On The Origin of Smooching, Mausoleum Madness, Chubby Cheetahs

Amanda Reed and Riley Black join the show to discuss the fat American cheetah, weird mausoleum culture, and where the heck kissing came from. 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 Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Link to Jess' Twitch: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Link to all of Jess' content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.jesscapricorn.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ -- 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rachel Feltman?

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• 0:40Rachel Feltman?

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• 1:18Rachel Feltman?

  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.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  I'm Amanda Reid.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  And I'm Riley Black.

• 1:42Rachel Feltman?

  Riley and Amanda, both welcome back to the show. It's been too long on both fronts.

• 1:49Rachel Feltman?

  Amanda, of course, you were a regular for a while and it's been a little bit, but hopefully this will be the first of many return appearances from you. So welcome.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Oh, it feels good to be back doing what I was born to do, which is speaking for 20 minutes straight with pauses for jokes.

• 2:07Rachel Feltman?

  Wow, so, so true. Put it on my CV. And Riley, we always love having you on and I'm really excited to have you here to promote your new book. Would you tell us a little bit about it?

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's always a great reason to come on these things, just like I have a new book. I keep writing books so I can actually talk to my friends and colleagues on their podcasts more often. So the new book is Tyrant Lizard Queen. And as you might guess from the title, we are doing a sort of subversive look at T-Rex, using all our latest science to talk about how this dinosaur actually lived from hatching to adulthood, but challenging a lot of the traditional tropes that this is just like a big monster that wants to eat everything. It's really using narrative to get into the life of a particular female T-Rex nicknamed Snaggletooth and all the trouble, good and bad, that she gets into as she wanders around this ancient environment.

• 2:58Rachel Feltman?

  I'm so excited and the title's so great. Ugh.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  I decided to just go for it. It was one of these things where like I mentioned this explicitly in the preface, like it is a bit of a poke and we're doing toxic eerie dinosaurs, basically like, yes, it is scientific. I've been doing this for so long that, you know, the reference section is incredibly long, everything I tried to research as much as I could, but I was tired of seeing the same dinosaur story. So this is the, the trans lesbian dinosaur epic that I wanted to see in the world.

• 3:25Rachel Feltman?

  Who is she?

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Who is she?

• 3:27Rachel Feltman?

  Ladies and gentlemen, her. Ah, can't wait. Great. Well, let's get into the show. On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then, once we've all had time to spin our little science yarn, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was, except we don't actually pick a winner anymore. I have to, I feel like it's time for me to stop having this bit where I explain that we don't do it, except when we have a guest on who's been on the show before for the first time in a while and I leave that out, then at the end, they're always like, wait, we didn't pick a winner.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  We didn't pick a winner.

• 4:10Rachel Feltman?

  That's on me. That used to be a thing we did. Anyway, it's because we're all winners here. Life is hard enough without two people not winning every episode. So that's, that's my stance. Amanda, for the first time in far too long, what is your tease?

• 4:26Speaker 01

  All right. I, I've been waiting to do this. All right. So my tease is, thank you neoclassicism for modern mausoleums.

• 4:36Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. I do love a mausoleum. I feel like there's been some, I mean, mausoleum's always a great, you know, atmospheric set piece in a film, but several recent films came to mind. I mean, Knives Out, Wake Up Dead Man, which I thought was, as somebody with religious trauma, I adored in particular, great use of mausoleum.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  And also great use of hot priest.

• 5:02Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah. Yes, absolutely. Riley, what's your tease?

• 5:08Speaker 02

  So my tease is North America's cheetah that got fat on fish.

• 5:13Rachel Feltman?

  Oh, can't wait.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Me getting all you can eat sushi from Kura Sushi.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  I relate a lot to this cat as we get into it. Just, just leave the salmon. Just leave it in front of you, please.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  It's like, have I put away my 15 plates to get my free little prize yet?

• 5:32Rachel Feltman?

  My tease is literally why is kissing? Why is it?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 5:38Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. I'll jump in today first. So yes, literally why is kissing? Why, why it do? Why, why she do that? We're going to start by talking about the 2026 Ig Nobel Awards. I guess maybe it's Ig Nobel because it's a Nobel Prize, but I feel like Ig Nobel makes more sense.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  I always want to say Ig Nobel.

• 5:57Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. Who, who knows? Who cares? Anyway, they were recently announced. Of course, I think most people who listen to weirdest thing are probably already familiar with these awards, but in case you're not, buckle up, you're going to love them. It's a ceremony that honors research that sounds ridiculous and sometimes is kind of ridiculous, but also gets people talking. From their own website, their goal is to make people laugh, then think. They say, we hope to spur people's curiosity and to raise the question, how do you decide what's important and what's not? And what's real and what's not in science and everywhere else? And I love that. I feel like in prepping this episode, I was thinking about how, you know, these awards and then the British Medical Journal's Christmas Edition, which is, I've also talked about

• 6:42Rachel Feltman?

  on the show before, where it's, it's all real research. It's not fake. They're not satire, but they sort of, they do a cheeky Christmas journal edition where it's like all your kind of silly stuff that isn't actually arguably a great use of your time.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, they love a cheeky Christmas over there. So the science stuff is like, let's do the weirdish.

• 7:04Rachel Feltman?

  Exactly. And I love that they do that and they're always such amazing things in there. And now I'm like, in getting this episode together, I was like, ooh, the autumn approaches, the cool crisp air, Halloween and the BMJ Christmas edition, and I can't wait. So you'll be hearing some more weird research. Of course you hear weird research literally every other week on the show, but that in particular. Anyway, the Ig Nobel's just announced as of when I'm recording this and there were some highlights this year that I'll run through, though I am going to focus on, you know, one particular research project that was in here. But just, you know, speed run, the economics prize was a study that found evidence that

• 7:46Rachel Feltman?

  upper class people are more likely to engage in unethical behavior, including snatching candy from children.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  You don't say.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  I literally am like fork founding kitchen.

• 7:57Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 8:00Rachel Feltman?

  How do you think they get to be upper class? But yeah, we, we love, we love being able to use the headline that rich people are more likely to steal candy from a baby. Medicine, that award was for an aerodynamic study of nose blowing, which was actually from a 1977 paper. It was awarded posthumously, RIP Dr. Takahara. We love research into how to blow a nose. Biology, this one's interesting because I looked and the study was actually retracted, but, but not because the data's bad. So this was on the defense behavior of venomous snakes and the researchers were doing a bunch

• 8:37Rachel Feltman?

  of stuff to basically try to incite snake bites, incite snake to bite, to look at how different factors like temperature and like time of day, body size and age of the snake, how all of these things factor into the likelihood that a human encounter with a snake is going to end with snake biting you. And that is, you know, a real and interesting question. It did, the study did involve them, in their words, softly stepping on snakes at different locations of the snake's body. It really seems that they were quite thoughtful about it. And again, it's not like there's no merit. Sometimes you see animal studies and you're like, okay, you just wanted to bonk a snake

• 9:20Rachel Feltman?

  on the head and get, get funding for it. This is, there's a reason to want to know how much foot pressure on a snake makes a snake bite a person. But apparently the study was retracted when there was some blowback about whether the ethical reviewed board approval they had, had covered stepping on snakes. And so perhaps more on that on a later date, but they do have this Ig Nobel award for their retracted study, but they do contest that, that retraction. And like I said, there's no, the data wasn't falsified. It's just sort of a disagreement on the justification of stepping on snake softly.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Controversy about treading on snakes?

• 9:59Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah. Don't tread on snake. No step a snake, please. It is literally, the retraction should just be no step a snake, please.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Right, no steppy. That's it.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  No stop.

• 10:11Rachel Feltman?

  The physics award was for attempts to design a splash free urinal.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Okay, wow.

• 10:16Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. Don't know how those attempts did. I didn't read the paper, but they tried. The technology award was for such a great phrase, 3D necroprinting.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 10:25Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Heck yeah.

• 10:27Rachel Feltman?

  Scientists used the proboscis of a female mosquito as a nozzle for a tiny 3D printer.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 10:33Rachel Feltman?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. And this was actually before they won the award, my husband Oliver had sent me, he has an email thread of just weird fact ideas and he had sent me this one and it was on my list. So maybe I'll circle back to that one eventually. I did.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  I mean, that feels like one that like, I was about to say, I wish that H.R. Geiger were still alive. But that's like, he might've already had one, like it's just his rediscovery.

• 10:55Rachel Feltman?

  RIP, you would've loved the proboscis printer. Yeah, we, well, and I, there was an episode at this point, a few years ago, where I talked about a study that was basically just like a proof of concept for using dead spiders in soft robotics, like using them as the, the claw grasper. And I thought that was so interesting and I also remember there being backlash of people saying, this is necrocapitalism. It's going to lead to the use of. Dead bodies as robots. And I was like, oh, man, there's so much I'm worried about with regard to capitalism.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:34Rachel Feltman?

  And I think that's a leap, man. I think.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  I think we're already there.

• 11:39Rachel Feltman?

  There's the thing to be concerned about and then it's not being caused by people studying spider graspers.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Just tried to have a take that day and it just wasn't it.

• 11:51Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Just wasn't it on that Tuesday.

• 11:53Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, so the, the award for olfaction, one of the great things about these awards being silly and, and made up is that, you know, they have sort of the big categories like venison and physics, but then every year there are a few where it's just like, this year's award for olfaction. There was a study on basically surveying parents on how they felt about their children's odors as the children got older. Not following the same parents, but like surveying parents with kids of different ages. And basically showing that, you know, as is very common knowledge, parents think that their babies smell great. It, it turns out, shockingly, parents don't also think their teenagers smell great.

• 12:36Rachel Feltman?

  And.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  I do remember that one day, like in the van where it's like, I, I wasn't standing with deodorant. What do you want me to do about this?

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Sorry, just 5% stinkier than normal.

• 12:48Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. And yes, this study did find that odor pleasantness was found to decrease as a function of children's age. And this was the same, you know, regardless of the sex of the parent and the sex of the child. And they were suggesting, you know, it maybe it's particularly important that babies smell pleasant to us because we need to care for them. And it's less important that we care for teenagers in that same intimate way. So as they start to get smellier, we also start to be less immune to their stink, which is delightful. There was another award for the Peace Prize this year documenting that we value friends who are vicious to people we dislike. So these researchers, I may do a deeper dive on this sometime because it is a really fun one.

• 13:33Rachel Feltman?

  And listeners, by the way, if any of these, you're like, Rachel, please do a whole episode. You can always email me at [email protected]. Also, just, you can email me just to say you like the show. Sometimes, listen, to be a little vulnerable, sometimes I forget people listen to the show and like it. So you can always send me a nice note and it really makes me feel very happy. Anyway. So.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  And you tell creative people you like their stuff. There should be more of that.

• 13:56Rachel Feltman?

  I know, I know. I really try to be very earnest and unashamed with reaching out to people whose work I like, being like, you're good. I like it. Because I know that that always makes me so happy.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Send Rachel fan mail 2026.

• 14:11Rachel Feltman?

  So anyway, yes, this study, they were basically like, okay, so we know that when you look at the, the friend, friend dyad, the relationship between you and that friend, you, if you ask sort of what qualities you want your friend to have, you're going to say you want them to be like, nice, probably. And that then if you ask sort of jet, in a more general sense, without any additional prompting, you know, what, how kind do you want your friends to be? You're, you're going to answer thinking of how they treat you. So you're going to say you want them to be kind. But if you specifically ask people, how do you want your friends to be to your enemies?

• 14:53Rachel Feltman?

  Then they, you value a friend who will, you know, absolutely kill someone for you, you know? And then that's, it's one of those things where it's like, again, fork found in kitchen. I mean, my best friend, Amy, truly one of the kindest people in the world. People talk about her when she's not there about how incredibly just kind she is, net positive to the world, wonderful human. Like, when I disclosed to her the behavior of a bad man in my life, she was like, okay, so you want to die?

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Right. We ride a dawn and my we and me.

• 15:33Rachel Feltman?

  And I was like, wow, it didn't even occur to me.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Which always, which always makes it difficult if, when you're in a situation, right? Because it cuts the other way where you're friends with somebody and somebody has wronged them, or at least they feel that way.

• 15:47Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  But you don't side with your friend. You see the other person's argument. You have to kind of talk to your friends. Like, I think you might be in the wrong on this one. And it's like approaching a wild animal. It feels like you're being so careful.

• 15:57Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Control Z, control Z, undo, undo.

• 16:01Rachel Feltman?

  I, I remember there was a video a few years ago that I think was Caleb here on, but may have been another creator. But it was basically, it was like, you know, POV, your friend is telling you about who's wronged them and they are definitely wrong. And it's, it's them going like, yeah, right. No. And I mean, it would be different if, no, yeah, right. And you know, maybe in a situation where, no, yeah. I was like, that's so real.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 16:33Rachel Feltman?

  One more before I get into the main story, just too special not to share. Their award this year for soil science was for burying 1,000 identical pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries and then digging them up after two months. So this is from, from the researchers talk, their writing. I'm about to read some quotes. "We watched as the two young boys stuck their shovels in the ground and painstakingly dug up the remains of the underpants. Most of the organic cotton brief had decomposed in the two months that the underpants had been buried. The worms, insects and bacteria ate most of our underpants, they exclaimed. We have good soil."

• 17:13Rachel Feltman?

  So yeah, basically these researchers, I think they were in Sweden. They were somewhere in Scandinavia. Oh no, sorry. They were in Switzerland. My apologies. So these Swiss researchers, they wanted to do, they wanted to get citizen science help on studying soil. And so they wanted to ask a bunch of people to bury some fabric and then unbury it. And they were going to get soil samples. They were going to get these fabrics back and looking at how they had decomposed in that amount of time was going to help them get information about the health of the soil. And they were like, okay, so we can like send people cotton squares. Then they were like, how do we get people interested in this?

• 17:53Rachel Feltman?

  And then they realized that cotton underpants with elastic edges would be, in their words, both intriguing and practical. And they said, our suspicions prove correct. And they, so they announced the project and people all over Switzerland jumped at the chance to fill the 1,000 spots in their study. They sent out a thousand pairs of identical underpants. The people took soil samples, they buried the underwear. And then, yeah, they, they correlated all of that data with the degradation of the underpants. And they found that it, it was a pretty good indicator for, for soil health. The, the ability of the soil to break down that this organic cotton.

• 18:37Rachel Feltman?

  And apparently it got such incredible media coverage that more than 25 countries ended up also participating. And just to leave you with, with one quote from the researchers, "Hopefully the sensory experience of recovering a decomposed pair of underwear from their own land has inspired the participants to see soil as a living system and a vital resource and empowered them to serve as conscientious soil stewards." If that isn't a perfect encapsulation of what the Nobel Awards is great at, I don't know what is.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  That's beautiful.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  I mean, and what a good pitch for citizen science, right? It's like, hey, you want to help science bury some underwear? It's like, you know, it's a good activity. I like this.

• 19:16Rachel Feltman?

  But today I'm going to talk about the 2026 prize in biomechanics. The award was for devising a more precise definition of kissing.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 19:27Rachel Feltman?

  Yes.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 19:28Rachel Feltman?

  So this comes from a study published in January that was trying to come up with a way to study the evolution of kissing. So Riley, Amanda, why do you think kissing exists?

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Ooh, um, because licking the sweat off of each other is a little too crazy nasty.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  See, I'm going to say like, oh, please.

• 19:53Rachel Feltman?

  No, no, no. Please go ahead.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Okay. Well, I mean, I've given this some, some thought as I've had my descent into the realm of BDSM and things. I think it's because, you know, we're kinky little freaks as animals.

• 20:04Rachel Feltman?

  Yes.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  And we have a lot of nerve endings. They're sensitive. It just feels good to do. If there's something that feels good, we'll find a way to do it and do it repeatedly. There are other benefits that go with it, but at least the, the initial spark, see, let's see what that feels like. I think it's probably pretty simple.

• 20:19Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. I, so the thing is that we don't know, but that is quite in line with, I think, the mainstream thinking about how this happened, or at least, you know, one of the many reasons why it happened. But yeah, we don't actually know. When kissing started, what for and why?

• 20:39Speaker 02

  And it would be weird to time travel back to try and do.

• 20:42Rachel Feltman?

  It would, yeah.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  You might stop it from happening if you tried to do that.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Imagine like going back to the Fertile Crescent and being like, so there's this thing called kissing, guys.

• 20:53Rachel Feltman?

  Who wants to smooch me?

• 20:56Rachel Feltman?

  What if we kissed in ancient Mesopotamia?

• 21:01Speaker 01

  It's like, we just invented bronze. What are you talking about? What is this smooching?

• 21:06Rachel Feltman?

  Well, so we do know that kissing is old. Mesopotamian texts show that romantic kissing was already a thing 4,500 years ago. And, you know, most of the scholars who've worked in that are like, and you know that by the time they were writing about it, it wasn't like brand new. It wasn't like somebody was like, writing barely exists, but you know what? I'm going to document this thing we just started doing. And I'm not even going to say, you know, this thing we just started doing. Yeah, so it's been around for a while. And of course, romantic kissing isn't the only kind. There's something that gets shared, kind of meme-like, that in ancient Rome, there were three categories of kiss. That's an oversimplification. That's not really how it worked.

• 21:48Rachel Feltman?

  They did, however, have multiple words for kiss in a way that I think is still illustrative of this point. So a social peck on the cheek was called an osculum. That just means little mouth. So just pucker up, basically.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  And like, yeah, tells you the function.

• 22:06Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah. So again, in this meme oversimplification, bathium is often referred to as intimate but closed-mouth kiss. It's actually just that this word became very popular in sexy poetry around the first century B.C. And we study a lot of that poetry because it was so horny. If you study the classics, you know the poetry I'm talking about. So anyway, bathium was just like another word for kissing. It may have, it was probably borrowed from another language group. And it was probably less that it referred to a specific type of a kiss than that. It just, you know, it also popped up and it's got sort of a survivorship bias because of all the horny poetry. Then suavium connotes sweetness.

• 22:48Rachel Feltman?

  And contextually, it seems like could be loving or horny, but like a sweet kiss, you know, not just, not just a peck. So anyway, all of that is to say, no, it's not actually true that ancient Rome had these three tidy categories of kisses. And you had to check off which one you were getting. But they did have multiple words for kiss. And to that point, there are many types of kiss. And romantic kissing is almost certainly, I would say certainly, the more recent invention. And it's less common than we in America, and I think people in the Western world more broadly might assume. One 2015 study tried to comb through a bunch of anthropological texts to see who kisses and who doesn't.

• 23:30Rachel Feltman?

  Meaning like romantic kisses on the lips. And again, this question of what is a kiss keeps coming up and being kind of a problem, which is, you know, part of this, this recent study I talked about. So they found that 90% of the cultures they looked at had parent-child kisses. But that just under half had romantic kisses on the lips, which is less than I would have thought. I think because of just sort of the ubiquitousness of them in most Western culture and in our media just makes it seem like, well, yeah, people smooch on the lips. And that's, you know, apparently not, not true everywhere.

• 24:12Rachel Feltman?

  But again, this comes back to like, okay, but romantic kissing on the lips is just one kind of kiss. In the examples of places that don't kiss is, is one culture where they nibble on eyebrows seductively. And I'm like, is that not a kiss? Like, what do you, like, they're not consuming the eyebrow that is lip contact to face. Again, there's just sort of this obsession with specificity of the romantic kiss on the lips. There's some reasons for that that I'll get into in a second. But getting to this new, award-winning study. These researchers wanted to reconstruct the evolutionary history of kissing.

• 24:52Rachel Feltman?

  But that meant deciding what they were looking for when they went looking for kisses in animal behavior literature. Because they basically, they wanted to look at a bunch of primates and see, who do we have on the record as kissing?

• 25:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was wondering about that. How that's distributed amongst our relatives.

• 25:07Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. And they landed on this definition, which is a non-agonistic interactions involving directed, interspecific, oral, oral contact with some movement of the lip slash mouth parts and no food transfer.

• 25:23Rachel Feltman?

  Which is important because food transfer is super common. Lots of animals, including, you know, non-mammals, ants transfer food mouth to mouth. Bees vomit at each other, you know, we've, we've all heard of this.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  I'm surprised there's no mention of tongue in this definition.

• 25:38Rachel Feltman?

  Well, yeah, and so it's interesting you mention that because to my knowledge, the only non-human animal we have seen, we've clocked using tongue, is the bonobo.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Bonobos.

• 25:51Rachel Feltman?

  Are our closest cousins, along with, with chimps, and they are the horny ones. But yeah, apparently the tongue is, is a pretty uncommon thing.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's part of the divide, right? When is it licking and when is it kissing?

• 26:04Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, like maybe animals only, only get into the fronting when the scientist stops staring at them.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, observation bias.

• 26:13Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, bonobos will do anything in front of a scientist. That we know.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Bonobos, the exhibitionists of the animal kingdom.

• 26:20Rachel Feltman?

  Certainly they don't care. Do they like it in particular? Maybe. But certainly it doesn't bother them.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  They're just doing it to prank the scientist. So like, we know.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  You nasty, you like to watch.

• 26:34Rachel Feltman?

  You love this.

• 26:37Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, so food transfer is really common, so they need to specify that this is not about pushing chewed up food into, from one mouth to another. And then the, the non-agonistic, AKA friendly, part is important because there's, there's a fish called a French grunt. They're named that because they grind their teeth and it sounds like grunting. I feel really kind of personally called out, but anyway.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:58Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  As somebody who wears a very structured night guard for my TMJ-caused teeth grinding, I feel seen.

• 27:07Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, but they do kiss fighting. They just kind of open their maws at each other and, and that's fighting. So, yeah.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, like sarcastic fringeheads.

• 27:16Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  Especially these goby-like fish that have these big mandibles that reach outwards like wings almost. And they mouth fight with each other. They're doing me in way too close.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  For emphasis.

• 27:26Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 27:28Rachel Feltman?

  So this definition may seem exclusionary to many types of kisses, you know. But nose kisses, which are very common in different cultures, and contrary to popular belief is not like, I think the, what's the, the common explanation is, oh, so your lips don't freeze together. It's a different thing. It's a thing you do when you see someone you like and you're all bundled up and you rub your little noses together or you press through your nose their face and take a nice little sniff. It's not, it doesn't mean they don't know how to kiss on the lips, guys. It's, come on. But it's very common. There are a lot of cultures where some kind of nose kiss is a thing. Of course, like I said, you know, nibbling on an eyebrow, who's to say that's not a kiss?

• 28:12Rachel Feltman?

  The kiss on the lips, lip to lip, is kind of uniquely interesting because it provides such a rich opportunity for disease transmission. So that's like a major downside, right? Whereas kissing somebody elsewhere, you know, it's not mysterious that animals like to touch each other. And, you know, Riley, to your point earlier, the lips are a sensitive patch of skin. So using your lips to touch another animal, especially in a pro-social, friendly, and then sensual and romantic way, seems kind of inevitable, right? But swapping spit is less so. And seems, you know, much less common in the animal world. And certainly, like I said, that sort of deep tongue kissing is almost exclusively human.

• 28:57Rachel Feltman?

  Caveat, bonobos, who will not, who say, step aside, humans. Anyway.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then is it like convergence or is it homology? Have you lost ancestors along the way?

• 29:09Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, who was tongue kissing? How far back does it go?

• 29:12Speaker 02

  Right. Did chimpanzees lose it and they had it?

• 29:14Rachel Feltman?

  I think they did. I always think that, you know, the whole chimpanzee versus bonobo thing, I know it's like oversimplified. Bonobos aren't literally the most peaceful creatures, creatures on earth. And chimps aren't, chimps can have friends, you know, they're, it's, it's grossly oversimplified. But they are like, one of them does war and the other one has a lot of oral sex. So there is, they are.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  The balance is a bit different between the sex and violence.

• 29:38Rachel Feltman?

  And I, I often feel like there's maybe some lesson for us in terms of not, not what is, not that one is more innate to humanity than the other, but that, you know, cultures form and, and norms solidify. And maybe chimps lost tongue kissing and gained war. And we should be careful that we don't lose tongue kissing because we certainly have war. So like, we got to watch out.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  I mean, that's all part of it, right? Because they're equidistant from us evolutionarily. They're closer to each other than neither is to us. So it's like, it's two different, as you say, like pathways and stuff. And who knows how bind up that way. It's, it's options, not being locked in.

• 30:16Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 30:19Rachel Feltman?

  This debatable but sensible definition of kissing was on hand. And so they were able to look at research on old world apes and monkeys. And they basically did a phylogenetic analysis, which is, you know, you create those branching trees of connection between different related species. And they essentially treated kissing as an evolutionary trait. So the same way you might try to track, you know, what common ancestor a trait like bipedalism came from, they threw kissing up there. And they use statistical analysis to try to infer from the existing data, how probable it was for various ancestors of those species to also have kissed mouth to mouth without transferring food. Of course, this is all very theoretical, especially because primates literally create new trends all the time.

• 31:04Rachel Feltman?

  There are studies about chimps deciding to start putting grass in their ears and butts because it's fashion. So kissing could have, could have come up multiple times in multiple places in multiple species. But these researchers do think that this very odd mouth to mouth swapping spit kissing is probably a pretty ancient trait. They think it goes back to ancestors at least around 17 million years ago, if not more, which would thrillingly suggest that ancient humans had the cultural know-how to French kiss Neanderthals. Yeah, that's great for us.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  I do have also French kissed Neanderthals.

• 31:43Rachel Feltman?

  Too many, in fact. But yeah, there are, as for what this tells us about why kissing exists, it doesn't. And it really doesn't, it doesn't even tell us when it arose or how, you know, this is more of sort of, they, they wanted to try to create the model for studying kissing this way. They want to get more data. They're really interested in, in trying to, you know, trace it back evolutionarily. There are lots of reasons to stumble into kissing. Very common suggestions are that it started with pre-chewing food for babies and that that's how the parent child kiss became so ubiquitous. Cause we know that babies are very lip oriented and that kissing is a very important bond.

• 32:26Rachel Feltman?

  My kid learned how to kiss not too long ago. He just full open maws and puts, puts his open mouth on your face and is very satisfied that he has kissed. And it's very cute and, and gooey. And so, yeah, I can definitely, I feel uniquely qualified at the moment to say that, yeah, babies definitely always had their mouths all over their parents' faces, especially, you know, pre-human and, you know, ancient humans who were maybe pre-chewing food because they didn't have an immersion blender like I do.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, sharing that microbiome.

• 33:04Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, definitely. It makes sense for that kind of contact to be happening a lot. And so then, you know, it becomes a thing that maybe you do sometimes even when you're not pre-chewing food and it's healthy and nice and social. And then culturally, eventually it becomes something that people do even not with babies. And then one day, suddenly somebody French kisses, you know, behavior is wild. But anyway, another possibility that comes up is that it might be like a lingering holdover from when we groomed each other socially. Cause most of our hair disappeared, as did thankfully, most of our body parasites.

• 33:45Rachel Feltman?

  So you're just kind of running out of real estate of places to lovingly, you know, pick bugs off of your, your beloved's skin, sometimes with your, your mouth. And so maybe just we sort of, the mouth was just the last, the last place that it made sense to do that.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  That's what we got.

• 34:03Rachel Feltman?

  But yeah, so it's like, there, there are many reasons why this could have happened. It certainly is a very strong, you know, as evolutionary psychologists would say, fitness indicator. And I don't mean fitness as in finding the most fit partner, but fitness for you as in compatibility, because smell is important. Hygiene is of course important. And, you know, we have all of these subtle indicators to show us that a potential mate is not full of plague that, that they shower and, you know, that they have a pillowcase on their bed, you know, things like this.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  And it's not naysay.

• 34:43Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. And so, uh, having this kind of close contact where you, you cannot hide poor hygiene or just basic compatibility in terms of like scent preference, does kind of make sense as like a thing that people do romantically.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  I mean, even mechanically, right? Because if you think, if someone's, I don't want to say a bad kisser, but just like a not a compatible kisser, that's kind of like, okay, if this is going to take work, I think I might want to go elsewhere.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Like arrows, it's not, sometimes arrows is innate, but you can't always teach arrows.

• 35:18Rachel Feltman?

  So true. Yeah. It's really, it's, listen, I kissed a lot of, a lot of people, many whom I shouldn't have bothered kissing in my life. I can only remember one time that the kiss itself was what made me be like, oh no, this isn't going to work. But it was, it was a strong reaction and in retrospect, correct. So listen to you.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  See, here in the city, you're thinking about the, the day I had on Friday, we were shotgunning weed smoke to each other. It's like, does this count as kissing? We are passing something.

• 35:47Rachel Feltman?

  Well, see, according to this, no, I would say, yes.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  Exactly, right? That's just why we need a category to start from. We're going to move those error parts.

• 35:56Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. Yeah. One thing I do want to end with is just that there are non-primates that kiss. So prairie dogs kiss as a form of greeting. The two rodents will press their mouths together, sometimes briefly press their tongues and like their teeth kind of click. Anyway, the thing is, they do this to get social information about each other. But sometimes they kiss and that kiss tells them that they're from different social groups. So then they fight. And I really love that. It's just sort of, uh, just to, you know, to underline everything I have just said about how kissing is kind of a weird thing that we fell into.

• 36:39Rachel Feltman?

  And it probably arose for reasons that have very little to do with why we do it now. And I just love the idea of these prairie dogs, they kiss, it's adorable. The kiss isn't a like, oh, hello, my beloved. It's like a, oh, hello, who are you? And sometimes the answer is my nemesis. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, that's all, all I have to say about kissing today. And, you know, thank you to the, the Ignovals for giving us this delightful, delightful story.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  You know, I would read an enemies to lovers, like prairie dog fic, like on A3.

• 37:17Rachel Feltman?

  It should exist somewhere.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Someone make it happen, please send it to me.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  It's not kissing, but it does make me think about my kitten who likes to put her teeth on my face at about three or four a.m. Cause I give her little kisses all over her head and I have to wonder, is she trying to do the same thing, only she has canine teeth?

• 37:32Rachel Feltman?

  Oh.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  I wish cats, like if my cat had the ability to pucker his lips, I do think instead of kissing, he would just blow a bunch of raspberries at me in defiance.

• 37:49Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. As Weirdest thing listeners already know, Marie Antoinette had to wear really horrible, probably very painful braces. If there's something about your smile that you've always wanted to tweak, thankfully you have more options than she did, like SmileSet. SmileSet is a service that says they can straighten your smile for under $1,800, which is less than half of what it tends to cost to get traditional braces. And plus with SmileSet, everything can happen at home. You get an impression kit, which you do yourself at home, and then a licensed doctor will review your case and make a customized treatment plan for you.

• 38:30Rachel Feltman?

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• 39:14Rachel Feltman?

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• 40:40Rachel Feltman?

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• 41:20Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're back. And Amanda, let's talk about graves, mausoleums.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Graves, specifically mausoleums, which should not be confused with crypts. So I'll get into that distinction later, but a crisp chill has descended upon Western Pennsylvania, where I live, which means it's a particularly beautiful time to take a walk in Allegheny Cemetery, which is one of the largest and oldest burial grounds in Pittsburgh, fun fact. One of the most discussed graves in Allegheny Cemetery belongs to the Winter family. It is this Egyptian-themed tomb.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  It's sort of like a five, like five minutes when you enter Allegheny Cemetery from Penn Avenue. It's like right there. And it's guarded by twin sphinxes with, you know, pronounced bosoms. There's also a winged sun, which is a symbol associated with the ancient Egyptian sky god Horus. And you're probably thinking, who, what, what is this family doing with this Egyptian-styled mausoleum with two titty sphinxes, as they're known here to the layperson?

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Well, the patriarch of the Winter family, Emil Winter, died in 1941. He was an industrialist and banker. He was born in Pittsburgh in 1857. And he owned a meatpacking industry before selling it in 1902 and moving into steel, which was the big industry de jour of everyone in Pittsburgh during that time. So he never achieved the status of other steel contemporaries like Andrew Carnegie or Henry Clay Frick, but he did see success in his own right when he co-founded the Pittsburgh Steel Company

• 43:26Speaker 01

  and served later as the director of Pittsburgh Steel Products Company. He purchased a controlling interest in the Workman Savings Bank and Trust Company, and he remained sort of there until his death. So a funny thing about this mausoleum is that it's not original at all. It is a replica of some other guy's mausoleum. Specifically, the some other guy in question is F.W. Woolworth's mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. And funny enough, both tombs were the work of this one single man,

• 44:10Speaker 01

  John Russell Pope, who later went on to design the Jefferson Memorial.

• 44:14Rachel Feltman?

  Oh.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Super, super cool. So even though the, this mausoleum, you know, has Egyptian influences, the design of it is actually at odds against Egyptian tradition. So the, the titty sphinxes that guard the front of it are actually Greek, although they do bear some pharaonic headdresses. You know, these sphinxes are clearly female. Traditional Egyptian sphinxes are male, or traditional Egyptian sphinx are male. And the image of the sphinx as a woman was, you know, made by the ancient Greeks,

• 44:56Speaker 01

  who sort of imagined her as the guardian of the city of Thebes, which, you know, you could only travel through if you solved a riddle. And this Winter guy, rich guy, was like, you know what? I'm dead. I'm gonna go build a little house for myself. So, which is where we get into the conversation of, all right, why do mausoleums look like that? So for nomenclature's sake, a mausoleum is a large, above-ground structure, often made of stone or concrete, that can house multiple individuals.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  They're typically more ornate than crypts, and they have a higher level of protection from environmental things like flooding, rain, snow. You can be interred at a public mausoleum. You can make your own mausoleum and have it sort of be private, you know, a very family thing. Crypts, however, are below ground. They are specifically made from concrete, and they are typically found in cemeteries and churches. So when you're walking through a cemetery, you sort of see a mausoleum. What sort of building things do you notice?

• 46:22Speaker 02

  I haven't been by one recently.

• 46:25Rachel Feltman?

  Like columns?

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Lots of columns. So columns, big in Roman and Greek architecture, all columns of all forms. You'll also see some domes, which is sort of like, you know, the higher the hair, the closer to God, but like, the higher the dome, the closer to heaven, you know?

• 46:50Speaker 02

  I like that.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Most mausoleums are symmetrical, which is sort of all about order and permanence. You'll see a lot of elevated bases, which separate the sort of ordinary dirt from this sacred and funerary space. And going back to this theme of permanence, you'll see a lot of like stone, marble, and reinforced concrete, because like, what's the point of a mausoleum if it doesn't stand up to the test of time? And you'll also see like inscriptions and epigraphy, like she died, how she lived, a life well-lived, et cetera, et cetera.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  So why do we have neoclassicism to thank for mausoleums? So much like kissing, mausoleums have ancient origins. The word mausoleum itself comes from the mausoleum at Halicarnassus, which was built around 350 BCE for Mesolus, who was a Persian royal. And it was so famous in antiquity that it became one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. And the name of it became the generic term for any sort of like grand tomb-like structure.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Of course, like Egypt, we have the pyramids. In Etruscan and early Roman tombs, you know, you'll see a more earthen mound over a stone burial chamber. You know, in Rome, you have a lot of massive mausoleums for emperors, like the mausoleum of Augustus and the mausoleum of Hadrian, which are these like huge, cylindrical drums of concrete and stone. The most famous mausoleum that you all have probably seen is the Taj Mahal, which was commissioned in 1631 by the fifth Mughal emperor Shah Jahan

• 48:58Speaker 01

  to house the tomb of his late wife, Mumtaz Mahal. And it also houses the tomb of Shah Jahan himself. So why do we have neoclassicism to thank? Well, in the 18th and 19th centuries, people really idealized, and neoclassicism itself as a movement, sort of idealized Greek and Roman forms, like, you know, lots of columns. And it's also, like, mausoleums are also a way to like show off your money, right?

• 49:40Speaker 01

  It's like, we have, instead of like you being buried in the dirt with the rest of the Olympians, like, we've built a whole little house for ourselves. And us rich people together will be in this little stone house that, you know, our fortunes could afford.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  Could house living people. Instead, it's just for us.

• 50:01Rachel Feltman?

  Our dead people's house is nicer than your house.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:06Rachel Feltman?

  Sorry.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  So honestly, I, in researching this, I did come across a couple of articles that were like, what does the inside of a mausoleum look like? And it's interesting, like, as you walk through Allegheny Cemetery, some of the doors are clothed shut with a chain and a lock, and you can sort of peer through the crack. And they are like just very somber and beautiful. Sometimes they have, you know, gorgeous, gorgeous stained glass as well. So it's sort of like, you know, reheating the nachos of ancient forms and being like, look at this beautiful thing. Look what our riches could afford.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  So going into the 20th century, and this is when it starts to get a little interesting, mausoleums can even be used as tools for political memory-making. So Lenin's mausoleum in Moscow is a really good example of this. It's this massive ziggurat-like building made of granite, marble, and labradorite, which you can find swaths of in Canada. So a ziggurat, for those of you at home, is a pyramid-like structure out of ancient Mesopotamia and Iran. And so Lenin's mausoleum references these ancient tomb forms

• 51:35Speaker 01

  while serving this ideological function. It's like this timeless, secular building, massive in scale, probably took years to build. That is sort of like, and look at Lenin, you know? It's sort of like how the Egyptians...

• 51:55Speaker 01

  I don't want to call it like, look at my big, cool car, but it's also like, look at my big, cool car. Look at my cool building. Isn't it so cool?

• 52:06Speaker 02

  I mean, this is why people buy dinosaur skeletons and stuff, right? It's like, look what my wealth can acquire.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  No, exactly. And in some cases, building a mausoleum is actually used for practicality. So say you're in a place like New Orleans, with where the ground is a little not great. So in fact, in New Orleans, speaking of, they had a ban on burying people in the ground for around a hundred years until the manmade levees and the pumping of systems were put into place because of how, you know, below sea level they were. And during flooding periods, the rising water would float coffins

• 52:54Speaker 01

  out of the ground and wash human remains through the town. They also, this also happened in Venice, Italy.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  And in Svalbard, or on Svalbard in Norway, you cannot legally be buried because the permafrost prevents all decomposition, which is very interesting. So I mentioned the Taj Mahal earlier. And of course, probably the, actually the largest mausoleum in the world is the mausoleum of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who was the first emperor of a unified China. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And it includes 8,000 terracotta soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses, acrobats, strongmen, musicians,

• 53:50Speaker 01

  and anything else you would need to be protected and entertained in the afterlife. And I think it's really interesting how in Egypt, you get buried with, you know, pets and clothes and spoils. And we see that, you know, in China with this specific burial practice of big mausoleum with 8,000 clay guys to protect you in the afterlife.

• 54:14Rachel Feltman?

  And if I'm remembering correctly, um, because my, my little brother was born in Xi'an. So there was a time when we talked about the Terracotta Warriors a lot. But I am pretty sure all their faces are different. They really took, they took 8,000 guys. They were like, line up, army. We gotta, we gotta make 8,000 different guys.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  This has to be believable in perpetuity.

• 54:37Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. It's awkward if you wake up in the afterlife and you've only got five rotating faces on your, your army. So.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So mausoleum.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Economic indicator, sometimes practical.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Almost all times somber, because some mausoleums have little benches that you can sit and be contemplative, of course. Here in Pittsburgh, the winter mausoleum, people will straight up picnic there and just take pictures of the titty sphinxes, as they're colloquially called. And it's, you know, who did architecture the best? The Romans and the Greeks. So, or not to say that actually the Greeks and the Romans did architecture the best, but to a lot of people or to a very specific tradition. It's like, well, let's take this ancient form and we died in 1909 and let's go build some columns.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  It's the stock model you can draw from. Pretty much, yeah. But why think I can just do the Greek columns?

• 55:41Speaker 01

  No, exactly. Who needs, you know, who needs a regular headstone when you can just get a pyramid for yourself? I'd also, if I could design a mausoleum, I do think I would have to model it after that one Bass Pro Shops. It's literally a pyramid.

• 56:01Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. Oh, my gosh. I know. I know what you're talking about. Yeah.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  I mean, I feel like that level of wealth is predisposed to it anyway, but it does have a little bit of like, I'll appropriate from whatever culture I want. Who's going to yell at me? I'll be dead. I'm going to get like, like a pyramid if I want.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  And as somebody who's shopped in many of Bass Pro Shops, I'm like, Tactile Linus is my culture. Hunting, fishing, being a little bit too empathetically or having a little, like way too much empathy for the fish in those tanks. Are they okay? Who, who is the, the fish keeper out of Bass Pro Shops?

• 56:40Speaker 02

  It should be a pamphlet.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  But yeah, you'll want to represent a life lived, throw those remains in a house.

• 56:46Rachel Feltman?

  Wow.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  And my, my final fact, there is, I believe, a name for mausoleum that has cremated remains. And that word is a columbarium.

• 57:04Speaker 02

  It's a new one.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Mausoleums, the war you know.

• 57:10Rachel Feltman?

  Wow. Wow. I, I, I long to take an autumnal stroll through a cemetery. The time is almost upon us. So by the time this airs, hopefully there'll be a true chill in the air. Today it was not hot where I am. So that's a start.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  Today I got to throw open the windows and it wasn't too stinky outside. Pittsburgh famously stinky, probably because all of the coal plants that used to be around here. Um, and the, the ones that are still around. Yeah. At one time I had my windows open and I got a whiff of fresh cut grass and I physically ascended out of my earthly form. It was so nice and lovely.

• 57:51Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're going to take one more break and then we'll be back with one more fact.

• 57:59Speaker 03

  Get your business ready for clients faster with Base44. Describe what you need in your own words and build the website and software behind it with database, login, backend, and hosting included. Go to base44.com.

• 58:18Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're back. And Riley, tell me about the Cheetah Girls.

• 58:22Speaker 02

  Yes, I want to talk about kitties for a minute. So have either of you heard of a fossil cat called Mira Sinonix?

• 58:29Speaker 01

  I have not. Mira Sinonix would be a great drag name.

• 58:32Rachel Feltman?

  That's, yeah.

• 58:33Speaker 02

  Yes, it would. Yes. I mean, maybe I can be the change that I want to see in the world on that one. But in the scientific sense, this is a cat that for a long time has had a, a just so story about it that has bugged me. So this is my choice for this week, my, my weird sec, because it turns out I was right in a way that I was not expecting. So the story goes something like this. It was the 19th century. Paleontology is getting its start in North America, mostly on the East Coast. Lot of fossils from all over the place as people are wandering around, engaging colonialism, collecting things, sending them back to the East Coast, to the naturalists and the academies of their, of their day. And some bones go over to a researcher by the name of Edward Drinker Cope.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  And if you know anything about the history of paleontology, you will know that Cope is one of the two bastards responsible for the Bone Wars. Othniel Charles Marsh from Yale and New Haven is the other. These two, you know, it, you know, met as friends in their youth while studying paleontology abroad, came to hate and despise each other, basically made this everyone's problem to the point that journals like the American Naturalists, like, we're not going to take any more papers from you guys. We're closing the comments because you have just abused the privilege going after each other over every little thing.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  So it's kind of like these dudes have beef and they used scientific research to like enact their war.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  Either that, or I want to write the romance story where this was just cover for their romance at the time that publicly they hated each other behind the scenes.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  I take back what I said earlier. I want to read this fic.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  There's, there's space on AR3 for all. So they're in the midst of this. It is 1895. And Cope got these bones that they're clearly cat bones of some kind. They're Ice Age cat bones from more than 30,000 years ago in North America. It's like, this seems to be some sort of prehistoric puma-like cat. And that's more or less where we leave this. This is the early days of comparative anatomy. You get a chunk of something, compare it to stuff that you already know. You kind of narrow down what you think it is. So they got it down to puma-like cat that lived in the Ice Age. Not all that intriguing by itself. And bits of this cat, you know, show up here and there in the fossil record all across North America from basically Wyoming, all the way down through Florida, Tennessee. It used to be wild here. I mean, there were jaguars that lived in,

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  you know, the forests of Tennessee and Virginia and, you know, mammoths and mastodons and giant sloths. Like the way that this continent was more than 10,000 years ago, be absolutely unrecognizable to what it looks like today. And this cat was part of it. So time goes by, still collecting this cat. In 1969, there's a second species of this cat that's found. This name causes one of these big revisions. Usually when we get a new species of something, paleontologists go back and they look at everything else that's been collected. Are we sure that all this stuff goes together? How are we distinguishing stuff? We do this work. This is where we get the name Mira Sinonix from. It's a species called Mira Sinonix trumanii. And it's named that because it's much more slender than the first one. So the first Mira Sinonix species that was found was much more stocky

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  and much more like a mountain lion, we know them now, similar proportions and everything. They didn't know whether they were closely related, just similar kind of cat. This one, it's lanky. It kind of has that compressed chest look. If you're thinking like a bordered collie, like almost like a dog like that. It looks fast. It looks lankier. It looks a little bit ganglier. And researchers are like, it still seems close to pumas, but it's like, it seems like she'd be moving fast. There's some basic biomechanics that work in with this stuff. Where if you have a relatively short upper part of your limb, so your humerus or your femur, if that's short and the lower leg is long, that means it takes less motion to basically swing that upper part back and forth, like to have a muscle pull that and have that swing. And then the lower part of them reaches further to take a bigger step

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  and that translates to more speed. Whereas a slower animal is going to have a very long femur in short parts of the lower leg. So it takes a lot more power to basically move that femur. And then that lower leg takes a little step instead. So this is a big steppy cat. This is a quick cat. And a researcher suggested a few years later that Mira's is in fact not a cougar at all, but a cheetah, that this is that the cheetah lineage started in North America. This was a cover paper in Science with a really neat pencil drawing of a really fluffy prehistoric looking cheetah. Something clearly took just an image from someone got in Kenya or something and just kind of made it look a little extra prehistoric. But this was the idea. And a lot of paleontologists didn't go with it, but there was a antelope researcher,

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  a pronghorn researcher, Jonathan Byers. And his specialty, we're looking at these North American mammals that I love, they're still around, called pronghorn, you know, the antelope of the famous deer and antelope play, Verkis and Home on the Range. And they're not antelope at all. They're actually more close to related to giraffes, although that's not even close. They're just kind of the last remaining lineage of this ancient group that was everywhere. And people can figure them out as a result of this. If you haven't seen one, if you imagine that something like a deer, but instead of antlers, they have these hook shaped horns on top of their heads. If they shed the outside, but not the whole thing. So it's this kind of in between antler and the giraffe's ossa cone. They have this beautiful kind of brownish-red coat with these cream highlights. They got the big doe eyes and everything. This is a

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  glamour magazine kind of mammal that can also run at 55 miles an hour and has-

• 1:03:52Rachel Feltman?

  Looks and muscles.

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  Yes, looks muscle, but mostly like for for running. This is like the kind of like mammal that spends so much time like doing its running stuff. You're like, well, I'm not even gonna see them. They're just always out like on the run. They gotta keep up that training. So we have the speed speedster pronghorn with the long fossil record going back through the Ice Age beyond. And we have an American cheetah. And that seems to have proportions like the modern cheetah, which can run at speeds, you know, greater than 55 miles an hour, up to 65 miles an hour or so. So Byers comes up with this hypothesis because there's nothing that exists now that's fast enough to catch a pronghorn going full tilt out on the plains, out in the sagebrush grasslands where we find them now. And they really prefer these open habitats where they can run. Grizzly bears can't catch them. Mountain lions can't, you know, catch them in a full outrun. They have to use other

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  methods like ambush to predate upon them. So it seemed logical that, okay, back in the Ice Age, we had super fast cat, and we had the ancestors of today's pronghorn. And the pronghorn must, it's supposed to be a ghost, basically an evolutionary ghost. The pronghorn are fast because of this cat. And it's almost sadly romantic in this way, this predator and prey relationship where they evolved together, you know, on this continent, shaping each other over hundreds of thousands of years. And then the predator go extinct, goes extinct, and we're left with fast pronghorn now. But it seemed kind of weird because we kept finding Mira's Sonics fossils in places that don't make sense for an animal that's gonna live out on the step, that's gonna be running everywhere, right? We find them

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  in places like Grand Canyon or Natural Trap Cave, a lot of caves in general. And as anatomists and paleontologists were looking at the skeleton of the cat all over again, it's like, there's some things like snow leopards have similar traits, and those are not fast running cats. They're climbing a lot, similar with mountain lions. So it seems like, okay, we had this hypothesis that everybody loves, that was just kind of based upon this tenuous relationship. We need, we need proof for this. We need to test this. A couple of years ago, there was a paper that came out from the fossils at Natural Trap Cave. Actually, I've done fieldwork. You can actually descend into this cave. It was reopened a number of years ago by Julie Meech and other paleontologists. It's really neat. It's basically an 80-foot drop from top to bottom. You have to basically go to this grate. Someone actually almost drove a car into this like back in the 60s, and they had to put a grate over it because

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  people joyride around this part of Wyoming. And the car almost drove into this basically just giant opening with maybe foot drop. The historic excavations, they just built scaffolding. So people had to hold skulls in their arms, holding on to the scaffold, going back and forth all the way up. It's better just to repel. So now if you go in and you visit, you have to get roped up and go down there. And in the cold and the dry, it preserves bones and DNA and stuff really well. So we're not only getting the anatomy, we're getting DNA evidence, we're getting geoisotopes, things like that. So we're looking at, you know, these natural trap cave cats, looked at geochemical isotopes in their fossils. So basically, you are what you eat, right? As you eat stuff, the carbon and its isotopes,

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  you know, nitrogen, oxygen, isotopes, all these things get brought into the body and locked into your bones and teeth while they're growing. Same is true for prehistoric animals. This has been used in archaeology and paleontology. I wrote a book called Skeleton Keys a number of years ago. This is how we know that the accounts of Richard III's life that were made previous to skeleton being found were actually kind of accurate about like when you see a change in his diet through these isotopes in his bones. So do the same thing with these cats. And they are eating pronghorn, but they seem generalist. You can plot the values of these things, like where are the herbivores and their carbon signatures showing up, where are the carnivores showing up in relation to that? If they're close, that suggests that kind of one is eating the other because they're clustering together. So it seemed that these Mira's Sonics cats were just kind of generalists. They weren't too

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  different from American lions or saber tooth cats or other things, just kind of eating a little bit of everything. Pronghorn is in the diet somewhere. It doesn't tell us anything about whether they're chasing each other or not. So now comes this new study that just came out about a week or so ago from Molly Cassett Johnstone and a collaborative group, looking not only at the natural trap cave fossils, but fossils Mira's Sonics found in the Yukon, that these speedster cats, or so we thought, also lived in, you know, the ancient Yukon about 30,000 years ago. And when we looked, or when those researchers looked at those geochemical isotopes, is particularly the nitrogen. This is something that's attached to aquatic food sources. The fishes in particular are gonna have elevated levels of nitrogen in their bodies, which then becomes part of the carnivore's body.

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  So when they plotted everything out, the natural trap cave Mira's Sonics still showed up in the same space, like around bears and lions and things like that. But the Mira's Sonics from the Yukon showed way off the charts for the nitrogen. The only food source that would have made sense for that are basically salmon runs. I wish that I could say that these were saber tooth salmon, that unfortunately that species that existed, salmon that had little saber teeth, went extinct by the time this cat was around. But still, the salmon runs that we see today, when it's like, you know, the fat bear contests that we see every year. If you imagine basically these ancient lanky cougars just gorging themselves on salmon, and what this suggests together with the other evidence is they're generalists, that they were not in this tight evolutionary relationship of predator and prey where they're

• 1:08:56Speaker 02

  honing each other and just getting faster and faster and faster. But rather, they were almost like every other carnivore that there was. They were just adapting to whatever was nearby. And if there's a whole bunch of fish available, full of eggs and all that other good stuff, they're gonna feast on it. And I think that's neat because now we still have the additional mystery of why are pronghorns so fast? They can still run up to 55 miles an hour, far faster than they need to. Is there something in their own sort of courtship and mating systems? Is there some other reason for this? Just how did that happen? And I kind of love that we get this little bit of resolution. The story doesn't work. But now we learn something new, and we have new stuff to ask about. And that's why it's my favorite thing this week.

• 1:09:37Rachel Feltman?

  That's really cool. Yeah, it's always, I mean, if I, if I were a researcher, I know that I would fall prey to the seductive nature of a compelling tidy story. Like, so I tried, I tried, it's easy on the outside to be like, well, yeah, it would have been a nice story, but it's just that. But I do, I do love when, I love when it turns out we're just wrong about stuff, that the answer that seems so tidy is just not the answer.

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  And some folks, like, this was not a scientific effort by any means, but there's a book that someone recommended to me once, because I'd write about this over the years, like waiting for someone to look into this. And a reader mentioned to me, there's a book called All Creatures Great and Small, basically about like an animal collector, like an animal dealer, back when like we thought like this was a thing that you'd want to boast and brag about, about all these animals that you've taken from place and keep in your house and all the shenanigans. It was very born, like the Born Free era kind of stuff. Who, I guess he had a cheetah that was tame enough and loosed this cheetah after a pronghorn, like out on the plains somewhere, just to kind of test the hypothesis. And it was already goofy then. It seems actually goofy now.

• 1:10:47Rachel Feltman?

  Oh, boy. Man, more money than sense.

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. Seems to be a theme.

• 1:10:55Rachel Feltman?

  It kind of seems like a moment you would see on Jackass, right? Where it's like, we're just gonna put two fast things out in the wild and see what happens. The dark, darkest episode of Mythbusters never, never aired. Well, Riley, thank you so much for coming on today. And Amanda, it was great to have you back. Riley, would you remind our listeners what your book is called so that they can go buy it?

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  Sure. The new book is called Tyrant Lizard Queen, The Love, Life and Terror of Earth's Greatest Carnivore. It's out on October 27. And you can find it in hardback ebook or audiobook, wherever you get your books. I certainly recommend your closest indie bookstore.

• 1:11:36Speaker 04

  The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Feltman, 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.

• 1:12:08Speaker 05

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