The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Ancient Tweezers, Modern Leprosy, Space Rock Recycling

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

PopSci's Laura Baisas hops on Weirdest Thing to talk about ancient tweezers (and their accompanying screams), Rachel explains the state of Leprosy in past, present, and future, and Sara Kiley talks about tools and weapons made from space rocks. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Check out Weirdest Thing on YouTube: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeekYouTube If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Thanks to our sponsors!  Here's a special, (limited time) deal for our listeners to get you started RIGHT NOW, Get 55% off at https://Babbel.com/WEIRDEST Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton.com. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and text stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm really.

I'm Sarah Kylie Watson. I'm Laura Bysis. Laura, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here. Listeners, this is Laura's first time on the show, but she is not a random guest, like so many of our other random guests, who we love very much. Laura is a Popsai staffer. Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself? Right. Thanks, Rachel. Yeah, my name is Laura Bysis. I have been a science newswriter at Popsie for exactly one. I cover little bits of everything from archaeology to poop to biology to climate change, you name it. Sarah Kylie tells me to write it and I write it.

Before Popsie, I worked at NBC News for about 10 years and then went back to grad school when I decided I wanted to focus on science journalism a little bit, a little bit more and got my master's degree from Columbia. I'm also my kind of weird fact about myself, I am a marathon swimmer and can swim where, yeah, Yeah, I can swim very, very long distances. And one thing that's cool about marathon swimming is there is a ton of science in it. So I have to think about tides and wind, weather, sunscreen, relieving oneself when they're swimming food, all sorts of things. So it's kind of a perfect sport for somebody like me who loves the water and also loves thinking about science.

You just love confounding variables. Um, yes, I, I say marathon swimmers need to go from type A to type Z on, you know, the flip of a coin because you have to be type A and you're planning and your training and all of that. But then like one variable shifts and you need to just kind of go with it. That's where the type Z comes in. You know, if the wind changes or if tides may be a little bit behind or somebody in your crew gets sick, certain things like that. So that's kind of like the fun exercise of it is going from like. the rigid training schedule to, all right, let's go with it. I think that would destroy my psyche, but I love that you love it. I could keep asking you questions about this all day, but instead, let's get it to the show. So on the weirdest that I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, swimming, the English Channel or whatever, etc. And then we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was.

Asterisk, not really. Anyway, Sarah Kylie, what's your tease? Okay. Well, my tease is that in the Bronze Age, people used a material that fell from the sky to make stuff, tools, jewelry, you name it. Great. I mean, that sounds really practical. Yeah. Reduce, reuse, recycle.

Exactly. From the sky. Laura, what's your tease? So if you think waxing your body here is bad, how about plucking your armpit hair? That was a practice that was par for the course in Roman Great Britain. Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't like that. Okay, cool. My tease is that now that leprosy is back, baby. Woo! I'm going to talk about why this disease. looms so large in our cultural imagination. So let's see, where shall we begin? Sir Kylie, I would love to hear about these sky materials. Sky materials, yep, happy to talk about them. Very exciting stuff. So, yep, we're going to start in the past. We're going to go back to the Bronze Age. So this is kind of

generally around 3,000 BCE to 1,000 BCE, obviously in different parts of the world. They were playing with bronze at different times. Like I think in modern day Turkey, they were playing with it as early as like 6,500 BCEs. But generally, 3,000 BCs when it started moving through the Middle East, like up into the Mediterranean and into Europe. So generally speaking, bronze was happening. And this was a step up from stones, obviously the Stone Age, which came before. Oh, yeah.

So humans during this time graduated from rock tools to metal tools. Namely, duh, bronze. So you can make bronze from melting tin and copper together, and you can make some pretty neat, strong stuff, especially weaponry. Bronze is quite a bit stronger than just copper and things like bronze spears, swords, shields, armors, axes, halberds, daggers, bows, arrows, clubs, and mallets all became commonplace, replacing or complementing the previous era as stone tools. So pretty exciting stuff for... I feel like you could be a like bronze age KVC host. Oh, I would. Oh, absolutely.

That run of tools you just gave was really just perfect. Yeah. Please continue. Taking out my Bronze Age credit card right now. Oh, yeah. Sounds great. The bronze card. But yeah, we love.

So very exciting time to be a prehistoric human. But obviously today, we know there's a lot of stuff that's stronger than bronze and one of them is iron. and we use a lot of iron in the modern world. And there's a ton of iron actually iron ore on our planet. But the problem is it doesn't work as iron ore. It's just doesn't work. It's not what you want it to be. So the USGS puts reserves for the whole globe at about 800 billion tons of crude ore as of last year.

So there's a tonne. but it's not usable. And to make it usable, you really have to know what you're doing. There's quite a science to it. So I'm going to talk to you guys a little bit about the art of smelting iron, which is something I was trying to figure out all morning. So fast forward after the Bronze Age came the Iron Age. So somewhere around like 1,200 BCE to 600 BCE, again, people were messing with different

metals at different times, at different places on the world, but this is a general estimation. I mean, there's some prehistoric iron doodads that date back, like, way before this. But this is around the time when people are figuring out, okay, this is how we smelt it. And so to make iron ore into usable iron, you have to heat it up like a lot, a lot more than bronze. And there were a bunch of different figures on the internet, but all of them were in the thousands of degrees Fahrenheit. 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit is one that sticks in my mind. So very, very, very hot.

And you had to make these, like, brand new, better furnaces in which you'd heat up iron ore with charcoal. And when you did that, it would make a spongy lump of iron and slag that was then hammered to remove all of the slag, according to Encyclopedia Britonica. And then you'd have to keep heating this iron up in the bed of charcoal. You'd harden it, heat it, cool it, cool it, heat it, heat it, rapidly. over and over and then you'd hammer it and heat it and you just keep doing this over and over and over again until it was in the shape that you desired. And so this was obviously not as easy as like

making bronze, pouring it in a cast and voila, here's your hammer axe, you know, etc. So these early iron things like didn't really look as refined necessarily as like, you know, the peak bronze age tools, but they were stronger, which was important. But, but But there is iron that exists, you know, out there on this planet and elsewhere that exists in the metallic function. It comes ready to use. We love it. But it's not exactly easy to find. And one way that you can find iron that's ready to use is in meteors.

So falling space rocks sometimes held like this magical, tougher material than, you know, anybody was able to make. in the Bronze Age. So, voila, we have meteoric iron. And so researchers, as of late, have been able to find out if ancient tools that came from this planet or from outer space. And the way that that works is kind of taking a peek at the chemical composition. So one French researcher, Albert Jamon, perhaps. In 2017, he like did a huge chemical analysis of a bunch of pre-iron age iron tool. So we're talking about before anybody was smelting. People were still using iron and it's kind of like where the heck did they get this? Because there is iron on earth, but who smelt it? Smelt it. Yes. It's been forged but not smelt. That was the thing. There's been

forging iron for a long time, but the smelting didn't come till later. So we've got a mystery. So he took all of these gadgets, which I'm going to give you another QBC list of. So we've got Egyptian beads from 3,200 BCE, a dagger from Turkey, 2,500 BCE, a pendant from Syria, 2300 BCE, acts from Syria, 1400 BC, and several things from China, 1400 BC, and then the dagger, bracelet, and headrest of King Tut, which was from 1350 BCE. So a bunch of cool stuff, all before smelting iron was in any of those places. So he checked him out using, let's see, a portable X-ray fluorescent spectrometer, which sounds very fun. So to determine if the pre-iron age iron treasures used space rocks or were simply smelted before smelting was a big deal, he and his team chemically looked at the ratios between iron, nickel, and cobalt to determine the metal's origin.

Tulloric iron or iron native to the earth is typically around 3% nickel. Tainite and Camasite, which are the two most typical kinds of meteoric iron, have a nickel mass of at least 5% going up to like 65%. And cobalt is hardly present at all in telluric iron. Not to mention tilluric iron is super duper rare. There's really only one major deposit on the planet, and it's in Greenland. So like 5,000 years ago, getting iron from Greenland to Egypt would have been like even more miraculous than finding it in a meteor. You know what I mean? So perhaps that is the great mystery is like if there is any of this stuff out there.

But so these this French researcher, he did this analysis and all of the knick-knacks that were listed were in fact meteoric iron. But where does meteoric iron even come from? Because most meteors aren't just iron that floats down to Earth. But the gist is when planets are celestial bodies form, nickel scoots its way to the molten iron core, kind of like Earth. like we have a molten iron core. So there isn't a ton of nickel on the surface, but there is in the center. And meteorites happen sometimes when these, like, you know, budding planets, our celestial bodies go boom and in a big way.

And so that inside sometimes comes outside and comes raining down on, you know, everybody else. So splattering bits of developing planet goes in every direction. And if those materials happen to come from the core, then they're bound to hold a decent amount of iron with this high levels of nickel and cobalt. And this metal that falls down from the heavens is already in the metal state. So it's ready to be forged into beads, daggers, whatever, you know, whatever makes you happy. Versus undergoing, like, reduction of iron ore and like all of the complicated, hot, sweaty science is smelting. And so while meteorites hit, like, the Earth a ton of, they hit the Earth all the time.

It's not that big of a deal. Thousands of them end up on our planetary doorstep every year, according to one 2020 study. And hardly any of them are noticeable. iron-filled or catastrophe-inducing. Sorry dinosaurs. And new scientist estimates that out of the 63,000 meteorites we found and noticed, so the ones that we have spotted, 6% are iron-rich. So the rest are just cool space rocks. So not that meteorites are like a super rare occurrence, but it's pretty, pretty rare that they are going to be iron-rich enough that you could, you know, turn it into cool stuff. So space iron tools, they're rare beyond rare. And thus far,

we only found like 55 examples, and they've all come from 22 different sites across the globe. And one of them is a relatively recent find, and this is the one that kind of led me down this rabbit hole, which, yay, but it's a 1.5 inch long 2.9 gram arrowhead that was discovered in the 19th century in a late Bronze Age lake dwelling community called Morgan in Switzerland. And so very, very recently, scientists found this in like the back of like the Bern History Museum or something, and they did some analysis, and they were like, oh, okay, this has got to be meteoric iron. And there's like a miniature weirdest thing story inside this weirdest thing story.

So this is the little arrows weird story. So the settlement of Morgan is located five miles from where the Tuanenburg meteorite struck the earth 150,000 years ago. So five miles away, there's a meteorite land, kapal. But as weird as it is, this is not the meteorite that made. the iron that ended up in this little arrow. So five miles away from where this little thing was found was a giant meteorite. But after some analysis, the authors found that the arrowhead itself was made up of 8.3% nickel, which is twice as much as the Twanberg meteorite. It also

is made up of a high content of geranium and a low concentration of aluminum 26, which hints that the meteorite it came from had to be huge, like two times at least. And so three such meteorites have hit Europe, one in the Czech Republic, one in Spain, and one in Estonia. The authors estimate that the meteorite that could have sourced this rare find is the Kaleharve meteorite, I believe, and it formed a giant crater in the Estonian island of Sarah Maugh around 1,500 BCE. So it just got deposited right there in the middle of the Bronze Age, which is just very fortunate for the Estonians. And this impact site, which is like at 864, mile journey through modern-day in Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. It also suggests that there's a

complex trade and transport system that would have been in place during this era, even though this material was so rare. It still, you know, made quite a little distance. And another cool meteoric iron gadget, obviously, is all the stuff that was buried with King Tut. So he was mummified in 1323 BCE. Well before iron smelting was commonplace in Egypt, and also well after the first metallic iron remnants are dated back to from this area. So the first use of metallic iron in Egypt dates back to 3,400 BCE, which it predates even the pharaohs and the state of Egypt itself. So they were using meteoric iron a really long time ago in Egypt, and they would not figure out how to smelt until much later. But anyway, there's no evidence of smelting iron until like 6th century BCE.

So just to show how long a history space iron has the prehistoric world. It's very, very, very weird. But yeah, during King Tut's reign, metallic iron and meteoric iron, all of that, all of that jazz was worth more than gold. So it was kind of a flex that he got to be buried with his dagger and like I think it was a piece of jewelry and a little headrest. So, you know, being buried with space iron was like quite the prehistoric flex. But yeah. So that's the just long before we figured out how to smelt. We were forging. We were forging iron, which is just really hilarious to me that we had somehow found a way to make a loophole to the Iron Age. Yeah. Yeah. Work smarter, not harder, you know? Just go looking for space rocks. Yeah. And just

thinking about the rarity. Like, not only does it need to have the right composition, it needs to land in the right spot on Earth. Like, statistically, those chances sound like crazy. Yeah. And it can't be buried. Like I think most of the meteor stuff, like, because I think the Twanberg was like a little bit under the ground. Obviously, it had fallen a long time ago. So they're like, yeah, I don't think people were digging these up. Like they just like saw space rock and we're like, I bet I can make something cool with that. Yeah. And they did. And it happened to be the stuff that we still use today to build all our stuff. Wow. So fun. That's really cool. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.

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looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code Weirdest. That's code Weirdest for 20% off. No one goes to Hank's for spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1.5. slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hank says, line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. Okay, we're back. And so is leprosy, as you may have

noticed in news reports. But seriously, y'all. In August, early August, a case report in the CDC's emerging infectious diseases journal sounded the alarm on, you guessed it, an emerging infectious disease. But instead of like a deuce strain of bird flu or some exotic new mosquito-borne parasite, the researchers were warning the medical community about the return of a real throwback, leprosy, more accurately known as Hanson's disease. That is the correct medical terminology these days. apparently cases in the Southeast have doubled over the last decade and central Florida has had a disproportionate share of reported cases,

81% of the 159 cases in 2020 to be exact. So truly disproportionate. We're not talking a slight bump. No. And to such an extent that the researchers think that Hanson's disease, aka leprosy, may now be endemic in Central Florida, which means there's a consistent on. going presence of the disease as opposed to occasional outbreaks when someone brings in from somewhere else, which is what the U.S. thought its relationship with Hansen's disease was like these days. But not anymore. So we got to get with the program. So similar to news reports on

cases of the plague, which yes, people still get. This one set off a lot of like frantic headlines about like quote biblical diseases being back on the rise. And Hanson's disease is like probably the most commonly referenced and least understood infectious disease in history. So I wanted to take some time today to talk about how it got that way and like what the facts are. Because yes, you should care that this previously sort of. eliminated infectious disease is possibly endemic again in the U.S. But also, it never went away.

Lots of people have been getting this disease around the world every year, forever. And it is actually much less scary than most people think. And there's a lot of stigma around it, and there shouldn't be. So the facts. Yes, Hansen's disease, which is caused by the bacteria, mycobacterium, lepray. And then also there's a new one a few years ago that they found called mycobacterium lepromatosis, but it's all the same. It's not like this is like a scary new bacterium that's doing different things. It is contagious. But it is extremely hard to catch. We aren't even

exactly sure how it's transmitted because we know that casual contact like on the order of sitting next to someone on public transportation or shaking hands with them is not enough to transmit it. It's been called a wimp of a pathogen by some experts because it dies pretty much instantly once it's outside the body, which of course many people know from conversations around like flu transmission and COVID transmission. That is often not the case. But like these leprosy bacteria, once they're out of a host, they're like basically done for. So, So you don't have to worry about, like, touch and surfaces. And it's possible that the bacteria spreads through droplets from coughs and sneezes.

That's, like, the prevailing theory. But in any case, it seems like you only run the risk of catching it from someone if you have, like, really prolonged close contact. Also, side note, you can catch leprosy from touching or eating an infected armadillo. The nine-banded armadillo is known to carry the disease. Humans are actually thought to have transmitted it to armadillos about 500 years ago. So that's on us. Oh, my gosh. Are the reds?

Armadillos in Florida like, okay. So I don't know how the armadillos in Florida are doing specifically, but it is like among the species. I think I remember seeing that there's that like 20% of the population has it. Wow. But yeah. But I think because their lifespans are shorter and I'll get it. into it in a second, this bacteria grows really slowly. So I think it tends to be less of an issue symptomatically for them. But I'm not an armadillo scientist. So red squirrels also actually

were recently found to carry it too. And it's thought that maybe the frenzied trade for their furs during medieval times in Europe may have fueled an epidemic at that time. And back to transmission. Don't eat armadillos. Just a side note. Even if you're in close contact with a person or armadillo with Hanson's disease, you are extremely unlikely to contract it because 95%

of people who are exposed do not become infected. It seems like only about 5% of the population is actually susceptible to infection with this bacteria. Most people's immune systems are able to just brush them

off. So obviously like being immunocompromised may factor in, but there also seems to be a genetic factor. So certain genetic variations seem to make people more susceptible and probably around 5% of the population has them. And so what's interesting is that that means it can seem to sort of run in families, which led to some of the confusion around what this illness was and how it was transmitted. But that's just because family members are more likely to share the trait of being susceptible to it. So then if they also happen to be in a situation where they're exposed to the bacteria, then you'll see multiple family members becoming ill.

And even if you are susceptible and you are exposed, the bacteria grows so slowly that it can take years or decades for you to develop symptoms. So you may be starting to guess that like all of this combined to create an illness that seemed like very mysterious in its ways. She moves in mysterious ways, leprosy. And I will explain in a little bit how that helps contribute to like our absolute like runaway stigma around this disease. So if you're listening to this and you're like, oh no, I pet our middle is all the time. I live in central Florida. What do I do? here's what to look out for.

The first noticeable signs of Hansen's disease, it's often like a development of a pale or pink colored, like patty rash on the skin. And usually the telltale sign that it's Hansen's disease and not some other skin rash is that those bits of skin will be insensitive to temperature or pain. So contrary to like a lot of sort of pop culture, portrayals, there isn't, it's as far as conditions that give you skin involvement go,

it's like not particularly gruesome. There's not, you don't have bulbous, you know, losing things. Though obviously if you do, you still deserve respect and compassion and love, but just saying, Hanses does not do that. You get this scaly rash and it can be numb. And, you know, there's kind of this classic thing associated with Hans's disease, the loss of fingers and toes. And that is true, but it's actually not the disease itself. It's not like it eats away at the tissue. What happens is that it tends to cause nerve damage and you have that insensitivity to pain and heat. And if that progresses without treatment, people become really prone to small injuries.

and wounds that cause infections, very similar to like severe or untreated diabetes, can lead to some really severe foot problems because you just don't have sensitivity in your foot. So it is quite common for there to be like some eventually pretty gruesome tissue loss, but it's a secondary effect, not the bacterium itself. which I did not know until today. So that's a thing I have learned. Luckily, the disease is really easily treated with antibiotics. And you stop being contagious as little contagion as there is. You stop being contagious at all within like 72 hours of starting treatment. So this is like as far as our ability to like treat and contain things that historically were scary go. It's like pretty clutch.

Of course, we still don't like to see diseases that we treat with antibiotic spreading because there is always the concern that increased antibiotic resistance is going to become a problem. So I would still say, like, don't be casual about the recurrence of perhaps endemic Hanson's disease. But, like, don't be weird about it. It's just an infection. There's nothing, nothing to worry about other than getting antibiotics and colonies. and call on your doctor.

So how did we get this overblowed idea of what Hanson's disease slash leprosy is? Our oldest physical evidence of the disease dates back to 4,000 years ago, a skeleton found in India that showed signs of bone lesions that can occur if the disease is left untreated. Again, this is similar to syphilis, you know, very common STI on the rise. You know, a syphilis absolutely is a huge public health problem if it's not treated and contained, but also it's nothing to be ashamed of or terrified of. Like, if you get it, you get antibiotics. You're going to be okay. But if you don't, then you're going to be really not okay.

Similarly, you know, we have this archaeological evidence that like before antibiotics were an option, the disease would progress and it would actually affect the bone. So that's why we're able to find it, you know, in the. archaeological record. What's interesting is that earlier than that, there are lots of historical references to leprosy, but it's likely that those descriptions refer to like all kinds of conditions that affected the skin. The word leprosy just comes from the Greek for like scaly rash basically. And yeah, they're actually, when I was writing my book, been there not that, a ralzic history of sex, buy it wherever you buy books. I talked about how Hillel deGarge von Bingen, my faith talked about a leprosy that only affected the like lusty sinful people, which was syphilis.

So like a lot of the really horrific like, oh my gosh, this thing is super contagious and its gross stuff was probably talked about syphilis, which again also isn't gross, but different from Hanson's disease. So there's a lot of confusion in the historical record. And there's a lot of a lot of the things that we, it's. evoke when we talk about leprosy, we're possibly talking about something completely different. The like Leviticus verse about isolating people, which by the way, only isolated them for seven days. So that's still like, I don't think you should run away with that and be like, wow, how gross.

That seems a pretty measured response. Seven days. Like just take a little week. Yeah. Rest up. Hide in the cave, find some scrolls, you know. But anyway, point being like, When we can't look at something like in the physical, archaeological record, it's really hard to date back, like the actual history of how people talked about disease because there were a lot of things that were conflated. Understandably, they had no germ theory.

They were just like, there are five categories of thing. This is the skin one, you know? Fair enough. And of course, some of those diseases would have been very contagious. And so we have this conflation of many diseases. The lack of certainty about,

how and when someone might contract Hansa's disease specifically, because, again, it can take like 20 years for symptoms to emerge, similar to syphilis, really. So it's, like, very hard, especially sort of like pre-modern epidemiology to, like, contact trace your Hansa's disease. And again, like, because of this genetic component, sometimes it would seem like a whole family got it. So that uncertainty, I think just really bred a spookiness around the disease. And that stigma seems to have really like peaked in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. When people with Hansen's disease were sometimes said to literally be doing their time in purgatory while still alive. Oh my heavens.

Right. That was actually kind of the more positive take because otherwise other people were like, well, they're being. punished. Like this is a, oh, okay. Like, they did something to make this happen. And if you're in purgatory, at least you maybe have a shot. Like, it's not a, you know. Yeah. Yeah. At this time, the prevailing belief was that everyone had to do some time in purgatory. It was, it was not a good time to, uh, to have a soul. The Middle Ages in Western Europe. Um, and so there were some people who were actually like, oh, like this is like a very, it was almost like a suffering of saints kind of thing. We're like, wow.

They get to get it over and done with while they're on earth. So they were often kind of like banished to the edge of town to like beg for alms. But there was also kind of this this like industry of people like giving money to people who had Hanson's disease as a way of like kind of piggybacking onto their purgatory finishing. Oh my. their heaven point. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something like that.

What a time to be alive. So we don't know for sure like where the first place was that they isolated people with Henson's disease specifically. But definitely they were doing that in the Middle Ages in Europe. And that continued in the U.S. It was only in 1975 that policies that isolated people affected with him. disease were disbanded. Until then, that was the U.S. policy. And there are still many countries where the disease remains pretty prevalent where people are sometimes, like, legally discriminated against. And so that's a big problem. And I will circle back to that in a second. But yeah,

in the U.S., we did have these, like, isolated communities in 1865, you know, just a few decades before the U.S. came barreling in. Hawaii introduced laws that allowed for the arrest and removal of people with Hanson's disease, and they started isolating them on the island of Molokai. And those laws weren't lifted until 1969. So even once Hawaii was officially a part of the U.S., again, why would those laws have changed? Because in the U.S. that we also had these isolated colonies.

So as of 2015, there were still 16 former patients living there because they'd sent their whole lives there. And it was really interesting looking at different articles about the Hanson Disease communities on Molokai. Like some of them were painted a very rosy picture of like, obviously this was bad. But they lived on this beautiful island and they built community and they had marriages and they didn't want to leave because they were so high. happy there. And then other articles that I feel may have been more correct were like, these people knew literally nothing else and had been completely disconnected from their families. And so decided to stay, which is not to say some of them didn't like have marriages and have things about their lives that they liked, but still like an obviously horrific situation.

And, yeah, before a treatment was found in 1951, patients on the U.S. mainland were mostly sent to a leprosarium in Louisiana. And at its peak, it housed about 500 patients. Molokai had thousands. And, yeah, the Louisiana hospital is also closed, but similar to the community in Molokai, there are people who have not left because they were at that point. point like people in their 80s and 90s who had lived there their whole lives. And so yeah, there are still 200,000 cases that we have disease every year around the world. Yeah. And in Brazil, India and Indonesia, especially, there are a pretty high number of cases. And it's like anything else.

You know, people who don't have access to health care and, you know, don't have access to antibiotics. And also just when there is stigma, people are less likely to get tested and screened and treated for what is actually a very easy to treat disease. So stigma sucks. It's very bad. I don't know what else to say. But anyway, yeah, U.S. listeners, especially Central Florida listeners, keep an eye out, but also don't be a dick about it. This is just a bacteria. You're probably not even susceptible to it. And if you are, like, honestly, believe for you, 5% that's rare.

That's, you're special. Yeah, and go to the doctor. Just go to the doctor. So that's, that's it. That's all I have to say about that. Oh, my gosh. All that stigma for something that is just like so hard to transmit, so hard to, it's, it's really, that's like, that was shocking.

You know, I thought it would, I always assumed it was more like the plague. You know, rapid, rapid, rapid, that's crazy. Yeah, you know, people, any public health policies that are like based on what people in the middle ages thought generally not great. Oh, yeah. This one in particular, really, really time for us to reexamine our relationship with leprosy. So, love it. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact.

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legs with my razor season? You know, is this, is this part shaved? Okay. It's up eight. So obviously, body hair is basically, it is about as human as you can get. It is part of what makes us mammals. We've evolved from other animals that had completely covered, bodies completely covered with hair. And even a study out as recently as this January found that the genes that control for a complete body of hair are not actually gone. They're just kind of currently muted. That's why there's lots of variation. We lost the full covering about a million years ago and studying how that pattern happens now can actually help scientists treat baldness in the future.

So it's obviously something that we've been fussing out probably since we first emerged from that primordial ooze and fussing about with our wallets as well. Fortune says that the body hair removal industry was worth over $4 billion in 2019 and it could reach $4.94 billion by 2020. So yeah, people are spending a lot. There's a new commercial for, I think it's Venus, but they have a new ad campaign where this like cartoon child wraps about how you should say pubic hair.

It's not shameful, which is true. But also it's still the dorkiest curse I've ever seen. I always, every time I watch it, I'm like, I don't want the like, it's unmas. fair that they are posing the false premise of if you're uncomfortable with this ad, it's because you don't like pubic hair and women. And I'm like, no, it's just a weird ad. Right. It's like, oh, you're uptight if you don't like this. But the ad is just kind of strange. I'm not seeing that one. And now I'm kind of afraid to turn on the TV. But kind of perfect point because like there are a ton of different types of hair removal now.

I mean, there's like, there's from lasers to razors. There's waxing. There's threading, which isn't terrible, but kind of along the same lines. But that obviously was not always the case. Technology has changed. You know, we've just kind of evolved. Now, back in the spring, a recent archaeological dig in the UK uncovered over 50 tweezers that date back to the Roman occupation. And they were used to tweeze armpit hair.

How do we know? How do we know? Well, we know because it was actually written about by a couple of different philosophers. Great. Yeah, we will definitely get to that. I mean, it's kind of like truly a new meaning to the term pain is beauty. And I mean, come on, it's definitely, it would be a great way to get me to talk if I had some state secrets. Tweezer is just kind of in general like today's.

They were fair. They were more safe than some. other options and they were fairly inexpensive, but just like today, not pain free. These were found at the Roxeter Roman City, which is a site in central England. And it was at one point this thriving urban location that was about the size of Pompeii, Italy. Fortunately for them, they did not suffer the same fate as Pompeii. And it's also no stranger to these cosmetic finds. There other tweezers were found in 2019 and also a metal ear cleaning tool that kind of resembles our modern day cotton swab or if you're a brand specific a cuttip, which also I kind of would like maybe a little bit of cotton going in there.

Metal cut tip. That sounds like a really fun way to puncture an eardrum. Yeah, that was kind of a weird one. This town was also once the fourth largest town in Roman Britain or Britannia and it was. a legionary fortress. It was basically one of those like Western expansions of the Roman Empire. And it dates back to about the 90s CE and people lived there until about the 5th century C.E. It all, it was home to a giant forum where laws were made of market, multi-purpose offices, community center, shopping center, bathhouse. So basically, I'm thinking like, you know, an Alta or a Sephora. And these were basically places just kind of like Alta and Sephora where

you could purchase cosmetics, but also socialize, get the news as it's pretty well known that Romans did care a great deal about cleanliness and public image. It wasn't as, for lack of the better words, it wasn't as dirty a time as the Middle Ages. There was something that kind of got lost a little bit there as far as valuing image. Now, Rachel, to your point, this hair plucking, it was so painful that a Roman author and politician Seneca once wrote a a letter complaining about the noise coming from public baths, noting, and I quote, the skinny armpit hair plucker whose cries are shrill so as to draw people's attention and never stop, except when he is doing his job and making someone else shriek for him.

Oh, yes, don't know who that, like, filler and shrieker would have been, but yeah, that was in a writing from Seneca. And to kind of complicate this, that process was also usually performed by slaves, fun times. Now, all of this cleanliness was actually fairly advanced for their time. These commutal baths, toiletry kits, earwax cleaners, they were definitely something that Romans viewed as putting them a little bit above barbarians. And the reason for doing this went a little bit deeper depending upon your gender. It wasn't so much skin deep. there were some cultural and there were some religious reasons for it.

Namely, you know, for men, it was to help set them apart from barbarians. Maybe the Germanic tribes, if you're familiar with that opening scene of Gladiator, that sort of thing. And according to Viren Swami, the Romans didn't really do it to look beautiful. They did it again for those cultural and religious reasons. And men removed it as a sign of purity, which I found kind of interesting because we have so see like that pure hairless skin with women nowadays, but that stuff, that definitely was not the case in Roman times. And again, that's continued to evolve. That's kind of what's interesting

about looking at things like hair, because it has evolved over time. A lot of people would have been too poor at this time to afford like the more expensive toiletry kits, but those tweezers, those, anybody probably, anybody could have gotten one of them. Oh, no. You know, like, so if you really do value that purity, you're going to kind of, and if you value that purity and don't necessarily have the money, you're going to want some of those tweezers. The hair removal for women was definitely a little bit more like the standards of today, although men seem to do it more. The site curator from the rocksiter site where these tweezers were found said that you mostly saw it in a lot of sports like wrestling. There was a social expectation that the men engaging in

exercise that required minimal clothing would have prepared themselves by also removing this body hair. You know, it's kind of, he, the site curator is named Cameron Moffat. He said, you know, it was, it was interesting for them to see how this removal of body hair again after millennia for everyone, although luckily modern methods are a little. bit less excruciating. And then for women, like I said, it was a little bit more, it did have more to do with beauty and purity. They wanted it to get a man, basically. That's the part that hasn't changed. So while the female idea of body hair has changed a little bit more, or the female idea has stayed the same, that male idea has kind of. Cameron Moffitt, again, that same site curator

said that there are some writings about how, you know, if you need, you need to keep on your body hair to get a man to like you, which, again, hasn't changed. So, yes, tweezers that were specifically used by slaves to pluck body, to pluck armpit hair that were so loud that philosophers and statesmen wrote about it. Wow. Yeah. Much to unpack. So much to unpack. So So, and I just think, like, things like this are, these discoveries are just amazing because, like, we find battlefield stuff all the time. And we remember, like, the blood of the battlefield. But, like, there was blood in the bathroom, too. And learning about those types of things through history are just like, and, like, from these kind of cool archaeological digs are just, like, they're fascinating.

Because it's, like, all of these fun, daily things that still drive us crazy in 2023 were in 9 DC. as well. Yeah, I love that. People change so much all the time and also not at all. Not at all. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, some great stuff today.

I love thinking about not just how beauty standards have changed, but how our methods have changed. I don't know. I feel like we talk a lot about like sort of more recent. historical eras where people like put poison on their faces yeah etc and um i don't think we talk enough about like uh the roman empire like ripping hair out of their armpits we've always been given ourselves a hard time to like look quote unquote good like it has never been great you know it's i think we're also like quick to say oh it's tictox fault or social media's fault it's like

these people didn't have tictock and social media and they still have these ridiculous bodies standards that, you know, their wrestlers needed to be airless, you know, like that's the, it's still like, you know, even, yeah, even without those standards that we compare ourselves to, they still exist. They're kind of, they seem like they're pretty part of being human. Yeah, it's true. Just what the standard is changes. Yeah. There's always going to be somebody being like, this is what you should look like. Um, this has been a blast from the past. I've enjoyed. Yeah. It's a lot from the past. I'm sure glad I do not live in a time. when people were writing about how loudly I screamed when I tweezed my armpits.

And I love antibiotics. Yeah. Right. Oh. Yeah. And relatedly, probably. Yeah. Honestly.

Like, somebody definitely, people definitely died from like hair and removal related. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Absolutely. Wow. I bet they dive them in modern era. You know what I mean?

Yeah. You could have that sophisticated romance. plumbing, but if, you know, some sort of bacteria gets into that plumbing. Oh, yeah. Not good. Not good. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire.

Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos.