The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Laughing Gas Parties, Human Femur Flutes, Domesticating Zebras

Episode Date: August 15, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from flutes made from human femurs to trying to tame zebras. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepses Sophie Bushwick: www.twitter.com/SophieBushwick Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support 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 same. 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 a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into our articles, there are lots of other 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 Feldman. I'm Eleanor Cummins. I'm Sophie Bushwick. So in case you weren't with us last week, we have a really cool announcement, which is that weirdest thing is going to be performed live at caveat in New York City on Friday, September 14th at 630 p.m. You can already get tickets online and find more info on our Facebook and Twitter. And it's going to be super fun. We're going to have audience participation, games, prizes, uncensored, unedited, weird facts. We might make Billy play the theme song on a toy piano. Who knows what'll happen? Anyway, we really hope you'll join us because it would be super weird to do it without you.

So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering a little tease of some kind of factoid or story that we picked up while reporting, reading, writing, answering angry emails, what have you. And then we decide what we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and vote on what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually. actually was. And of course, you can vote for your own favorite weirdest thing on Twitter or Facebook. So, Sophie, since it's your first time on Weirdest Thing, I'm so excited to be here. We're so excited to have you, and why don't you give us your teas? My tease is that in the late 1700s, early 1800s, there was something known as Laughing Gas Parties. Cool. Sign me up. I shouldn't say that yet. Who knows what's coming? I mean,

To be fair, I think people also had laughing gas parties in more recent times, but this is the, this is the, now they're called whipets. Eleanor, what's your tease? My tease is flutes of all kinds, some made of human bones. Weird, that's the description of my album on iTunes. Okay, my tease is that once there was a man who really wanted us all to ride zebras. It's beautiful. Yeah. I want laughing gas.

Yeah, let's start with laughing gas. Oh, boy. I thought you would never ask. My story starts with Humphrey Davy. He is born in Cornwall in the late 1700s, and he's, at the time, this was a very remote area. And when he was younger, he was sort of rebellious and adventurous, but when his father died, when he was about 16,

he started getting a little more serious. He got really into poetry and chemistry, as you do. Too dark paths. About this time, it was really exciting time for science. People were like, hey, maybe the world isn't made up of four elements. It's actually, there's other stuff going on. There was a lot of new ideas around. This was about when the chemist Lavoisier was active before he, you know, died in the French Revolution.

So great time to get into chemistry. And one of the people that Davy befriended around this time was Gregory Watt, son of James Watt, the guy who invented the Watt Steam Engine, and also the way. the horsepower. And they would hang out and gather minerals and get really drunk together. You know, good times. And Gregory wrote his father about

this brilliant young man and his father told a guy named Thomas Beddows who's a doctor and he was, Beddows at the time was in his 30s and Davy was about 20 but they started corresponding and Davey

would share some of his really forward-thinking ideas. Like people knew that plants absorbed carbon dioxide and produced oxygen, and humans would take in oxygen and produce carbon dioxide, but Davy sort of propounded the idea that this created an equilibrium, which was the first time someone described the carbon cycle. So he's clearly really forward-thinking and brilliant, and Betoes hires him to run his pneumatic institute. So Betoes wanted to have this institute where he would use inhalable treatments for diseases like tuberculosis. So the idea was he would give free treatment to people who needed it,

and also he'd get to try out, like, can inhaling gases help you? Makes sense Bedros had asthma, and so it makes sense that he'd be interested in this line of research. So Davy takes the job, and he starts, you know, administering gas to people, and he realizes really quickly that this isn't based on actual experiments or trials. Like, they would give these treatments to people with TB, but they'd also give it to people with venereal disease. and they would sell, like, do-it-yourself inhaling kits to rich people

so they could breathe gas at home. So Davey is like, I need to do research on this. So in 1799, he sets up these gas-inhaling experiments, and his first subject is himself. So this was not great. He started getting fainting fits. He'd get nausea. He almost died once from inhaling carbon monoxide.

He would burn his throat. Davy. Davy. Oh, Davy. In some ways, he was doing breakthroughs. like he would be measuring his own lung capacity. He was making all this equipment so he could measure the amount that people were inhaling and exhaling. When it really got interesting was when he decided that the gas that had the best safety record was nitrous oxide or N2O, which we know

better today as laughing gas. He would make this gas by heating crystals of ammonium nitrate. He collects the gas in this bag made out of oiled silk, and he passes it through water to remove impurities, and then there were to be a mouthpiece he could use to inhale it. And he took these detailed lab notes on his own experience as he was doing it. He'd have people taking his pulse, and he'd be writing down his own impressions. And it very quickly became clear that Davey just loved laughing gas. Uh-oh. Wow.

Yeah. So he says, this gas has raised my pulse, made me dance about the laboratory as a madman, and has kept my spirits in a glow ever since. This is why they say don't get high on your own supply. Yeah, he would also, he also, because remember he's a poet, so of course he decides I'm going to have some nitrous oxide and then write a poem about it. Oh, no. So he did. And it's really interesting, because a lot of it is just him describing his physical symptoms.

So he'd say, yet is my cheek with rosy blushes warm, yet are my eyes with sparkling lustre filled, yet is my mouth replete with murmuring sound, yet are my limbs with inward transport thrilled? Shakespearean. Yeah. He actually, he wrote some decent poetry, but this isn't one of them. And he starts, at one point he was breathing gas up to three or four times a day. Sometimes when he's at home alone, sometimes he'd, like, go for a walk and then he'd, you know, come home and have a session with the gas. And the really frustrating thing, though, is that he recognized that if you breathe enough gas, you could lose consciousness and then be brought back to awareness very quickly. But he didn't make the connection that you could use this during surgery.

And it wasn't until 1844 that Laughing Gas was actually used as an anesthetic in surgery. So at the time, people were just, like, getting cut open with no painkillers. Right. And it was really miserable. So it's really annoying that he didn't make that connection earlier. Anyway, I said there would be parties. So let's get to the parties. Other than the party of one that was just daily dancing around the lab.

Exactly. He had another breakthrough. He pioneered the blind experimental method. So he would test laughing gas on people, but he wouldn't tell them whether it was gas or regular air, and he wouldn't tell them the concentration of the gas they were inhaling. So he decided to start with his friends. And the people who came into the clinic for free treatment, this is actually where he first ran into trouble, because some of the people he gives this gas to are women.

Oh, my God. It's very, clutch your pearls, please, because there's rumors that this reduces their inhibitions, makes them hysterical. Uh-oh. Yeah, and this is going to lead to trouble later on. But some of the people he gives it to are other poets. So, for example, the poet Robert Southey was the, he would go on to become poet laureate, and he was friends with, like, Wordsworth and that group.

And he said, such a gas had Davy discovered the gaseous oxide. It has made me laugh and tingle in every toe and fingertip. Davy has actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name. I am going for more this evening. It makes one strong and happy so gloriously happy. They're so addicted. I love it. Also just like was it so depressing to be a Victorian that...

This isn't even Victorian. These people, this is like Regency era. This is, yeah, like late 1700s, early 1800s. It's like a really exciting time for science, but also for science and the arts together. So there's a reason that there's this chemist being buddy buddy with all these poets. There was like this huge overlap. You know, you'd go to a party and you'd have like a painter and a poet and a couple scientific scientists and, you know, a doctor

all sitting at the table together talking about ideas. But I think that it just wasn't other than alcohol and opium, which was not widely used, you know. There wasn't a lot of... I'm just imagining like Fitzwilliam Darcy on Laughing Gas. That would have been a different book. That would be an amazing book. Why hasn't anyone written...

Pride and prejudice and laughing gas. During this time, Davy is also testing it on animals. He's also trying things like having wine and then laughing gas and see how that changes. Apparently it reduced his hangover the next day. Oh, yeah. And he also tried a portable gas chamber. So he would go into this gas chamber and just be completely surrounded by gas. And he said, the sensations were superior to any I ever experienced, inconceivably pleasurable.

I seemed to be a sublime being, newly created, and superior to other mortals. I was indignant at what they said of me and stalked majestically out of the laboratory to inform Dr. King Lake privately that nothing existed but thoughts. Oh, no. How did that go over? I don't know. I think Dr. King Lake was used to him being, like, to this guy being super high all the time. Go back to your laughing gas box.

Anyway, so yeah, laughing gas is an amazing thing, and all the people who took it in the early 1800s were just having a ball. But like I said, I said there'd be trouble down the line. So Davey, he's been really pretty rigorous with his method, despite the fact that he's just taking a ton of laughing gas. So he publishes a book about his findings, and the reaction was mixed.

So in the popular press, he was really attacked. If you look up laughing gas political cartoons, you'll see some drawings from the time of people's imagined version of what these parties were. And they're really disturbing. Is it like the Reefer Madness of the Regency era? It's basically the Reefer Madness of the Regency. Yeah, it is. I mean, because remember he's giving it to women,

so people implied that there was this sexual debauchery going on. Oh, my God, it was literally the Reefer Madness of the Regency era. Yeah, someone spread a rumor about this woman who got pregnant under the influence of the gas. and yeah, it was not great. But that didn't really end up damaging Davies' career. So he went on to isolate for the first time elements such as potassium, calcium, strontium, beryum, magnesium, and boron. And he used electricity.

He invented this much safer mining lamp called the Davy lamp. And he also helped, he had as an assistant, Michael Fitton, Faraday who went on to become a famous physicist. Wow, that's amazing. Imagine what he would have done without the drug. Can laughing gas in the quantities in which he was using it, damaged you in any way? Yes. So at the time he's doing the experiments, other chemists were actually classifying it as a toxic gas.

And you need a certain amount of oxygen, and anything that's going to deprive you of oxygen can mess with you. So, like, in more modern era, people, you know, have used laughing gas recreationally as well as, you know, in the dentist's office. And that can definitely, if you use it irresponsibly, it can be dangerous. Right. Look, if you were to say, you know, build your own portable gas chamber. But also the fact that he was making it by heating these crystals, there was the potential for explosions if he let the reaction kind of get out of control. So he was lucky in some ways. but also Davy was, he was pretty brilliant.

He was, you know, he went on to make some really cool discoveries. So despite the fact that he loved drugs. Did he ever kick the habit or did it just, was it like into his coffin? No, I think that, you know, the whole doing, inhale and laughing as three to four times a day, he didn't do that for like all of his life. Okay. You know, sometimes, even during this period when he was experimenting really heavily with it, he would sometimes, you know, only do it a couple times a week. How responsible. Okay.

Well, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more weird facts. Okay, pals, you love the weirdest thing I learned this week podcast. And now you can also love it as a Facebook group. Share your strangest facts and read all about the offbeat and outlandish findings of other science lovers. We'll also be publishing some of the bonus info and ramblings that didn't make it into the final cut of the podcast. Just search for The Weirdest Thing on Facebook. And we're back. And now we're going to go to Bone Flutes with Eleanor.

Hello. I was recently writing a story about sound design when it comes to, like, you know, products like our devices and gadgets and how much work goes into, you know, every, like, Bing and Click and Clack. And it got me kind of started on, like, the question of, like, the oldest instrument. And it was a very interesting rabbit hole to fall down. So the oldest instruments are all flutes, which I find really interesting. And they date back. the confirmed ones date back to about 43,000 years ago. Wow. They've all been mainly identified in Germany, which is like a method that archaeologists have used to sort of prove like human habitation in that area and sort of, you know, track our migration around the globe. And so they've come in all different kinds of materials. There are some that are made of bird bones, some made of mammoth ivory.

One that has a special place in my heart that is contested, is made of cave bear bone, vulture wings, you know, however you could get it. And I think it sort of makes sense that these are some of the earliest instruments. You know, the idea that like if you like suck the marrow out of a bone and you have like a little hollow, you know, tool, and you can kind of carve holes into it. You've got an instrument pretty quickly. Yeah. And also you have a snack.

Perfect. A win-win. And so, you know, I was just really excited to kind of find out about that history. but then I was like, what's the weirdest instrument, you know, around? There is also a case, I found at least one case, where, you know, human femurs are part of ritual musical instrumentation. So I brought a photo of a kangling, which is a Tibetan trump. It's really made out of a femur. Wow, that is just a whole dang femur.

Yeah, there's really nothing. It's exactly what you. They didn't even, like, make it, wow. Yeah. It's just a femur like you have seen on your own x-rays, wherever you're, wherever you're looking at bones. It's just that with some jewels added to it and then obviously, you know, able, you can play it. It's using rituals and funerals. And so the idea is that you can use really anyone's femur. But that you would prefer, obviously, the femur of a criminal or someone who maybe died in a very violent way or someone who is a respected teacher. Which reminds me of our medical cannibalism episode. Absolutely. You always want to do some guess.

Bones. Them dry bones. So, yeah, so they were used in this particular ritual. I'm not really sure how to pronounce it, but like a chod ritual, which is where you are trying to kind of communicate your fearlessness to the spirit world. and so obviously there is nothing more fearless than taking the femur of a criminal and putting it to your lips and playing a tune so I think it really gets the job done yeah yeah yeah I've just been kind of like looking into the history of music and it's really

interesting to think about the theories of how these instruments sort of evolved there's definitely a debate over what qualifies as an actual instrument right when we're looking at stuff from 43,000 years ago, there's a lot of disagreement about what is actually intentionally made into a flute. So like I was saying, there's one that's made out of Cave Bearbone that is, it dates to roughly the same period we're talking about, you know, like 40,000 years ago. It's called the Divja Babe flute, which is such a good name. And they have, you know, been able to actually reconstruct it and you can listen to the music.

And you guys, it is so spooky. I was telling our video producer Tom about how I was listening to this and I just had to tell somebody about how freaked out I was. And he was like, that's exactly how you bring an ancient curse. Like on your family is like listening to a reconstructed prehistoric flute. So that is really contested though because they are sort of like unsure if the holes are, you know, were carved intentionally or if they are something that can like maybe happen from gnawing, you know, on a bone. And similarly, it's like our flute's really the first instrument we were using the first way that we were sort of making music, or is it just something that has enough of an evidence of human intervention that we can sort of tie them historically to this process.

Have they found any, like, wooden instruments? Not really, not from this period. You would think it would probably be because they wouldn't have survived. Right, because that would make sense to me that they'd made something. I mean, bone is great and all, but I feel like wood is pretty. to carve. Yeah, definitely. And it's like, I mean, if we were, you know, sort of like, like, when I think about what would be the first instrument, I can definitely see, like I said, like, you know, carving something out of a hollow bone to, you know, like, play. But I would just, like,

imagine that, like, you know, drums and keeping a beat was really foundational. But, like, you know, in that kind of a case, if we found sticks near rocks, we would never be like, oh, this is an instrument. And, you know, the sort of drums that we do have from, you know, the historical record, like, are also often made out of, like, you know, like stretching animal, like skin and organs, like over a kind of like bowl, right, to get that sensation and whether or not those would survive, you know, for very long is an interesting kind of question. There's, like, a lot of debate over this. One question that people have is about, you know, how long humans have been, like, singing for since that's sort of the most innate

instrument, right, is our voice. Right. And so humans, our vocal range, apparently crystallized about 530,000 years ago, which is interesting to think that this has been more or less what it's been like. But it's obviously unclear when singing really begins. We've noticed that at least a few primates seem to sort of exhibit like singing behavior, lemurs, targers, and gibbons among them. and some people have noticed that these animals all are like monogamous maters.

So there's a scientific theory that maybe sort of singing emerges from our, you know, trying to communicate and woo, you know, kind of permanent partners. Again, obviously contested, but an interesting sort of theory. Another idea I find really fascinating is that, you know, human babies don't really cling to their mothers the same way that a lot of like primate. babies do and that having sometimes to have to set your baby down resulted in like baby talk and kind of cooing to your baby and finding these other ways to soothe them while your hands were occupied you know making dinner or whatever um whatever ladies do yeah you know carving bone flutes carving bone flutes exactly for your for your really cool um abba style band um and so uh there is this is definitely like a very unresolved

kind of issue. But it's interesting to see how people have been trying to put it, you know, the archaeological record to use, as well as like, you know, in the case of the human voice, that's based off of looking at historical anatomical specimens and watching how our throat and skull, like, literally evolve to give us the capacity for different kinds of sounds. Neanderthals definitely play a really big role in this history because a lot of the time, it seems like we're just trying to demean them. when you read about all of these flutes, it's always, and this proves that Neanderthals were not, like, creative enough to make their own flutes and that this is definitely a mark of,

like, you know, the human spirit here in this place. And that even extends to the idea of our vocal range. Neanderthals had a very different, like, throat bone composition. And so people have recently been working on trying to recreate the sounds that Neanderthals make. You can Google this. and find these very funny videos of voice actors being coached into a Neanderthal kind of physical position so that they can sort of mimic that. And then going super high pitch. You would never think that a Neanderthal is screaming like, you know, like at this like almost dog whistle kind of an octave.

But that's exactly what they're doing. It's like very angry and, you know, their shoulders like up to their ears. And then just this like really upsetting kind of baby like wine emerging. from based off of these reconstructions we've done of their throats. This is just sort of, you know, what we're trying to piece together, and it sort of seems like unless we get time machine sometimes soon, we'll never really know a lot of answers to these questions. But it is interesting, I thought, to just sort of put into context

some of the more recent instruments that we have developed. I found these to be really surprising. When do you guys think that the saxophone was developed? The saxophone. Adolf Saxx developed that, right? My goodness. So, no, I know his name, but I don't know when, I think he was German.

So that makes me think that it predates, like, just the jazz era. So. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was, like, a 20th century instrument. Maybe 19th century, but not before then. I vote 19th century. Yeah, you guys are, like, musical detectives. Like 1840, Adolf Sachs, nailed it. Okay, what about a trumpet?

Oh, though that's, you know, you got your heralds. Oh, yeah. Exactly. So, I don't know. When was heraldry invented? What's that, like medieval? I think of like medieval castles, like a bunch of people outside with the long skinny prophets. I would say medieval-ish.

Yeah, so this is really interesting. In like 1500 BC, this is sort of similar to like the laughing gas of people not really putting together all of the potential of the device that they have. And like at least as long ago as 1500 BC, the ancient creeks and Egyptian were using trumpets in battle as sort of like a rallying cry or to like organize the troops. But it wasn't until the medieval period, really like in the 1300s, that people were like, this is a musical instrument that we can use in other contexts. Okay, so then here's my last one that you guys are just going to make me feel like a fool. You'll probably get it down to the day.

When was the piano developed? Oh, right, because this is like a trick one because there's so much, quote, piano music that's from an era where pianos didn't actually exist yet. For like clavichord and harpsichord and stuff? Yeah, I want to say that the piano was invented in like the 1800s, 17, 1800s, 16, 17, 1800s. I mean, definitely not before then. I mean, if like... The last millennium.

If harpsichords and stuff don't count as pianos, then, or do they? I'm not considering that. I'm considering, like, exactly what we would imagine. Yes, exactly. Piano forte. That sounds very, like, little womeny, so I'm just going to say 1800s. So Bartolomeo Christopheri, an Italian genius. He invented the piano, as we know it today, in 1700 or thereabouts.

So 1800, 1700, 1600. You know, right there. I'm pretty glad that overall we're not using a lot of, you know, human bone-based instrumentation these days. but it was just really cool to sort of piece together this puzzle that, you know, like hundreds of archaeologists and music nerds are working through about how we did all these things that we do. Such great flute facts. Thank you. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some not flute facts.

It's really easy to get confused by all of the tech news flying around the internet. On last week in tech, the popular science tech team explains everything and tells you how all of these stories. Stories affect your daily life. New episodes post every Monday on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, and pretty much anywhere else you can listen to podcasts. We'll talk to you then. And we're back. And I'm going to talk about edible domestication.

So we had a story up this week about domesticated foxes, which everybody loves, as evidenced by the long-tail success of a popside.com article called, Can I Have a Pet Fox? I know what you people want and it's a pet fox. So this recent article was looking at a new study about this famous fox domestication experiment, which started in 1959 in the former Soviet Union. Basically, this guy decided to start breeding the most docile and human-friendly foxes that he could find. Does this again and again, generation after generation.

At this point, we're about 40 generations out, and they act like. puppies and it's adorable. They're, you know, fully domesticated. They love playing with humans. They're cuddly. They're not going to bite your face off. They've even developed these different coat patterns, floppy your ears and like curly tails, which are totally unknown in wild foxes. That's something called domestication syndrome, as described by Charles Darwin, which is when you domesticate a mammal, it tends to develop like white patches, more infantile faces and floppy ears. It literally gets cuter. It literally gets cuter, even if you're not selecting for that. So with these foxes, you know, the way they domesticated them, which is the way you domesticate

anything, is that they just pick the ones that played best with humans, you know, best serve the purposes they wanted them to serve and kept breeding for those traits. Looks weren't supposed to have anything to do with it, but there's this connection we don't quite understand yet between docility and these kind of cute features. So maybe it's that like humans developed to find cute, the traits that belonged to less harmful animals? Right. Or there might be something that like you're more, because you're more likely to survive

as a docile animal if you're adorable to like other species. Like we really don't understand a lot. In fact, this recent study was trying to look at dogs and like a bunch of different. of different kinds of wolves, including the domesticated wolves, to try to pick out what gene types were changing as the domestication happened. And they did find some, like, promising leads, but it was still a very confusing mishmash of, like, what genes seem to change when you domesticate an animal. These foxes are a great example of the difference between domesticating an animal and taming one, because a lot of the foxes you can buy are tame, which really means nothing

except that they're not a particularly aggressive baby fox. If someone sells you a tame fox, it just means this particular baby fox probably will not bite your face off. Emphasis on probably. Right. And you can tame any animal in theory by just raising them to behave and follow human rules. And that animal may be a loose cannon. There have been cases of people with wild animals

that they thought were tame as pets attacking them. because those instincts are still there. Or, you know, it's totally possible that that animal you tame will, you know, be chill for its entire life. But if that animal had a baby and was raised under a different set of rules, they would have totally lost all of the tainness because it is just behavioral conditioning. It has nothing to do with the, you know, genes of the animal. Domestication is when you do that taming generation after generation and specifically select for, animals that are innately suited to your purposes.

So that's like every litter of every generation, you're picking the ones that are best to keep breeding according to your purposes. And then if you just do that for a long enough time, you're actually starting to affect change in your micropopulation. Right. Okay. Yeah. And that's the point where they start getting the curly, the floppy ears and everything.

Yeah, exactly. After many generations. You know, that kind of underlying tenets of what kind of animal can be domesticated. Traditionally, it was, I'm pretty sure this came from Darwin. He said the animal needs to have a desire for comfort. They need to be easy to tend. And they need to be useful and show a fondness for man. In Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs and Steel, he actually expanded that to six criteria.

He said they cannot be picky eaters because they need to be able to survive on like whatever food the humans are able to provide for them. They must reach maturity quickly relative to human lifespan because if it takes you a long time to even raise and tame one generation, you're not going to bother to keep doing it. They have to be able to breed in captivity, unlike pandas, for example, which do a great job having sex in the wild. Terrible at doing it ensues. They must be docile by nature.

They cannot have a strong tendency to panic and flee. And they usually need to conform to social hierarchy so that they can recognize a human as a master. Wow. Cats are a notable exception. That doesn't sound familiar for cats. Right, exactly. How long did it take for the 40 generations of these foxes to be bred?

Was that in one man's lifespan? So this was since 1959. Okay. And they've just about hit like 40 now. So, yeah, foxes were great because they're closely related to dogs. I know they're in the same genus. you can find individuals that are quite tameable. So that's really what it takes.

That brings me to my next question, which is whether we could domesticate any animal. And of course, for all the reasons I have just outlined, we can't. There are animals that are simply, it would take too much work to wrestle that, like, those first generations. It would take too long. So, like, maybe theoretically it's possible for any animal,

but, like, gosh, would not be worth the trouble. And one that comes up a lot is the question of whether we could domesticate zebras or why we haven't. Because horses have like their history of domestication is pretty ancient. Not as ancient as the dog. There seems to be something pretty special about dogs that they have like a lot of genetic plasticity and just happen to have a lot of traits that made them very like sympathetico with humans. So it was kind of primed to happen. But after dogs like, you know, horses are one of the older ones. and, you know, there were wild horses that people start to ride around Eurasia and, you know, blah, blah, blah.

And the rest of history, we have some articles about it on popsai.com. So a lot of people ask, you know, why didn't the same thing happen on the African continent with zebras? The answer is that zebras are real nasty sense of p-hreli. Relative to wild horses, even. And that's probably because the abundance of large natural predators there, like large, fast. predators. You have to imagine what kinds of predators

a horse in Eurasia was running away from versus like a cheetah. And so they had to become pretty twitchy and fast animals. I mean a zebra's kick can break a lion's jaw. Whoa! They have very powerful like ducking reflexes

to dodge predators as well so they're pretty difficult to lasso. And they are just temperament They don't want to hang out with humans at all. So they're an example of, you know, an animal where you would have a hard time wrangling them for long enough to produce enough generations to make a truly domesticated zebra. People have tame zebras, but, you know, those are going to be like one-offs. And there was once a man who was pretty into the idea. His name was Lionel Walter Rothschild, second Baron Rothschild of Tring.

His father was actually the first Jewish member of the House of Lords, not to have previously converted to Christianity. Seems like they were a pretty cool family. He was born in 1868 and loved zoology. A little lionel at the age of seven declared that he would run a zoological museum. And he started his first in a garden shed at the age of 10. He worked at the family bank but hated it. He seems like he was a real precious babie. He was 6'3, had some kind of speech impediment.

He was described as, quote, rolling around like a grand piano on casters because he had very dainty feet, even though he was so large. Wait, a grand piano on casters was the metaphor they chose? Yes. We have lost our facility with language. I think this was from a niece of his, perhaps. So anyway, Lionel, possibly my new love. But he started working at the family bank around his 21st birthday, and he hated it. and his parents, who felt very guilty, I guess, also at the same time gave him some land and built some cottages to house his books and insect collections.

And then a much larger building behind it, they were like, here's your zoo, a logical museum. Now please go try to work at the bank. He did that until he was 40. And when he was 40, flirty and thriving, as I say, he set out to finally go be a zoologist and just go find animal specimens. Fulfill his dreams. One fun fact, he actually sold off his beloved bird collection to the Museum of Natural History in New York City for only $200,000, even though it was likely worth a couple million. Whoa. And they found out later it was to get fast cash to pay off one of his three angry mistresses.

Lionel never married. So the reason I bring up Lionel, other than all that wonderful information I learned about him along the way, is that he strongly believed zebras could and should be tamed for Ryanel. writing. So he had a bunch of them from his private zoo trained for carriage pulling. No word on how many they had to try to train to actually get a few that would do it. But they did, you know, again, you can tame a zebra. They're just not domesticated. And he once drove four of them through Piccadilly to Buckingham Palace. And I have a picture of that, which will also have on popside.com. Ooh, that's a good look. There he is. I guess the motivation. Yeah. It's so stylish. And he also had a single zebra cart to show off at home. A little less ostentatious than the four zebras. And he also liked riding around on his giant tortoise with lettuce in front of it to guide it.

How fast could he go? Don't sit on a giant tortoise. That's very rude, especially if you're a six-foot-three man, no matter how dainty your feet are. But he really wanted to share his love of these megafauna. and he didn't understand why we weren't like introducing them more into our daily lives. So a really interesting guy and just loved, loved animals so much. Animals are fascinating, domestication fascinating. And it's really interesting to think about how much pressure we've put on specific species

to turn them into animals that are useful to us. And I find it heartening to be reminded that there are many animals that, we have absolutely no hope of of doing so too. Long live the zebra. Yeah. So anyway, what was the weirdest thing we lived in this week? Laughing yes. Yeah.

I'm with you on that one. The Regency era Reefer Madness, Laughing Gas is pretty delightful. Okay. I kind of like Lionel riding around on the tortoise, but if you're going to hand it to me, I'll take it. But laughing gas is amazing and don't do it recreationally. There's a lot of stuff in this. episode that you should not attempt.

Yeah. Like, opium. Making a flute out of someone's femur. Don't do that. Ill advised. Laughing gas recreationally. Not even once.

Gateway drug. And, yeah, domesticating a zebra. Also rude. Weirdest thing. Don't try this at home. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music,

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