You're Dead to Me - Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
Episode Date: December 6, 2024Greg Jenner is joined in the Palaeolithic era by Dr Isobel Wisher and comedian Seán Burke to learn about cave art.Tens of thousands of years ago, human ancestors all over the world began drawing and ...painting on cave walls, carving figurines, and even decorating their own bodies. Although archaeologists have known about Palaeolithic art since the late 19th century, cutting-edge scientific techniques are only now helping to uncover the secrets of these paintings and the artists who created them.From a warty pig painted on a cave wall in Indonesia, to a comic strip-like depiction of lions chasing bison in France, this episode explores the global phenomenon of cave art, and asks why humans have always felt the need to express their creative side.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Jon Norman Mason Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: James Cook
Transcript
Discussion (0)
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
We all have bad days and sometimes bad weeks and maybe even bad years.
But the good news is we don't have to figure out life all alone.
I'm comedian Chris Duffy, host of TED's How to Be a Better Human podcast.
And our show is about the little ways that you can improve your life,
actual practical tips that you can put into place that will make your day to day better.
Whether it is setting boundaries at work or rethinking how you clean your house, each
episode has conversations with experts who share tips on how to navigate life's ups
and downs.
Find how to be a better human wherever you're listening to this.
BBC Sounds, music, radio radio podcasts.
Hello and welcome to Your Density, the radio for comedy podcast that takes history seriously.
My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are cracking
out our crayons and journeying back tens of thousands of years into the deep past to learn
all about the Paleolithic and cave art and to help us paint an
audio picture we have two very special guests. In Archaeology Corner she's a
postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark where she's
researching the evolution of early symbolic behavior. Usefully for us she has
a PhD from Durham University in upper Paleolithic cave art it's Dr. Isabel
Wisher welcome Izzy. Hi thank you for having me. And in Comedy Corner he's a
rising star of sketch and stand-up.
You may have seen his recent Edinburgh Fringe show,
Burke in Progress, a fine title,
or caught him on the hilarious sketch show,
No Worries if Not, The Michael Fry Show,
or Hollywood Hijack.
If you've got the internet, I recommend it, it's very good.
You've probably seen one of his many viral comedy sketches,
but you'll definitely remember him from our episode
on medieval Irish folklore.
It's Sean Burke. Welcome back Sean. Thanks for having me
it's lovely to be back. It's lovely to have you back. Yeah. You've grown a
fantastic mustache. I did for the last episode as well. I just do it for this
podcast. Oh I see. Yeah yeah so I need three months notice before every episode
appears even though it's an audio format and it's completely wasted. But I need to know it's there.
I'm really grateful you've done it.
What do you know about cave art? Have you seen any?
Have you ever visited any or seen it in a movie?
I'm...
In films. Now I'm sure I visited something to that effect,
presumably on a school tour as a kid.
From what I know of it, it's recently, it's mainly from YouTube videos.
There's lots of hands, usually some vague person shapes and maybe some animals as well.
It's usually really delicate and needs to be well preserved.
Although when I make a hand painting and put it on the fridge, it's in the bin within days.
So, OK. But yeah, I know it's fascinating and I know there's a few caves, a few in France.
I have happened to watch a few YouTube videos
about this topic in the past.
This is good knowledge, Sean.
Yeah, is it?
Yeah. Okay, good.
Yeah, this is good.
First question, what is a cave?
So, what do you know?
This is where I have a go at guessing what our listener
will know about today's subject and I reckon you've seen some cave art at some point somehow. At least you've spotted
some in the background on the Flintstones. It's in everything from animated movies like
the Ice Age franchise, which I absolutely love. It's in the Oscar-winning classic The
English Patient, which I totally forgotten, but it is in there. Maybe you've visited a
cave on your holidays. Someone like Crestwell Cranks in Derbyshire
or Lascaux in the south of France.
But for how long have humans been showcasing
their artistic talents?
What sort of things did they paint on cave walls?
Sean's already given us a summary, but there's more.
And were cave people really the first comic book illustrators?
Let us find out, shall we?
Right, we'll start with some basics.
Sean, do you know what we mean by the Paleolithic period?
Inverted commas, give me a date range, start and finish.
1975 to 1989.
No, I'm gonna say thousands of years ago,
and I don't think I can be more precise than that.
Am I in the right ballpark?
You're kind of not actually.
Yeah, it's surprising.
My god.
Because really it's what, 3.3 million?
Way off.
Yeah, exactly. So the start of the Paleolithic, this period that we call the Paleolithic,
is around 3.3 million years ago. So that's defined by when our hominin ancestors first
start using stone tools. And then it goes all the way until 12,000 years ago. So that's defined by when our hominin ancestors first start using stone tools. And
then it goes all the way until 12,000 years ago. So it's a huge stretch of time. And we
split that into three chunks. So we talk about the lower Paleolithic period. This is three
million-ish years ago to about 300,000 years ago. Then we have the middle Paleolithic period
that goes from 300,000 years ago to about 50,000 years ago, and then the upper Paleolithic period from about 50,000 years ago to 12,000
years ago. So we're talking about chunks of really long periods of time. Almost all
of the art that we know about comes from that end period, the upper Paleolithic. The upper
Paleolithic period, the start of that is defined by homo sapiens kind of entering Europe,
and then Neanderthals are starting to die out in this period between 50,000 maybe 40,000, 35,000
years ago, where Neanderthals are kind of declining in population. And we don't know why? Did we just
annoy them into disappearing? I mean there's lots of different theories about this. Everything from climate change to, you know,
homo sapiens being superior. My personal theory is that it's just we start to get a lot of
interbreeding between homo sapiens and Neanderthals at this time. So it could just be that, I mean,
they're part of us now, their population becomes part of the broader homo sapiens.
You have 4% Neanderthal DNA, Sean.
Who told you that?
I went through your ancestry. You have 4% Neanderthal DNA, Sean. Who told you that? How did you?
I went through your ancestry.
And I gave you a swab on the way in.
And yeah.
You work fast.
Yeah, I do.
That's why you're a bit late.
Yeah, we've got a lab in the back.
And just, you know.
He stole our heads on the way in.
OK.
The idea of the Stone Age is 200 years old.
So the concept of it was sort of coined in
kind of the 1820s, something like that.
But when was cave art first discovered?
Is it the Victorians?
Before we discovered cave art, the first kind of evidence of art from this period that we
find is from 1864.
So it comes from a site called La Medellin in France, and it was discovered by Laté
and Christy. And
it's this piece of mammoth ivory that has like a beautiful kind of engraving of a mammoth
on it. And this was not only exciting for being the first art from this period, but
it was the first solid evidence that humans existed alongside these ancient animals.
So a mammoth carved a mammoth. Sean, I mean you're a sketch artist in a comedy sense,
but if you were a sketch artist in an artistic sense, what would be your best artwork made
of the thing that it's depicting?
Maybe the shape of a sheep with a flock of sheep.
Nice!
No, I know you can't preserve that on a cave wall, but we're taking shepherding to brave
new places.
Let's talk about cave paintings, because I think that's probably what listeners are
really imagining in their head. So when were those first found?
The first site that was kind of identified as Paleolithic was Altamira. So this was discovered
in 1879 by Marcelio Sanchez Sartula. He was kind of excavating and recording parts of
the cave.
It's a shame, isn't it?
In Spain, yeah, sorry. Yeah, in Spain. And as he was doing this,
his daughter was bored and playing, and she'd come across the bison, the famous bison ceiling of
Altamira. So this is really beautiful polychrome, so they're using multiple colours, depictions of
bison that are on the ceiling of Altamira. Sanse Sartola had this amazing discovery at Altamira cave, and
he wrote this up in 1880. And then Fulanova y Piedra, who was a professor at the University
of Madrid, he then presented this discovery at a conference in, I think, 1881. And when
he does that, people just can't believe that this was Paleolithic. They'd been warned
about people making forgeries and wanting to debunk this idea of the Paleolithic. They'd been warned about people making forgeries and wanting
to debunk this idea of the Paleolithic being a period, so they wouldn't accept that this
was Paleolithic.
G. So there's one guy called Hallé who visited this site. What do you think he did to disprove
its ancientness?
A. Did he draw something himself? Did he? Just after I'd be like, I can do that.
G. Just get out of Sharpie. There you go, mammoth, what do you want?
He did the opposite. He wiped his finger across it and smudged it through.
What does that prove? That it's incredibly delicate?
And it wasn't until 1902 and more kind of discoveries of cave art were emerging at this
time that eventually Emile Kartelak writes
this apology called Mia culpa ad unskeptic so you know
I understood too those words
Exactly, exactly
It's basically my bad
Yeah my bad, he accepts the legitimacy of Altamira
unfortunately this was after Sans de Sautoula had passed away so he never got to see his sign accepted as authentic.
Priced this artwork, rubbed his finger through it, nearly destroyed it.
Sean, what's the comedian's equivalent of that?
Probably heckling, to be honest.
If somebody's done a very long set up to a joke and they're just going, no,
I'll go through. It's really hard to recover from that.
That's true.
Trust me.
All right, so we've done Southern France, we've done Altamira in Spain.
Where else were the major sites?
We have Kresol, Kraigs and Derbyshire.
That's actually the northernmost example of cave art that we have.
And we also find other examples of Paleolithic art from other sites as far east as sort of
Ukraine and Russia throughout Europe, actually.
Is there any in Ireland?
Any chance?
Not that I know of, unfortunately.
So I'll have to make a forgery. Europe, actually. Is there any in Ireland? Any chance? Not that I know of, unfortunately.
I'll have to make a forgery.
Yeah.
But we do actually have a much older example of drawing.
Yeah. So the oldest example we have of homo sapiens making art
comes from Blombos Cave in South Africa, and it's a small piece of ochre.
So ochre is usually used for drawing
on cave walls, right? But it's just a piece of ogre that is engraved with patterns of
lines. And we have a few examples of these and they date from between 100,000 years ago
to 75,000 years ago from this site.
So really early.
Yeah, really early.
Okay, so that's 100,000 years ago, the earliest human art that we have in terms of drawing.
Let's move on to representative art. This is art that looks like a thing so Sean
in the past few months literally in the past few months scientists have
announced the discovery of the oldest ever painting depicting a real thing okay
it was found in Sulawesi which is in Indonesia on an island what do you think
it shows? Probably a beach ball. Yeah I'm gonna stick with beach ball. Beach ball? Yeah yeah.
Yeah well we can show you what it was and we'll hand it to you. There you go. Thank you. What can
you see? A very well-fed pig. Yeah is it? Yeah all right. It's an incredible pig isn't it? Yeah
yeah it looks happy and healthy if you ask me. Izzy, this is very exciting for numerous reasons.
A, it's the oldest ever representative art.
Yes.
Secondly, art outside Europe?
Yeah.
So tell us about it.
Yeah, so this is known as the Sulawesi warty pig.
Harsh.
Because it has little warts.
It's doing its best.
I know.
Okay, wow.
Right. It's from Sulawesi in Indonesia and it's been dated to at least 45 and a half thousand
years ago.
But we haven't had anything quite like this from anywhere else in the world.
It changes how we understand kind of the beginnings of art.
Is art something that's invented once and spreads or is it a human instinct that shows up constantly
in different places because each new group of humans is going, I've got an idea?
Yeah. My personal feeling is that it's exactly like you said, Greg, it's these multiple origins.
Like, it's something innate in us that likes to create, likes to make things. And the other
evidence that suggests that it's not just a single origin but possibly
a few multiple different origins is we're not the only species to be making art.
We now know that Neanderthals were doing it too.
So we have evidence of Neanderthals also producing cave art, ornamenting their bodies, they're
making shell beads too and probably painting their bodies as well.
I think listeners are thinking, talk about the bison, talk about that.
So what kind of animal, well, actually I'll ask you, Sean,
what kind of animals, apart from bison,
because that would be cheating,
what are you imagining on the wall?
Deer, mammoths, because we've mentioned them already.
I want to say cats and dogs, but I feel like that's,
Oh no.
let's say wolves.
Okay.
That kind of area terrifying animals
So you think predatory animals? Yeah, big scary prediction animals. I think that's a very common response
Yeah, and surprisingly that's not common at all is it no the most common animals that people are drawing are the ones that they're hunting
The most common are deer so you got that one
Bison I beck so mountain got that one. Team! Yeah. Bison, ibex, so mountain goat, that sort of thing.
Horses?
Horses, yeah.
I knew I was missing one.
Yeah.
And wild cattle called aurochs, which are terrifying.
They're mega cows.
Yeah.
Mega cows.
Imagine a cow charging towards you.
Yeah.
Mega cow.
Okay, I got it.
I'm running. She's absolutely enormous. Right, I got it. I'm running, I'm running.
Absolutely enormous.
Right, wow.
I thought cows were already pretty big, Greg.
Mega cow, Sean.
I don't think you're getting it, mega cow.
So we do have one famous scene.
Yes.
It's called the Panel of the Lions.
It is, yeah.
Where is it?
It's from Chauvet Cave in France.
I can show it to you, Sean.
Here you are, I'm handing you a bit of paper.
Thank you. This one, I think, is absolutely gorgeous.
Well, that is pretty cool.
That's a whole group of what are they? Lions?
No, a few things.
Lions chasing big things.
Kind of like a terrifying herd, really.
The first image I get on this is it looks like a scene
from a kind of comic book or something.
It's got a very interesting
Overlapping yeah, you can almost sense the movement of it as well. Genuinely. No, that's really cool. Yeah, it's like Lion King the prequel
It's fair to say we would assume that's a hunting scene, right? Yeah. Yeah that panel of lions It's not what we're seeing here
It are these depictions of you won't believe what I did last week lads
We went out and I hunted this many lions and this is what it looked like.
What is this for?
This is a very common misconception about cave art,
is that it's always depicting hunting scenes,
and you might imagine, you know, little stick figures with their spears
sort of chasing after animals that might be behind what we've got on the image here.
But that's actually not what a lot of cave art is.
Humans are very rare in Paleolithic art.
Just observing stuff, really.
Yeah. So I think what they're doing is trying to capture kind of animal
behaviours and something about the animals that communicates some sort of meaning or
importance to their society.
This is their version of an Instagram story.
You know, it might take a bit longer, but it's like you'll never guess what I saw last weekend
Share it with your friends. Sean, let's talk art supplies. Okay.
They couldn't pop down to W.F. Smith's for their sort of paintbrush set and their my first art palette.
What do you think they're using to make all this art? Whatever's to hand. Yeah, because that's art, you know, it's not about being right
It's just about having fun
using whatever's to hand. And from what I know throughout history, a lot of it, like art
supplies, are often like pretty nasty stuff. I'm not going to speculate, but we can all imagine
whatever's available. Did you say ochre earlier? Yeah. That kind of thing. What they tend to be
using is ochre, and ochre comes in a few different different shades so we have red ochre is a very common one, yellow ochre, browns and sort of purple
hues too. And then they're using charcoal as a black pigment and also manganese oxide
as well as a black pigment. But that is kind of it. So there's very... Black and brown.
Black and brown. Those are your choices. Black and brown. Black and brown. Those are your choices. Yeah.
Black, brown, red and yellow.
And a little bit of white.
Yeah.
What they are using is sort of water or clay
to kind of mix this into a paint.
Also animal fat to create a thicker sort of paint mixture
that then they will mix it up and then put it on the walls.
They can also just use it without that,
like crayon and just draw directly on the walls.
So there's a slightly emulsive quality to adding the fats in, right? Makes it slightly
thicker and...
Yeah, stick on the cable better, but also it makes your pigment go further too. And
possibly saliva is the only bodily fluid that we know that they're probably using in this.
So some of the hand stencils that we mentioned earlier, the way that they're made is by spraying
ochre from the mouth onto the hand.
Sometimes they might have used a tool like a little tube, a bow bone or something.
Oh, like a straw, yeah.
Like a straw, yeah.
Yeah, cute.
Yeah, or just directly from the mouth.
So there's some ideas that maybe they're just putting the powder in their mouths, mixing
it with saliva to create the paint and then spitting it on their hands.
Wow.
OK, let's talk about the canvas or rather the cave-ness.
I mean, the actual physical space we're talking about.
Sean, when you're writing a comedy show, do you ever think about the physical space you're performing in?
So the lights, the sound, the acoustics?
Yeah, definitely. Actually, I think no joke, I think a cave would be a great place
for a stand-up comedy night,
because nice and dark,
probably just have one light source,
which is the fire,
because you want there to be
as few distractions as possible.
So that's the spotlight on me on the stage,
in the centre of the room.
Ideally with a crowd there as well.
That's one thing I do think of as well.
A crowd of cave fairs.
A crowd of cave men,
probably some toilet humour, that's their kind of ballpark, that's fine thing I do think of as well. A crowd of cave bears. A crowd of cave men. You know, probably some toilet
humour. That's their kind of ballpark. That's fine. I did a show last night and I had a PowerPoint
presentation in there. As far as I know they didn't have that technology back then. Probably not.
But I wanted, you want it nice and big, nice and clear. It's just very important that everyone
understands exactly what's going on in my experience. That's nice. So Izzy, do we get a sense of the cave as an art space?
Absolutely.
And if you'll indulge me, we can enter a cave.
Imagine ourselves in a cave.
Yeah, there we go.
Tens of thousands of years ago.
So we start to notice these unusual echoing acoustics, this space around us.
We're in complete darkness, and we
hear this flicker of our firelight
that's illuminating the space around us.
So the firelight's sort of dancing across the walls,
lighting up these unusual stalagmites and stalactites
and undulating surfaces.
And we might even tactically engage
with the space around us, feel the sort of
smooth flowstone or the rough surfaces of the cave wall. Have a fondle, Sean, have a fondle. Wow.
Oh no, I destroyed an ancient piece of art. This was Greg's idea, I swear.
So all of these sensory experiences would have been embedded in the making and experience of this art. And recently in archaeology we've
been appreciating these sensory experiences in what's kind of a sensory turn in our interpretation.
So we're trying to appreciate how these different dynamics, the acoustics, the firelight,
the tactile interactions would have enriched the art that they're making. And for me, especially Firelight is really an amazing way of imagining this art in a
new light.
So I didn't intend to have a pun there.
So this unpredictable light source is probably kind of animating the art in some way.
If we look back on the panel of the lions here, we can imagine as the flickering light
is dancing across this.
We see one lion and then the next and it creates this sort of animation effect to the art.
And this warm light also makes us feel more sociable, comfortable as well.
So all of this is really like enriching this experience of the art and the art making.
Beautiful. Yeah, absolutely.
The whole echo as well is like a theatre
performer's dream, you know, really helps you project, you know, tell the story.
So that's ideal. Yeah, friends, romance. Exactly. Yeah, that's great isn't it. Let's leave the cave for now because
that was charming but it's quite damp in there. So that's
fascinating. The idea of illustrating the, you've got static art but it's
illustrated by the flicker of the flames. It's a fascinating animating technique.
Sean, do you know what the word pareidolia means?
I'll be honest, no.
Do you want to have a guess?
Yeah, is it the study of beach balls?
If only it was.
It's actually the study of parasols, you know, the umbrellas.
Oh, so close.
Now Izzy, what is pareidolia?
So pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon of seeing meaningful forms in random patterns.
And this is something that everyone experiences.
So it's that phenomenon of if you look at a cloud and you see it looking like a face
or a rabbit or a dog or whatever, that's all pareidolia.
What some of my research has focused on is, that's all pareidolia. What some of my research
has focused on is trying to understand how pareidolia influenced the making of
cave art. So we think that maybe the flickering sort of firelight enriched
this experience of pareidolia and then they're drawing sort of what they're
seeing on the cave wall. I'm glad I have a word for it now. I see it on social
media all the time when somebody's like
Oh this house looks like a face. Yeah, or this coat hanger looks like a drunk octopus that wants to fight you.
I think that's the best one. Yeah
That's all Parodolia. What's so interesting I think is that Parodolia, if I understand it, is you're more likely to see the thing that you're accustomed to seeing.
Yes. So if you spend your days in the dark
looking at animals, you're more likely to see animals. Is that right? Yeah, kind of.
So we experience a lot of face pareidolia. So we see faces everywhere. But if you imagine
that you're a hunter gatherer living in the Paleolithic, you're not encountering many
other humans. They're living in quite sparse populations. But what you are focusing
your attention on is animals. So you're tracking migrating herds across the landscape. You
have to be attuned to sort of if a bison's going to leap out and attack you or something,
you have to really be paying attention to these subtle visual cues of animals. So my
little pet theory is then where we see faces all the time, they're seeing animals
all the time, and that might account for why animals are such a dominant theme in Paleolithic
art. Fascinating, isn't it? Yeah. I'm going to drag us back a little bit more towards form and
function a little bit of like why might this art have been so important to people? Sean, I mean
we've already talked about like hunting manual. Are there any other theories you might want to chuck out as to why people would spend such time and effort doing art?
It's something to do, really.
I think the one I would pitch more seriously would be when you get people around a campfire
and they start telling stories, and I've had this on an archaeology dig, you get people
around a campfire from different backgrounds, They don't all speak the same language.
Sometimes art is quite useful.
So is there anything in that?
I definitely think so.
And this is actually one theory that people have had,
particularly about these very big caves
and the famous caves like Lescaux or Altamira,
is that maybe these are aggregation sites.
So we're dealing with mobile hunter-gatherer populations.
And for most of the
year they're sort of off doing their thing, but maybe they come together seasonally, aggregate in
one spot, so you have different populations of people coming together. And then they're producing
art, maybe that's like a way of reinforcing sort of community bonds and connecting with these people
that you haven't seen in a long time, or yeah, it could be that they need a common language and that's bison.
You know, we don't know.
Did you speak bison fluently?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's great.
That's visual storytelling, you know.
It's show, don't tell.
Truly. Sure.
It's a very ancient principle, it turns out.
Isn't it?
Yeah.
There's also this idea that it's a way to exchange information.
You know, some people have been off in Germany and they've seen something there and they need to communicate it
efficiently. So okay, so I'm pushing the kind of communication functionality. Are there any other
theories that you want to name check, even if you don't agree with them? Anything you... Yeah,
there's, well, it's kind of Sean's first interpretation. They were just bored and doing it.
It's what we call this art for art's sake idea.
So maybe it didn't mean anything.
They're just bored and doodling on the walls.
I don't agree with that one.
I think it's a lot to invest.
If you're just bored, you can do other things, right?
And not go into a deep cave.
There's lots of ideas about shamanism and ritual.
Yeah, that's a very common interpretation.
Maybe religious elements,
there's an early phase of what we might call ritual behavior
that, you know, that's no longer simply just survive,
but is now like, here's some ideas we have about,
maybe there's a sky god or a reindeer god.
The nuance window!
["The New Ones' Window"]
This is the part of the show where Sean and I put down our paintbrushes and sit quietly by the fire for two minutes for some storytelling while Dr Izzy takes centre stage to tell us
something we need to know about Paleolithic art.
Take it away, Dr Izzy.
So we've talked a lot about the people who made cave art, how they lived, where they
lived and maybe even what they used the art for, right? And we've discussed that maybe other species were engaging in making cave art too,
but when we imagine a cave artist, what do we see? We tend to imagine these were adults engaging in
this behaviour, and this is really a problem in archaeology more broadly, but especially when
we're dealing with this period. But we know, or we should know,
that children were around this period too, and so we must be seeing some children's behaviours in the
archaeological record as well. So there have been some studies looking at the anatomical measurements
of hand stencils or traces left by the fingers, we call those finger flutings, that have demonstrated
that children were there alongside adults making this art. So this adds a whole new dimension to understanding
cave arts. So what we thought was actually an adult activity exclusively, we know that
children are actively participating in and probably been taught the importance of this
as a way to preserve knowledge in the society. But in my recent research
I've also shown some evidence of children kind of doing their own thing with K-Bot,
which I think is really cool too.
So I looked at a panel from Las Monedas Cave in Spain, and this is a group of drawings
that was previously interpreted as a panel of enigmatic signs, which is archaeology
speak for we don't know but it's very weird. It's quite low to the ground, the original
Paleolithic cave floor. It consists of lots of sort of concentric circles and random lines
that intersect each other, and this is all characteristic of very young children's marks,
so I've made the argument that this is children, very young children,
making this art.
Wonderful. Thank you, Issy. Sean.
Yeah. How about that? So it's their equivalent of the photos on the front of the fridge,
I guess.
Exactly.
Beautiful. I love it. Thank you so much. Listener, if you want more from Sean, of course you
do. Check out our episode on medieval Irish magic. Also some animal stories in that, some
quite weird things in there. Yeah, that's weird.
And for more prehistoric stories,
listen to our episode about the Neanderthals
with Tim Minchin, that was a fun one.
And if you've enjoyed the podcast,
please leave a review, share the show with your friends,
subscribe to Your Dead to Me on BBC Sound
so you never miss an episode.
I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests.
In history corner, we have the incredible Dr. Izzy Wisher
from Aarhus University in Denmark. Thank you, Izzy. Thank you. And in comedy corner, we have the incredible Dr Izzy Wisher from Aarhus University in Denmark.
Thank you Izzy.
Thank you.
And in Comedy Corner we have the spectacular Sean Burke.
Thank you Sean.
Thank you very much for having me.
And to you lovely listener, join me next time as we uncover another lost historical masterpiece
and try not to smudge it with our finger.
But for now I'm off to confuse future archaeologists by painting mammoths all over the local coffee
shop.
Bye! [♪ music playing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, wind blowing, BBC Radio 4 simply titled, Witch. I'm going to explore the meaning of the word today.
It is a twisting turning rabbit warren of a world,
full of forgotten connections to land and to power,
lost graves, stolen words,
and indelible marks on the world.
Cause the story of the witch
is actually the story of us all.
Come and find out why on Witch with me,
India Rackerson. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
We all have bad days and sometimes bad weeks and maybe even bad years. But the good news is we
don't have to figure out life all alone. I'm comedian Chris Duffy, host of Ted's How to
Be a Better Human podcast.
And our show is about the little ways
that you can improve your life,
actual practical tips that you can put into place
that will make your day to day better.
Whether it is setting boundaries at work
or rethinking how you clean your house,
each episode has conversations with experts
who share tips on how to navigate life's ups and downs.
Find How to Be a Better Human
wherever you're listening to this.