know, a Neanderthal. And you're like, we got to go. And then you hear this rumbling, like the ground shakes. And then you're like, whoo, trips canceled. It's cancelled. Yeah, exactly. And your wife is like, oh, my parents and you're like, oh, no, my in-laws, now they're across an ocean. Guess we can't see you anymore.

Dang. Oh, doggard land. See you. Dagger land. Why is it called Daggerland? No, I don't know. It was 1989 when, oh, no, I do know why. That's not true.

I do know why. It's because there's a place called Dogger Bank, which is where medieval Dutch codboats is, isn't it? A doggers. Okay. Yeah, so it's named after a fishing vessel. Got it. And so mammoths were roaming around that land in doggarland. Earlier, earlier than...

Earlier, but then this bone got covered up by water. Right. So this, this, this mammoth would have died in doggarland when it was a land and laid there for many, many, many thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, no doubt. And then one day a tsunami came and swallowed up. up the land that this had once stood on and then, you know, over time, it sort of arisen to the surface and then was dredged up. How cool.

Can I tell you my favorite thing about Doggerland of All, though? Yeah. Okay. So the thing is, because the structure of the coastline of Britain was different, it means that the river estuaries had a different structure. So the Thames did not used to come out through London. It found its way out to the sea much further north through Norfolk. Okay, so in 2013, there was this storm, really big storm.

This is a beach at Habsburg in Norfolk. Okay. So you're talking quite far up just where the bend is. And this would have been maybe not quite inland, but it's sort of like on the edge of Doggerland. But as this storm came in, it exposed this layer of estuary silt that had human footprints in them. Oh. Or at least humanoid footprints. Yeah, right.

So there's at least five people that have these footprints on, had like been walking along this river bank. Adults and children, by the way, and they were like walking around and these mud flats that was the banks of the river Thames and left these footprints in them. People have aged these footprints, right? Try to work out how old they are. The footprints themselves, they're just holes. You can't really do anything about it. But when you look at the surrounding rock, you can look at the magnetic. elements within it

and you can demonstrate that this solidified before the last switch of the poles Oh, cool. Right, so you know it's really, really old. You can't date it before switch. By the way, carbon dating does not work for this because carbon dating fails after about 50,000 years. You just got so few left that it doesn't really work. So it's too old, older than 50,000 years. But the last magnetic

switch happened 780,000 years ago. 780,000 years ago. So they're not the footprints of Homo sapiens. It's some other hominid ancestor. Exactly. Wow. You can also, there's other

there's voles that appear in the seal, but sort of trapped in the sill. You can tell them apart. There's some that went extinct 600,000 years ago so we know there's extra evidence that's more than 600,000 years old. There's pollen also that you can work out where it isn't a cycle. I mean, I don't really understand this pollen dating stuff that well, to be honest with you, but put together

the estimate for these footprints is somewhere between 990,000 years ago to 780,000 years ago, which makes these the oldest evidence of humanoids. It's humanoid. It's humanoid. is the right word? Hominids. Fine. Humanoid, I think. It's a bit roboty, isn't it? It's a bit, it's also, I think, a bit like, to me at least it feels like an insult, right?

Like, humanoid. Homanids, okay. Homonid sounds more like, oh, yeah. Yeah, you know, one of us. Okay, this is the oldest evidence of hominids outside of Africa, and it's on a beach in Norfolk. I love thinking about history through our geology. That's going to live on a show. shelf in my house now. It's a beautiful

specimen. It's so big. Yeah. You know? Should we do some questions? Let's do some questions. We'll take a quick break and when we come back, we'll provide some answers. Do you think one day we should do a filled notes auction where we just get rid of water rush? That would be a good idea. Yeah, we could raise money for charity by

auctioning off as featured on the rest is science. I would empty my house out. My gosh. Here's a can of Diet Coke that Michael shook up a bunch. Okay. We'll start at a thousand. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

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For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit Cancer Research UK. dot org slash rest is science. Okay, we're back from the break. We have some questions. Right. Here's one for you, Michael. This is from Tully on email. I've been listened to the podcast for quite a while,

and I finally have a question for you that I can't seem to answer. Why does coolness vary so much? Whereas the standards of politeness are more mutually agreed upon. How did a word, meaning cold, turn into resemblance? a whole attitude and a way of being insanely good. I have many questions here, but mainly, why is coolness the thing that we can't seem to agree on? We can't agree on politeness either. I agree.

Do you know what? I disagree with the premise of the question. Oh, disagree is such a strong word. I'm intrigued by the premise and I'm very excited by all the thoughts it's producing in my head. Okay, there we go. Because coolness is really weird. In some ways, no, we can't agree on it. But in other ways, we agree on it in ways that are very puzzling.

When you look at what cool means and you look at other words that are also quite recent in their meanings, coolness prevails over all of them. We have words like groovy and da bomb that come and go. But cool always stays. It doesn't become uncool. And I think it's because cool is describing something that is very real and not a temporary trend. But the word cool didn't emerge for what it means today until the early 1930s. Right. That's older than I was expecting. So it's not even 100 years old.

But it has meant cool ever since then, no matter how many times things become uncool and new words. for cool come about, it's always remained. But it wasn't a word that meant what it means today before like 1933. So why? Was there some other word that meant cool? Not really. You couldn't be cool in the modern sense before the 1930s. Okay.

Because society, we don't know why, but I love investigating this. And I was, I got obsessed again when I was reading a Reddit thread about who, who was more influential, Britney Spears or Taylor Swift. And people were like, okay, thing is Taylor Swift just isn't cool. I didn't say, I just am saying what I read, okay? Go on. And I was like, whoa, what does coolness mean? Because I kind of understand what they're saying. Now, to not be cool doesn't mean you aren't influential, important, relevant, all these things, successful.

But coolness is something that I think is only possible when your society starts to value individualism, creative work, cultural contributions. It's no longer about your rank, your position, who you are because of birth. now what matters is what you got what new cognitive inventions do you have for us but it's not the same as creativity coolness is this kind of like i fit within the current schemes but yet i'm pushing them just enough and i'm doing it in a very comfortable way i'm not goofy i'm not way out here I'm just different enough and comfortable enough that I'm fitting in, but I'm not in. Right. Okay.

In a way that people want to follow you rather than that you're following other people. Exactly. You are a leader, but you're not trying to be a leader because that's too normal. That's not cool. That's not cool. That's exactly what my old grandpas do. They're like, I used to be a battalion commander. No, no, no.

The new leaders were these leaders of expression. And of course, the word cool came from the African-American community in America. I'm not surprised. Exactly. It was in many ways this like, okay, there's this schema. There is this world around me that is not friendly and I can fight it or I can fight it in this cool way. And so that's where we get cool pose where you're just like not. phased, effortless. And these are behaviors that did not mean anything or matter or do anything

prior to the early 1900s. So politeness, that changes generation to generation. And country to country. I mean, I remember going to Japan and we had this whole fixer and basically his job was to travel, filming with a crew. His job, as far as I could work out, was to follow us around and tell us when we were being impolite. And no intention with being, but we were just impolite. And you know what, that guy could have had that job 500 years ago. Politeness, what is and is not polite, changes all the time. But what is cool and not cool changes all the time.

But the fact that politeness and coolness always means something is important. But the fact that coolness did not exist 500 years ago, 700 years ago, 200 years ago, tells us a lot about how our societies have changed. I hear what you're saying about the word didn't exist. But in terms of the concept, like I think, I don't know, Mozart's pretty cool, wasn't he? You're a nerd. Now, he may have been a rapscallion. He was influential, you know.

He was daring. He was, he pushed the boundaries of etiquette. But also, I think people wanted to be associated with him, wanted to be. Of course. Of course they admired him. They aspired to be like him, but he wasn't cool. Okay. I wonder about the word, right? So I guess for me, I would add in that there is a certain authenticity to coolness where you as an individual are unapologetically a really honest version of yourself. Correct. And I think the unapologetically, part is important. So I always thought that that was, I don't know, there's something in the

way that the word reflects that, that while everything around you is warm and sort of sharing its own temperature, you're standing out from the crowds ever so slightly. Yes, you aren't trying because to try, it's too in schema. It's too Protestant work ethic. It's too, that's what everyone's always been doing and we all can do that. Yeah. But if you're cool, you are flying by effortlessly. It's just who I am. I don't even think about it. I'm not even trying. You're, you're pretty cool. You are pretty cool. Thank you. You're pretty cool. And I aspire to be cool, because what else could I possibly be? The strongest? No. I mean, you could be. I could be. You could be. How? In what way? In a really narrowly defined group.

Let me ask you this, though. Could I be the coolest? Doesn't matter. I don't care. And that's the coolest thing you've said. Okay. Should we go on to more cool things? All right, here's a question from Sean, who says,

something that occasionally fascinates me is the so-called stank face. What is it about certain kinds of bass or heavy music that make our faces scrunch up like that? Okay. The stank face, we should probably explain this, because I didn't know. know it was called this. I didn't either, but I know exactly what he's talking about. Go on, do the slang face. Okay, so you listen to some really heavy. Yeah. It's almost like your, your face recoils and disgust. It's not a disgust face. At least for me, it feels more like a, like a strong face. Right. Dun, ding, ding, dung, dung, dung, dung. Yeah, like I'm a warrior.

Yeah, okay. Hey, like you're ready to go into battle. Yeah. Okay, so I, I had to look into this. there is very little evidence or research into why this happens, but it does appear to be quite universal. I know I make the face. Yeah. It's something that does happen. When you're listening to Mozart, you're like, oh, yeah, you're so cool. Look, Mozart can be cool to us, but he could not be cool in the same way to his contemporaries. How dare you?

Mozart is super cool. Okay, so it's one muscle in particular. It's called the Levator, Labi. superioris alaque nae nazi oh that one how was that for Latin

it translates as the elevator of the upper lip and the wing of the nose exactly that's it this one that one yeah

okay so I mean why on earth that particular muscle gets triggered it's it's like sort of a bit of a mystery so there's definitely reasons why that kind of music

might end up having a physical reaction to us. So there's this idea that you've got like these really low bases or you've got this kind of heavy distortion that it can create this this cross-modal response in the brain where you're like, that's filthy, yeah, right? Right. So your body is like, oh. So it's related to disgust under this hypothesis.

Mm-hmm. Maybe not like, yeah, but like, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Or there's also this idea that it's like benign masochism, that it's sort of like a pleasurable pain. Yeah, this is bad, but I'm enjoying it. Right, right. Exactly. Oh, interesting.

Yeah. I mean, the reason why you go on roller fosters, essentially, the reason why you might eat chili peppers, that kind of thing, like, I'm just enjoying. I'm going to write this down because I'm working on a theory of humor. Okay. And it's bedrock is the classic benign violators. theory, that things are funny when they're bad, but okay. That's so wrong, but it's safe. Yes.

And so stank face being a benign machism. Massacism. I wonder if there's a line between them. Maybe Dubstep and Jerry Seinfeld have something in common. Maybe they do. Maybe they do. There's also this idea that it's like, because your brain's this big prediction engine, it's like working out what's coming next.

you are delighted by surprise. So there's an idea that when you're listening to like really heavy music, you're sort of expecting this like synchronicity to happen. And then when it changes, you're like, oh, yeah, that feels good. Yeah. Can you tell I never went to a single live event? I went to a Skrillx concert once. Did you?

Yeah. It was like a surprise concert with noisy. The Vice, Vice Magazine had noisy. their music outlet and they loaded us all into a bus and they took us to this like secret location. We didn't even know who the performer was going to be and it was Scrillix. This was in 2009. I actually, weirdly enough, I think I did an episode about coolness, like the history of the concept of cool. And I included footage of myself at the Scrillix concert in that video.

This is all coming together. Let's come back. Look at that. There's also this idea about bass on its own. Why am I doing the music question? This doesn't make any sense. No, this is very fun. You're enjoying it.

You're like, well, you know, bass like Mozart. Did you know the cool musicians like, you know, dubstep? It's kind of like Mozart. Can you name an artist that's made music after Mozart? Yeah. Okay, go ahead. Vivaldi. I don't actually know was Vivaldi after Mozart?

See, you do know that. I'm not hating it. Vivaldi is amazing. The four seasons, like, it's incredible. That is stank-faced territory. You know, my first, the very first CDs I was ever allowed to have were classical thunder. It was a collection of four CDs that had like the most stanky classical music. It had like the overture of 1812 where there's like cannons in the music.

Yeah. And it had Beethoven's fifth. Amazing. Yeah. All these like, oh yeah. And it had one of all these songs like a really fast one, spring maybe or summer. It'll be spring. Yeah.

Yeah. And I loved it. Honestly, I love that shit. I love that shit. I do too. Okay. Last question. This one's from Robin.

What are you reading right now? Oh, a nice little breezy cue. I love this. This is a nice little cute one at the end. What are you reading right? right now? I'm reading Project Hail Mary. It's really good.

It's really funny. I mean, he's an amazing writer, isn't he? I never actually read The Martian, but I'm really enjoying Project Hill Mary. It's also, the bit I really like about it is that it's just like, he just makes these little, like, math jokes all the way through. Ah, yeah. It makes you feel clever to get them. Okay.

I haven't read it, so I'll have to, I'll have to read this because. It's good. It's really good. Yeah. Like, it starts off, this isn't giving me anything away. But it starts off and he sort of wakes up in this laboratory and he's like, no one's around. And he's like, something weird is going on and I can't work out what it is. And it's how he works out that gravity isn't what it should be.

Oh. So he's like trying to work out. Yeah, it's great. It's really great. But it's all the science is really, really, really good. How great. How about you? I just finished a book this morning, actually.

I finished Reaper Man by Terry. Pratchett. Oh, yeah. The Discworld novels. Yeah, it's, it's, I love the books that are quite silly, but they contain like really good insights into the human condition, just as little as sides. So I like write down like all these quotes. And so I brought soul music with me. I'm going to read that one next. They like, there, there are such great psychological, scientific and philosophical scenarios in them. One is that, okay, So the premise of Reaper Man is that death has been asked to retire.

The grim reaper, right, is this personification of death that visits people, helps their souls get out of the way, go on to the afterlife. And he's asked to retire. But in the interim between deaths, there's no one to help the souls. And this one guy dies and he's like, what the heck? Where do I go? So he goes back into his body and he controls his body. But his body's dead. And so he has to control every part of it.

And he's like, oh, crap. Like, it's only now that I'm realizing how much of my existence was done by automatic processes. It's pretty easy for me to walk because there's like pretty obvious like nerves that are going to pull which muscle. But breathing, digestion, like, what? What does a spleen do? And how do I make it do that? He doesn't know. He's trying to like operate this body completely under conscious control.

And it's just this amazing like thought experiment that shows you how little of you is you. It's mainly being done for you and you're just along for the ride. Oh, I like that so much. It sort of taps into your soul music thing. It's like there's an element of consciousness going on there, right? Exactly. Exactly. And then I think I'm going to read Mind Over Matter next.

This is the one I brought. This is my Casey Cole. She wrote the universe in the teacup, which I read like a decade ago. And I loved that book so much. I even discussed it in some Vsauce episodes years ago. And I found that in a thrift shop. And I'm like, Casey, cool. She wrote more books.

And it's not even a new book. But I'm very excited to read it because it looks like it's pretty mind-blowing. Yeah, that looks good. I've got the next one on my list. It's arriving today. It's called Straw Dogs. And it's by John Gray. Have you come across this one?

That's, yeah, it sounds familiar. Yeah, so it's all about the idea about human beings, their place in the world. It's sort of very philosophical about sort of, I think trying to challenge our assumptions about what it means to be human. Ooh, how did you hear about it? Someone told me about it last week and we're like, oh, you can just gobble this in a weekend. Okay. It might be quite hard. You'll be fine, but for me, it might be quite hard.

I think I'm going to have to, this is one of the ones you're going to have to read with a, with a highlighter in your hand. Yeah, that's the best way to read. Laura and our producer is looking at me scathingly that I could possibly put a mark in a book. I put marks in nonfiction books, but in the fiction ones, I just, I copy down the exact. There's some cats that my daughter drew, but copy down whole bits because I, they're just kind of long and then I can add my own thoughts to it. I'm trying to see if there's anything particular. cool from what I just read. Man, sometimes I go so off the rails.

I'll be like, oh, oh, that makes me think of this idea I've been. Oh, here's one. They're describing this woman named Mrs. Cake, and she's a medium. She can talk to the dead. And a lot of the other religions in Discworld believe that that's sinful. So they say that whenever she's told that she's wrong by a priest, she gives them a peace of her mind. there were so many pieces of Mrs. Cake's mind left around the city now that it was quite surprising that there was enough left to power Mrs. Cake.

But strangely enough, the more pieces of her mind she gave away, the more there seemed to be left. And I'm like, that's a funny way of describing what I think gave us our sense of selves. It was sharing it. When you have to communicate what's in here, you actually define yourself. And so it was giving people a piece of our mind, both in. In an angry sense, but also in the sense of, whoa, you know what I just saw that you didn't see? That we developed from being this you social sort of selfless, not human to the incredibly interiorly active humans that we are today that are self-conscious and that have wills and desires and are alone in our own minds. And it just came from that little joke about Mrs. Cake.

So that's what I love about the Discworld books. There's just like the richest. Endless fun. I shouldn't read them. The jokes are good. I'll recommend one to you after I've read a bunch. But I'm reading all the death, all the death ones that are all about death. In the first book, he needs to get an apprentice.

And then I think in this next one I'm going to read his apprentice and his daughter. He has a daughter because he like spared this baby's life and raised it. And now it's his daughter. So there's a kind of plant. There's a kind of tree in discharacter. squirrel that are called the counting pines because they realized or they thought

that humans were cutting them down in order to figure out how old they were to count the rings. As soon as the trees learned that we could we count rings to see how old a tree is, they thought that that's why they were being cut down. So they evolved to display their

age on their bark. It's big numbers. But that did not save them. It just turned them into, people got even more excited to cut them down for the address plate business of like, okay, what's your address? And you went and you found the trees that had those numbers on its bark and cut them down. He was amazing. Terry Pritchell was just amazing.

Yeah. Just amazing. All right. Do you wrap it up? Let's wrap it up. Let's wrap it up by saying, you guys are amazing as well. Send us in your questions, your thoughts, your concerns, your fears, and your hopes. The rest is science and goalhanger.com.

Well, I don't know why you, but I'm hoping to find some coolness somewhere. You can also check us out on our Reddit, our slash the rest is science. Or leave us a comment wherever you are watching, listening to this, or send us an email or stop us in the street, or just shout really loudly and hope that one of us will be walking past it close enough to hear you. Any way you want to get in touch. But we will see you next time.

I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore. On October 14th, the Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy. That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible? Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest. Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy.

Streaming October 14th, only on Disney Plus.