The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Butts: A Backstory, Parrot Social Media, Why We Eat Chickens

Episode Date: July 19, 2023

Radiolab's Heather Radke joins the show to talk about butts! Plus, Rachel talks about the history of chickens as pets, and Chelsey divulges why parrots are video calling each other. 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!  Get 20% OFF @honeylove by going to https://www.honeylove.com/WEIRDEST! #honeylovepod If you’re looking for a simpler, effective investment for your health, try AG1, and get 5 free AG1 Travel Packs and a FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D with your first purchase. Go to https://drinkAG1.com/WEIRDEST Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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 tech 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 Rachel Feltman. I'm Chelsea B. Coombs. And I'm Heather Radke. Heather, welcome to the show. Oh, thanks so much for having me. Listeners, Heather is the author of a really awesome new book that I have very much enjoyed called But a Backstory. Would you like to tell listeners a little bit more about who you are and how you came to be writing the book that everyone listening to the show wishes they could have written? Well, I don't know if that's true, but yeah. So I, yeah, I'm a writer and I'm a radio maker. Also, I work at Radio Lab. And I published this book in November of last year called Butts a Backstory. And it's basically a cultural history of women's butts, although there's also quite a bit of science in it, too, sort of history of science, really more than straight up science, although there's some of that too. And it's a look at, Oh man, how do we summarize it? It's a look at basically what butts mean and why they've come to mean that. And as one one thing I've thought a lot about is like, why do they mean so much when they could have meant nothing? Like an elbow doesn't mean nothing, but it means much less than a butt, I would say.

Yeah. It's a more function over form, you know. Awesome. Well, we will be talking more about butts in a minute, I'm sure. but let's get into the show. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and then 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. Chelsea, what's your tease? well, this week, mine is that parrots seem to really enjoy video chatting with other parrots. Yeah, you know, I mean, like everybody loves FaceTiming, right?

You know, so I'm glad that parrots can finally get in on the action that we all can. I'm intrigued. Can't wait to hear more. Wonderful. My tea is actually accidentally also bird related. I want to talk about the surprisingly thrilling history of chickens as food, which started more recently than you might expect. This one was a real roller coaster for me. You're not going to lie. I'm excited about that. I love a surprising

history. Heather, what's your tease? Well, mine is not one that I learned this week, but instead one I learned a long time ago. But it's about two statues that were very important to the eugenics movement in America and also are kind of foundational and women's sizing of their clothes. Which is interesting. A mysterious and arcane art for sure. It is indeed. Yeah, I love going clothing shopping. It makes me feel great.

Oh, yeah? You're the only one. That was a huge heathous art. Well, let's see. What should we begin with? I'm happy to, I can get rolling on chickens. Yeah, go for it. Yeah, so this fact started with an article called

How a Shipping Era 100 years ago launched the $30 billion chicken industry by Kenny Torella at Vox, which is as wild and interesting as it sounds and which I promise I will get back to in a few minutes. But in an effort to not just like crib this one fantastic piece of reporting, I decided, you know, I'll pull in some other random chicken facts from farther back in chicken history. And then, like, let me just say I have been thoroughly like poultry pilled. Like, my mind is blown. This thing goes deep. I had no idea.

So, yeah, it turns out that the origin of domesticated chickens is hotly contested. Would I do not know? Interesting. Until recently, it was like fairly widely accepted that people were. breeding juggle fowl in southeast Asia, which is from whence chickens, as we know them today, came as far back as 10,000 years ago. There wasn't any evidence of butchering that long ago. So some people suggested that the birds were bred for cockfighting way before they were

bred for eating. What about eggs? Yeah. Also eggs. Like there's the history of eggs interweaves here. and it gets complicated. Sorry, not to throw you off. Keep going.

No, no, no. Cockfighting versus meat, chicken meat. People have probably literally always eaten eggs, but then it's like that can be kind of like a foraging situation, right? Oh, sure. Sure. Then the question is like, when did they start keeping birds specifically for eggs and or meat? And definitely the eggs came before the chicken in terms of what people eat them for. But the oldest signs of chicken bones that people had slaughtered and, like, snacked on came from the ancient city of Mauritia, which is in the Judean lowlands.

And it sat at the crossroads of trade routes for Egypt and Jerusalem during the Iron Age. And the city peaked between, like, 400 and 200 BC. And so in addition to signs of, you know, butchering marks on the bones, you know, teeth and things like that, we also see twice as many females as males. in the like chicken bone remains, which because of that idea that previously they had mostly been bred for cockfighting, that's like, ah, clearly something else was going on. There were hens. But in 2022, an international group of researchers called foul. I'm so sorry. They used radiocarbon dating to confirm the ages of 23 of the proposed earliest chickens found in Western Eurasia and Northwest Africa. They studied remains found in more than 600 sites in 89 countries in total. So looking at the radiocarbon dating, like DNA evidence, archaeological evidence, etc. And while that study on Russia that I mentioned used radiocarbon dating and is probably accurate, a lot of the evidence of the oldest kept chickens came from older studies.

And some of them dated the chicken bones based on the soil layers that they were in. You know, archaeologists will be like, ah, we see this artifact that was definitely from this time period. And here's all the stuff that was sitting next to it in that layer of soil. The issue is that chicken bones are super light. And so it's very easy for any disruption in the soil to press them down deeper. So that was kind of what got them suspicious. And once they did the radiocarbonating, they were like, indeed, many of these bones are not actually as. old as archaeologists assumed that they were.

And yeah, the researchers also showed that those 10,000-year-old bones that supposedly showed people had been raising roosters for cockfighting were actually from pheasants. So, wamp-womp. But according to the new analysis, the oldest bones of a definite domesticated chicken were found in central Thailand, and they dated to between 1650 BC and 12. 50 BC. So like pretty recent, all things considered. Yeah. And what's really cool is that based on that timing, which coincides with the rise of rice and millet cultivation in dry fields in that region, basically planting them in fields that would flood during particular seasons as opposed to

flooded rice patties, the researchers think that domestication could have started when a few of these jungle fowl were like tempted down from the trees because there was suddenly all this grain around and up for grabs. And they would like head more into human settlements. And sort of the way that like docile wolves started hanging around human campfires, that was just like the beginning of this interaction that paved the way for like humans being interested in these birds. But there is something intriguing here because we know based on the archaeological evidence that people didn't start keeping chickens for meat for hundreds of years from that point. And according to the new study, as domesticated fowl spread across Asia and then throughout the Mediterranean along roots used by early Greek, Etruscan and Phoenician traitors, there was a clear pattern of the birds arriving several centuries before people started eating them.

So weird. Huh. So what do they think they were doing with? them. So what's interesting is that in early Southeast Asian sites, you'll see partial or even whole skeletons of adult chickens that are placed in human graves and show no sign of butchering. Pets. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And in Europe, similarly, several of the earliest chickens around 50 BC to 100 AD were buried in human graves. And one grieved chicken in Europe actually showed evidence of a healed leg fracture. So like,

somebody made a little splint for that chicken. Oh, that's so sweet. Also, men were often buried with roosters and women with heads, which we don't know that that means anything, but it kind of adds to the sense that there was some, some meaningful something. Anyway, I also don't really know how precise you can get on sexing a several thousand-year-old chicken skeleton. Yeah, isn't it pretty hard to say?

sexy chicken in general. I would say probably. Yeah. So I'll just leave that as an aside that the researchers, you know, added, but I don't know that we really, I don't know how true that it is. But yeah, so it does seem like they were kept as pets. And researchers argue that, you know, these like barely domesticated jungle fowl or perhaps even just like truly wild jungle fowl because they were pretty chill birds to start out with. They would have been like some of the most colorful and friendly birds that people had ever encountered, especially as they moved out of Southeast Asia on trade routes. Like imagine being in like Iron Age Britain and this like fluorescent jungle bird shows up.

It's like having a pet parrot. That's what they compared it to. They were like people, people would have been enamored with these birds. they were beautiful. And listeners, if any of you are like picturing a barnyard chicken and don't know what I'm saying, like look up, you know, Asian jungle fowl. They're very colorful. Is it like a peacock or what's the, what's, I'm going to look it up?

They've got like very shiny feathers. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sort of like the, the chicken that is voiced by Allentitic in Moines. is like what these chickens would look like. Yeah, very fancy chicken. Yeah. So even if cultures didn't like actively revere them, which of course, because of how

archaeology is, there are definitely some researchers who are like, oh, they buried them with them. So they were, they were spiritually significant. And it's like, well, maybe they were just like pets. We don't really know. But clearly they mattered and they were not eating them. They were like exotic and cute and cool to keep around. Of course, that changed eventually.

We know that as time went on, like all of these places I have mentioned that loved their chickens went on to eat chicken. This probably happened pretty gradually, probably pretty site specific. People needed food and these chickens were there. But we do know that during the rise of the Roman Empire, eggs became an extremely popular snack. Like we find shells that were like cast away by gladi your spectators. They were just you munched on eggs all the time, a very portable, hearty snack. Like a hard boiled egg? Yeah.

Is that the idea? I think it was like there were various ways of preserving them is what I've seen reference. So I'm guessing like some boiled, some salted. And yeah, it seems like the widespread adoption of chicken meat as a human food probably followed pretty naturally from the spread of like chicken eggs being a hot commodity. Like in England, for example, chickens were not eaten regularly until around 1700 years ago. And that started in like urban and military sites that were influenced by Roman occupation. So this is not to say that the Romans were the first people to eat chicken.

They definitely were not. But it seems like the spread of like this idea that chickens were for food was probably better by the Roman Empire. one of the researchers on this study kept being quoted saying things like familiarity breeds contempt to explain. Wow. Yeah, apparently like according to their research, which of course like, you know, is still pretty preliminary, but is kind of the best, the most detailed narrative to date on like how chickens spread as a food. you know they were like it took about 700 to 800 years once chickens arrived in a place for people to decide to eat them and so yeah they basically are saying they were really exciting and then people got used to them and then people got hungry and then people ate them so who among us that seems like kind of a little bit of a I don't know doesn't that feel like quite a lot of assumptions are being Oh, absolutely. There are many, many assumptions in this study. I am, you know, to me, it's like, it's so fascinating just that we, like, have this confusing origin story and that, like, there was a time that chickens were, were not really primarily a food, but that people seem to walk them around anyway. All of the details are, of course, quite speculative. But yeah, I am excited to see more researchers kind of dig into this question.

And yeah, like fast forward to today where people around the world eat more than 70 billion chickens a year. So like, how did we get here? In America, there's a particularly whimsical bit of lore, again, not really sure how true it is. The claims that the answer is a shipping error. So, yeah, as Kenny Torella reported for Von, box. One Cecile Steele of Ocean View, Delaware, kept a small flock of chickens back in 1923, as many rural Americans did. And Americans generally kept chickens for their eggs. They would slaughter and eat a chicken once they stopped being good at laying eggs. And chickens were

really expensive to keep alive in high numbers. So their meat was considered a luxury, or at least having like a spring chicken, you know, if not like an old bad at laying eggs chicken. So as the legend goes, the local chick hatchery accidentally delivered 10 times the number of birds that Steele had ordered. She had asked for 50. They sent 500. And with a way to return them, she just did her best to raise them in her 256 square foot barn, which was a real foreshadowing of the poultry industry as it stands today. Sounds like my apartment. Yeah. More than 100 of the chicks died, unsurprisingly, but the ones that lived did, like, yield her a good return, something like $11 per pound, adjusted for inflation. They did, of course, only grow to be about two pounds apiece, because this is before we had plumped up birds for their meat, which I'll get into a little bit more in a second. But yeah, there's a bunch more info about, like,

like how all of this happened at exactly the right time for chicken coops to take off because we discovered vitamin D. There's the advent of refrigeration. But you can read more about that in Torella's vicebox.com article, which I will link to on popside.com slash weird. But yeah, the story goes that like this woman really made it work. She just life gave her chicks. She made industrial farming.

And the world followed suit. But yeah, mass production of chicken took a dark turn in 1948 when the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company or ANP, which was the kind of major supermarket of the day, held a chicken of tomorrow contest because they wanted to find a breed that had like a plumber body, faster growing time, and more white eke. That's what the people reaved.

and 40 finalists submitted 720 eggs to a central hatching facility, and they were fed, raised, monitored in closely controlled conditions for 12 weeks. Then the survivors were slaughtered and judged. And there's some documentary footage, which I'll link to on Popside.com slash weird. It's pretty delightful everything you would expect from a 1948 chicken contest. It features the crowning of the Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow Queen, a girl named Nancy McGee, which is the perfect name for the chicken queen. Also, the parade looks exactly like the parade at the end of one of my favorite movies,

Drop Dead Gorgeous for what it's worth, so any fellow Drop Dead Gorgeous fans get excited. And, yeah, Red Cornish Crosses from the Ventress Hatchery, absolutely crushed the competition in terms of feed efficiency and weight. meanwhile a family farm called Arbor Acres, which won the competition's purebred category, would go on to crossbreed their very docile chickens with the Red Cornish to get them bigger. And they even got them to have fewer feathers, so that made them really popular because it was less work to pluck them. And then Nelson Rockefeller bought the farm in the 60s. And that's why at this point, most chickens being raised at industrial scale have a genetic link to that Chicken of Tomorrow contest.

And to put things in perspective, there was a Canadian study a few years back where researchers took breeds from 1957, 1978, and 2005, and said each bird the same diet for a couple of months. And I guess when we say breeds from like breeds originating in those years. And the 1957 breed, which would have been, you know, something pretty similar to the one that won that 1948 contest, hit the two pound mark after that two months of controlled diet. The 1978 breed reached double that weight the same amount of time. And the 2005 breed was a whopping 9.2 pounds. Oh, my God. So we have just, we have some real bloated chickens today. And yeah, that brings me to kind of the cap of this fact, which is that modern chicken farming is, to put it lightly, a horror show.

Chickens grow really big. They grow really fast. Some breeds basically can't stand up because of that. They're also more prone to heart failure because their cardiovascular systems can't keep up with their growing muscle. And then there's the rampant spread of antibiotic resistance among eggs and chicken meat because we really have to use preventative antibiotics to keep. birds from dying off on the farm because they are crammed inside covered in food. It's pretty bad. Meanwhile, humans are eating like more and more chicken every year because of the health and environmental concerns around red meat. So as people cut out other meat, they tend to add in chicken, which again, like I understand why that was the messaging for a while. But like maybe keep in mind, don't eat too many more chickens. One thing I think a lot of people don't realize is like how misleading a lot of chicken and egg labels are. So for folks who like really do mean to buy kind of more sustainably ethically raised eggs and meat, here's a little primer.

And I will just say I do eat chickens and eggs. So like I'm not trying to shame you into never eating chickens or eggs again. I just think this is important. it. So labels like free range, no antibiotics, and natural are absolutely meaningless. There's no oversight. There's no accountability. There's no standards. Anybody can just put that on their eggs and meat. I mean, no antibiotics, sorry, does mean that they aren't given antibiotics, but it says nothing about anything else. I think a lot of people assume that that must indicate a whole bunch of positive things. I think it's also like no antibiotics only means they were never fed

antibiotics and like there's kind of a whole lot of, you know, loopholes you can get into about what that means. Cage-free and free-range birds can still be crammed into overcrowded indoor areas, too. There are basically three certifications that actually mean something, and those are animal welfare approved, certified humane and global animal partnership. An important caveat for certified humane is that you want it to also reference free range or pasture raise chickens, which indicates a certain amount of outdoor access. The other two labels I mentioned animal welfare approved and global animal partnership come built in with like the chickens get to see daylight. Yeah, without one of those three

certifications, you're pretty much guaranteeing that your meat and eggs come from this like hellish, lightless box full of crippled chickens. roll around in their own poop and like listen again i eat meat but like yikes you know and these are birds that are ancestors literally treasured so the next time you're thinking about like picking up a budget pack of chicken wings think of that ancient human who made a little splint for their precious pet chickens and just be like maybe you can do a little better also like listen if nothing else I'm here to tell you, happy chickens taste better. I have a super hipster, local butcher, dark pines and Jersey City.

Please give me a free chicken. And if life-changing, when you taste a chicken, that wasn't bred to be a nine-pound ball of water and live in misery. So this is my, you know, my red blood and American meat-eating endorsement. for more ethical chicken farming. Anyway, yeah, that's my, that's my saga. It really, I was shocked to learn that chickens were once treasured pets. And it's particularly mind-bling because I grew up in a rural area with a lot of chickens. And listen, we've done chickens dirty.

They're pretty stupid at this point. And the idea that they were once these exotic, exciting birds. kind of bubbles be out. But, you know, that's life. That's agriculture, man. Oh, man. Well, at least in the 20th century, it's agriculture. Wow. True. Yeah. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? And talking about mood.com, they have an incredible line of cannabis dummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code weirdest. I'm not a smoker myself, but I do love the occasional

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Honestly, I can't believe how well your fact goes into mine. Like, wow, parrots as pets, you know, maybe in like 100 years we'll be having horrible conditions for parents that are about to eat. Maybe we'll learn our lesson. Yeah, hopefully, hopefully we do. So, on a brighter note, pet loneliness is a huge problem because obviously humans, we just can't be there for our animals 24-7. Like, there's over 20.6 million parrots kept as pets in the United States, but they often just don't get enough enrichment like they would if they were in the wild with another flock. And that can lead to negative behaviors like pacing, excessive sleeping and vocalizations, feather picking, and even self-mutilation. So our most recent Popsie Plus Pet Psychic column by Brandon Kheim even focused on the subject looking at whether captive parrots can get PTSD.

And just as a forewarning, you're going to want to grab tissues before reading that one. I'm sure we will have that linked below. But obviously, adding environmental enrichment can help with these kinds of behaviors. And while just adding another bird to be a friend to your current parrot sounds really good. There are actually a lot of other issues like diseases and even aggression and injuries that can kind of keep that from being the best solution for your pet pet. parrot. So scientists at Northeastern University, the MIT Media Lab, and the University of Glasgow decided to create and test a parrot-to-parate video calling system to find out if that would help. And I have to tell you, this study is probably one of, like, the most ethically minded studies about

animals I've ever read. Like, every single sentence is, like, we just wanted to make sure that the parrots were okay. Like, it was really kind of touching, honestly, like, when you read enough studies about like animals and stuff. Usually it's just not the most ethically grounded. But like this one really was. So in phase one of the study, basically the parrots learned that when they touched a bell three times, then touched a picture of another parrot three times, they would then be connected to that parrot through a video call that their caregiver would facilitate through Facebook

messenger. Whoa. I know, right? Also, why Facebook Messenger? That's like a weird choice to me. But like, that's fine. Sponsored by, right? Sponsored by Facebook Messenger.

Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, for connecting the world's parents. So they also got a treat each time they touched the bell and the picture. And that's important later on. I'll tell you why. So that first phase was kind of a meet and greet phase. And each parrot was able to chat with the other parrots in their groups two times. So, you know, each group had like four parrots or something like that. And they'd all kind of like meet each other and kind of learn how, you know, how each each other were and all that kind of good stuff, which is kind of adorable.

So in the next phase after that meet and greet, each group of parents and caretakers would choose a specific three hour long window in which all the other birds and their owners were available to make and receive calls at the same time, just to make sure that, you know, if a parent was trying to call their bud, you know, they wouldn't. end up with like a call waiting signal or like anything like that because that would be truly tragic. So during that time, they would bring the bell and the phone or tablet out, the caregiver would. And then the parrots could choose which of the other birds they wanted to call. There was like a piece of paper that had like all the different parrots pictures on them. And they would peck to signify which parrot they wanted to talk to. Was there one that was like really popular? and then one that was like left, like, nobody wanted to talk to.

So luckily that didn't happen, but like they legitimately, and I'll get into this a little bit more, but they had preferences for like who they like to talk to. Exactly, exactly. So, you know, they would then have, they could make up to two five-minute calls per session. And it was only, it was like limited to five minutes because, you know, they wanted to make sure that the parents didn't get like over fatigued or like, you know, one pair of was talking about like his grandma and the other one was like oh god i'm so sick of doing about this but uh no that's not science that was just made up right then um thanks thanks for that

disclaimer tulsie you're welcome i mean you never know maybe somebody listening was pretty human sounding yeah it really well it really is it's animal behavior you got to love it um so the really interesting thing is that it ended up being really successful 100 percent of the caregiver participant said they believe their birds had at least a moderately positive experience, and they actually had these specific things to say about their birds' experiences. One said she came alive during the calls. The other one said, he still got treats for several of the apps, but not for Messenger. Yet he would choose Messenger above the others every time when it was available. And then another person said he would clearly ring the bell and very decisively select a friend.

So like these parrots like very much enjoyed this experience, or at least it seems like they did based upon their experiences. And again, they weren't getting treats anymore. Like they got treats during the first like meat and greet period, but they didn't get any extra like food treats or anything during the second phase. They were just kind of like motivated by wanting to chat with their parents. That second bird is just like the. life is wonderful mirror universe version of the like wire ape mother study yes it's like it's the same

thing but not cruel and terrible just they could have just just given them treats at a phone call but instead they decided to make the most cruel yeah but i love i love that there are there are way are more ethical ways to prove that animals want to hang out with other animals and have comfort and connection. It's really nice. Yeah, yeah. And it was great too because like in that like kind of meet and greet period, there were originally, I think like 18 total birds. But three of them, like for whatever reason during some of the encounters, they would have like some negative behaviors like flying away from where the video camera was and stuff. And they were like not included because they were like, oh, clearly these birds don't want to do this.

So they were like really thinking of the birds in this experiment, which I thought was... So everybody would have a good time. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And something else that was super cool is that the birds even exhibited new wild bird behaviors that they'd never done before just because they had seen these other parrots exhibiting those behavior. It's like teens picking up trends on TikTok. Exactly. This is TikTok for parrots. Like, you know, they're something.

slugging, doing all kinds of wild things. But one of the caregivers said, after the calls, she started flying more. I think she realized that flying is an okay behavior, which is like, isn't that the most heartbreaking thing you've ever heard? Like, this parrot in captivity finally learns to fly because it saw its friend on FaceTime doing it. Like, that's amazing. And then another added, he learned foraging behaviors that I have tried and tried for a

year to teach him. This is the first time he would forage. Like, it's kind of amazing how literally just giving access to these parrots, like, this video message access really kind of opens up their worlds. And, you know, you can make like a whole parallel about like the internet giving us all access to other worlds. But, you know, it's kind of interesting that you see this socialization among these parrots in a similar way that you see the socialization of humans. Yeah, it actually reminds me. I have a small baby who's nine months old and she was sort of like trying to crawl and then we had another baby over who was like basically the same age and he was crawling and then she started to crawl. And it was interesting because I was like, why did she need another baby? I mean, I guess like we don't crawl around. Maybe that's it's as simple as that. So like it's, but maybe you just need some of your own kind to kind of like understand what, you know, like a human can't teach a parrot to forage. Only another parent. can teach you that, you know? Right, exactly. And like, it's so interesting because we do take these animals, like, out of their wild, you know, cells and their natural environments and their flocks. And, you know, we enjoy having parrots or other kinds of pets and stuff, but, like, we don't really think a whole lot about, like, well, is this what we should be doing? Like, how can we make their

experience more optimal, et cetera, et cetera. But in conclusion, um, you. While all of these calls were kind of facilitated by caregivers, because again, they wanted to make sure that the birds didn't, like, break the tablets or phones or, like, get hurt from breaking them or anything like that. This study could actually help inform new technology that could let parrots video call their friends whenever they wanted. And I think that's just great. Like, I don't know. Like, it's such a fun study. And usually studies are not exciting. And like, or they have, like, some horrible conclusion, like, the earth is melting.

but like this one's just good old fashion parrot fun and I just really appreciate it. I mean, yeah, that's awesome. The one thing is also because I have a baby, I'm like, is there such a thing as too much face? Like, what about screen time for the parents? Right. Sure. That's like 50 years from now we'll be talking about the scourge of parrot screen time. There really will be a parrot TikTok by then.

And that won't be so good. But there's definitely, maybe we can do better for the parrots than we did for ourselves. Maybe we can stick to an optimal amount of social networking. Exactly. Exactly. Maybe the caregivers need to be there just to monitor whatever they're doing because, you know, you don't want any weird parrot sexting going on at all. Maybe we should just let the parrots hang out together.

As long as there's like a moment where they could. Well, that's the problem though, because there's like this particular disease that's like super common among parrots. that's like very transmissible. So it's like hard to be like, oh, let's get the parrots together and like have like a like a meetup between the parrots or whatever. Like a play date or something. So yeah, a play date. Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, it's, I think it's just better. Honestly, you know, you have kind of like a wall there with the screen time. But it's safe for all involved. And everyone was happy. Wow. That's not the study you hear every day is everybody's happy at the end. and better connected.

And I'm relieved to hear that, you know, while they had preferences, none of the parrots were like, and nobody called this parrot. Can you imagine if the researchers who lovingly crafted this study, then we're like, oh, no, what do we do about this parrot that is all alone? Because no one wanted to call him. This parrot is posting song lyrics. Like, we have to stop. Maybe the ones who would have been all alone are the ones.

who were like, I'm flying away from this. Yeah, probably. True. That's true. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. But it's great because it's great for like, you know, parrots, not only just like pet parrots, but also parrots like in zoos or other kinds of birds that are like social animals or just social

animals in general. Like, this could be applied to so many different species. So it'll be interesting to see where this kind of study goes in the future. Definitely. Cool. All right. We're going to take a quick break. And then we'll be back with one more fact.

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And Heather, let's talk about presumably butts in some fashion. But yeah. Yeah. So my fact is it's about butts. Everything I do these days is about butts. But I got interested in this because, you know, I was researching this history of women's butts. And I looked at all these different components, moments in especially the last 200 years. And I knew that eugenicists must have something to say about butts because they were so obsessed about bodies.

And I talked to a really interesting researcher at the University of Michigan who's done like very important historical research about like uncovering files of sterilization in the state of Michigan. And I just asked her like, she probably was like you totally unsurious person. But she was I was like, what did you do genesis have to say about butts? And she pointed me to these two statues that now are housed at the Science Museum at Harvard. But as you'll hear, we're in Cleveland for a long time. They were called Norma and Normann, which is like such a eugenicist like thing to call something. And there are these statues that were made. They were kind of displayed first in 1945.

And they were kind of meant to be like the ideal. eugenics people, you know, codified in stone so that people could come and look at them and be like, this is what the, it's kind of a complicated needleed or threading here, but like the best, but also most normal and most average American body would look like. And so basically, this was like a way to know what, what eugenicist thought was the correct women's butt. And And the answer to that question is basically like a small-ish kind of pert, like non, like kind of boring, but there, which is kind of, it's like very hard to describe because it's sort of like it's like not too thin, not too fat, not too curvy. They were very suspicious of like voluptuousness. Sure.

There's a lot of anxiety in the literature around these statues that's like about the like comparing them to the venous statues of the ancient. ancient times and how these are really different than that. They're not like that. They're like very intense about the way that they're not voluptuous in that way because it's like too sexy. Oh my gosh. And so the statutes were first displayed at the American Museum of Natural History here in New York, which was a big eugenicist place. Although to be fair to that place, actually most of most American universities and scientific institutions were very deeply embedded in eugenics project. Like you can barely find anyone from the first half of the 20th century. that was well known who was against eugenics.

And the curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History wrote a big article about these statues. They were, and there was a big display and lots and lots of people came and saw them. The statues were made by two people. It's kind of a weird combination of people. It's a gynecologist and a sculptor. Oh. Okay. So it's like classic combo, you know.

They had previously worked on this other thing called the birthing series where they showed like how a fetus develops in utero and kind of how it works in the uterus. And, you know, that project actually was sort of useful because it was the kind of thing not many people knew at the time. You know, that's like. Right. So when they were displaying those statues. I mean, I think in all, they thought they were doing a good thing through and through, but that was their first collaboration and that's part of why they were doing it, was to sort of do an educational thing.

And then they decided to go in on the second project to create these statues to show what they perceived to be the average American man and woman. So the data for these statues came from a kind of complicated set of places for Norm man and his it's spelled N-O-R-M-A-N so it's like norm the norm man and then wow norma is a little more um I don't know it's like a little more elegant I guess because it's like an actual name but norman's measurements came from basically army measurements every time anybody had ever gone into the army they are measured and so there was this kind of trove of data that these two two guys were using to create norman but when they were

trying to create norma, they kind of ran into a problem, which is that there's not any equivalent amount of data for the American women at that time. So they went hunting and hunting, and then they found this study that had been done in the 30s by the WPA, by this woman named Ruth O'Brien at the WPA, who was trying to solve a problem that so many of us still have today, which is that she was like, women's sizing doesn't work. And the history of women sizing. I like won't even go into it. But basically it's like very nobody's ever been able to make it work. Like women are basically the bodies of female sexed people are just, it's too, too bulbous and there's fat in different places. And it's basically very, very hard to standardize.

Which I, I sort of like that just for what it's worth. I feel like it, although it causes us all quite a lot of problems. There's also something about the ways that bodies resist standardization in the story that I think is sort of beautiful and maybe like offers some some mode of thinking about resistance that's kind of just like in our actual embodied selves. But Ruth O'Brien, it was like the 30s, people are obsessed about data and she's like, this is, the problem here is that we don't have enough data points. So we're going to go and measure thousands of women. We're going to use WPA money, send people out all over the country and measure thousands of women. And she did. She measured 15,000 women across the country in different cities with these like these measuring

squads. They would like go and they had like little special underwear people put on and then they would stand up on these little like platforms and then they took many, many measurements like the ankle girth and the calf to thigh, you know, whatever. Just like any, any part of the body was was measured. but Ruth O'Brien did something that I mean it's very of the time I guess although I still find it really weird that she did this even within its historical context which is that she she threw out all the data of non-white people so they some of those 15,000 people they measured were non-white and one thing that's a little unclear from the historical record is if she just meant like what we would think of as women of color or if she all

also included in the non-white people like Italians and Jewish women and people who at that time probably wouldn't have been considered white in the sense that we think of it now. So she threw out all of that data and then she created a sizing scheme from what was left. And it was a pretty complicated sizing schema that was like, it was like something like 30, I was forget the number, but it's like either 35 or 37 sizes. But it didn't even work anyway because partially because she threw out all that data, but also because that's too many sizes for manufacturers. It's just too expensive.

Okay. So that all happened. Meanwhile, the gynecologists to the statue guy are making these, they use her data to make these statues to show. And for them, they're like, it's awesome. This lady threw out all the non-white women because that's what we want. That's how we perceive to be, what we perceive to be like the most normal, the most eugenical, as they would say, American body. So then they create this statue that's the average of all of this data that Ruth O'Brien collected, put it in the Museum Natural History, blah, blah.

Everyone's super excited, et cetera, et cetera. Then this guy from Cleveland is like, rad, I'm starting this thing called a hygiene museum. he had worked in Germany during the war. He was Nazi adjacent. And when I was fact-checking this thing, it's probably not quite right to call him a full Nazi because he was kicked out of the Nazi party, but he was definitely like, vibe in hard with the Nazis in the, I ran into that a couple of times in fact-checking my book too, where I was like,

this person was a eugenicist and a Nazi. and my fact her crew was like, well, and I was like, okay. I know. I mean, it's important. I think that the only reason it's important to do that is because there's a way, like, actually just so many people believed this stuff. And you don't, you want to actually just, I think it's important for people to understand how pervasive these ideas were and that they weren't, they actually weren't all Nazis.

Like some of them were, you know, many of them were presidents, you know, presidents of the United States. Most of like, what is it? The first seven presidents of the United States believed. eugenics. So this guy actually got kicked out of Nazi Germany for not being Nazi enough, basically. He starts this health and hygiene museum in Cleveland and he buys these statues and he's pretty psyched about him. And he's like, we're going to bring the statues to Cleveland. We're going to show him off. And he did. And the first thing he wanted to do to celebrate this

purchase of these statues was he had this contest to find Norma. Because it's like, Oh, no. And this is actually an interesting thing that kind of chimes with your chicken story a little bit. Because he's like, we want to find the, you know, to some extent eugenicists aren't, they're not interested in an ideal that's outside of reality. They want people to believe that they can do this through essentially breeding, you know, and this like very rudimentary idea of genetics that they had. So he's like, we're going to like measure all the women in Cleveland and find the most Norma lady in all of Cleveland, like the most normal and the most eugenic. And so I think it's like 10,000 women measure themselves for this contest. And, you know, it's like it's like in the newspaper every day.

Interestingly, the other things in the newspaper right around this time are the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So it's like the end of World War II, which is, I think, interesting both because like, like, you can imagine the kind of like Hiroshima bombed, like also like come to the YMCA and get measured for this. Like these things are running side by side. But also it's like a moment in American history where there's a lot of interest in normalness and normalcy. Right. I mean, and maybe for understandable reasons. Like things are pretty bananas. It's like the depression is in the recent past.

the these you know everybody's been away at war so part of probably with the popularity of a contest like this is that there's this kind of desire for you know wanting to fit in and wanting things to kind of return to something stable so then they measure all these women and I guess I I was surprised by this but they didn't find anybody who was normal who was the right measurement That's also surprising to me. You would think someone, like, by accident. I know. I know, exactly.

But they found this one woman, her name's Martha Skidmore, who was, like, the closest. And she was like, she had worked, she was like a Rosie the Riveter, it worked as a gauge grinder at a factory. Then she, like, had, you know, given up her job for the boys coming home. And then now she was taking tickets in the movie theater. She had just been married. It was like a very, it's like she's like a sort of. quintessential like mid-century mid-west like middle-class woman. I tried so hard to find her. She or her family. She had died, but I couldn't, I never could track anybody down. But I mean,

the story I always feel like is such a, it's a story about eugenics, about how like embedded the eugenics idea is in even things as kind of, you know, mundane as and also kind of horrifying as women's but also how like in the quest for the most normal or most average person, you actually can't find them because it's a, it's a myth. It's like they created a big, you know, to do a big song and dance to about normalcy and middleness and how it's, you know, the ideal is the average. But then they actually still can't find the ideal. And I always sort of find that to be also this kind of moment of resistance in, in the ways

that our bodies just work and are, you know, that it's like we're, we can't, we kind of won't be contained in that kind of way. But it's sort of like your chickens where there's like a kind of big contest, you know. Well, we've talked on, on previous episodes, a weirdest thing about the better baby competitions that's very similar to that. We're so popular. Yeah. And just like it's so, in hindsight, it feels so sinister to think of people like, lining. up to have their babies like head ratios measured and have like a blue ribbon pin to them for having the most like well-bred plum baby. But at the time it was just that was just good old American fun which is yeah and I mean I think what's interesting about those is part of what

was going on is that these kind of cerebral I mean coastal elite type eugenicists that Or like trying to figure out a way to get farmers essentially and people who knew a lot about farming in to be interested and kind of excited about eugenics. And they were like, well, those types of people actually understand breeding. And the way that we're going to like get them in on it is by essentially treating their babies like, you know, prize pigs at the fair, which is really, it's really dark. And it's also like. Yeah.

And you also see how, like, how that it didn't work exactly, but like that there was something like they were hitting on by thinking of it that way. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's almost like massively like, I'm putting a positive spin on this. But it's nice to see that like something, I mean, a couple weeks ago there was the story about like the couple who's trying to, you know, they're, they're big nerds or whatever. But they're trying to make the best babies and they're breeding and stuff. But like so many people were like. Like that is so f***ed up. Yeah. Like it's almost nice to know that like back then it was like that was the norm. But now we're like at the place where the norm is like you can be whoever you want. And it's fucked up that we're trying to like breed people to be a superhuman or like whatever. Like I don't know. That's kind of like hopefully.

Yeah. I mean I think also like the ideal has really in an interesting way, the ideal has really changed. I mean in the mid century, I think the idea of the being normal of being average of being kind of. of middle in that way was very appealing. And that's not what we, I don't think that is what is valued in the same way now. Right. So that's definitely true. And I also think like, interestingly, I think anything that has like eugenics vibes even in science is so, it's like such a third rail that it, it, it, it, most scientists won't even come close to touching it or dealing with it. And I mean, I think that's probably, I mean, it's like.

complicated. I'm sure that it means some science doesn't get done that maybe could be useful, but I think it's good that so many scientists are aware of the history of science in that way. Right. Right. I'm just, I'm really, I'm still really mad about the sizing thing and being like taking the measurements and then being like, I don't like those measurements. I don't we're going to throw that tape out. This is what I mean is it's so weird because I mean, it's not weird because people were horribly, people were and are horribly racist and do things like this. But I talked to the archivist who's kind of in charge of the archive of this woman. And we were just like, what, like, I was like, what did she say in the paper?

Like, you know, what is even the justification here? And she's like, it's just like, straight, straight up old fashioned like racism. But it doesn't, the thing is that's weird about sizing is that people don't design. clothes, even then it wasn't like there were white clothes and there were Jewish clothes and there were Italian clothes or something. It's like it's really not in the interest of capitalism to to throw out that data either, which is it's always kind of interesting when like American capitalism and American racism are kind of at like it's not very often, but sometimes they are kind of at loggerheads and you're like, oh, I guess racism trumps capitalism in this in this situation.

You know what I mean? Yeah. No, absolutely. Because it just like just like just. doesn't actually make any sense to throw out that data if what you're trying to do is create sizing that's going to fit the most number of people who buy them by clothes. Right. But then the sizing system didn't really work that well anyway, although that data was the basis for kind of attempts as as time went on, although it's it fell away pretty quickly because it's it's just so hard to make standardized sizing. And so there just isn't really any right. Yeah. I feel like the you know, a few years ago, I definitely rolled my eyes at the early attempts for like 3D scanning for making custom clothes. And then as some companies started to get decent at it, I was like,

no, actually like I think this is probably the best we can do, like made on demand. But without the need for a human pattern designer to make every single item and like actually need to fit a person's body because like we've had a lot of years for somebody to figure out a different way as right i mean the other way like well just if you really want to get into it there's two other ways that it could work one is the really old-fashioned way like chicken times way like where you're like basically like put a sack on your body right yeah yeah a belt which i'm like pretty pro sack plus belt or like breaches plus tunic you know like that feels like You know, that'll last you a lifetime, the sack in the belt.

But the other thing is, like, you just only have two pairs of clothes and you make them or somebody makes them for you and they're pretty expensive. And then that's, that's it. That's the other way that it can work besides the 3D printing way, which will also be pretty expensive and possibly weird, although maybe not. I don't know. I'm always a little skeptical of like the, like I'm not a futurist in that way. So I kind of maybe I'm too skeptical for my own good.

I always feel like it's just going to be like a body stocking, you know, maybe like Star Trek style, which I guess I'm pro the Star Trek uniform as the future too. Yeah, you can, you need two options. You need the completely open-ended tunic and the Star Trek body sock. And as long as we have both available, we're fine. Yeah. You just, that every day is, is a Star Trek body sock day. That's right.

That's right. I would argue most days are not a Star Trek body sock. I'm definitely more of a belted tunic kind of gal. Yeah. So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? Every time I do this now, I think I should just throw away this aspect of the show. Because everyone's always so fun. Yeah.

Everyone is as weird. I don't know. Maybe this is me officially saying that now everyone ties every time because I grow weary of this. Maybe that's the trick is to tie them all together. I mean, we kind of already, like, happenstance did, right? Yeah, it's true. We really synthesize the facts this week. So, there we go.

It's dead. Heather, remind our listeners, what your book is called and where they can find you. Okay, my book is called Butts, a backstory, and it's available everywhere you buy books. And I'm not on Twitter, although maybe I should be, but I am on Instagram. I think I'm Rad H. Radke on Instagram. And yeah. And, you know, thanks so much for having me. And it's so fun to hear you all's facts.

Thank you so much for coming on. This was great. Yeah, I can't wait to read your book about buds. It's a higher than. It's great. It's a real wrong. 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.