What Was A Mammoth Doing At The Bottom Of The Sea?

Hannah surprises Michael with a mammoth bone from Doggerland, the lost Ice Age land that once joined Britain to mainland Europe, and now lies beneath the North Sea. Who lived there, what roamed it, and how did an entire landscape disappear under the waves? Then it's your questions: where did "cool" come from as a word for style, and how did it stick around for so long? What on earth is "skank face"? And what are Hannah and Michael reading right now?-------------------For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscienceCancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.-------------------Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠-------------------Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack MeekAnimator: Sam BensonVideo & Social: Bex TyrrellAssistant Producer: Lucy LipscombeProducer: Simona RataSenior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-CarterChief Digital Officer: Samuel OakleyExec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Welcome to Rest Is Science. I'm Hannah Fry.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  And I'm Michael Stevens.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  I have just been on holiday for the summer. And while I was on holiday, I was, of course, thinking about you, Michael. And I saw something on a shelf in a shop and I was like, I know who would like that. Michael Stevens of Beestow's fame.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  What is this? Can I hold it?

• 0:18Speaker 00

  Yes, you can.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  I want to guess.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  Are you gonna lick it?

• 0:21Speaker 01

  I will if you tell me to. Oh, my gosh. It's more stony than I thought. I thought it was... Is it like a coral?

• 0:30Speaker 00

  I've handed Michael something that looks sort of like a cross between a stone and a bit of wood.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Yes, it's like wood coloured, but it's like a giant shape of a shark's tooth.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  Right, that's a nice way to put it.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  But it's not a shark's tooth.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  It's not a shark's tooth.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  It's how large is it? It's larger than my hand.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  And it's not that heavy.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  No.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  I thought it was either gonna be much heavier or much less heavy.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  It's quite porous, isn't it?

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it looks like it would be really porous, but it's denser than if it was wood.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  It's got quite organic shape to it.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Is it bone?

• 1:05Speaker 00

  It is bone.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, it's bone, but it's not a tooth.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  It's not a tooth.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  It looks like it's like a hip bone, because it's so smooth here, like a ball joint.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  One section of it is very smooth. I don't think it is a hip joint, but you are, you're getting close.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm gonna smell it. Mamalian?

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Mamalian.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Yep, female. No, what if I could smell a bone and tell? I just made that up as a joke.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Where did you go?

• 1:33Speaker 00

  I was in France.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  So, yes, I'll...

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Jerry Lewis.

• 1:39Speaker 00

  I'll give you a bit more of that in a minute. Okay, let's think about this, right? It's an animal bone, a fossilized animal bone.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  How big is the animal?

• 1:47Speaker 01

  The animal's big.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  Right, how big?

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Bigger than a human.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  Correct, how big?

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Three times as big as a human.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  I'd say bigger.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:56Speaker 00

  I'd say really big.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Like whale big? Dinosaur big?

• 2:01Speaker 00

  Well, it depends which dinosaur.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  It depends. There's some chicken-sized ones, I know.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Mammal, though. Stay on mammal. Land mammal.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  A land mam- so elephant?

• 2:12Speaker 00

  You're closer.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Rhinoceros.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  Bigger.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Hippo?

• 2:15Speaker 00

  I mean, their name means big.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Oh, a mammoth?

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Yes. It's a mammoth vertebrae.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Whoa, a vertebrae.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  Isn't that cool?

• 2:24Speaker 01

  That's so cool.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  Isn't that cool?

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Not a mastodon, a mammoth.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  A mammoth.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  A mammoth.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  A mammoth. Now, the thing that I think is...

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Oh, shoot, there's a sticker on here.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  I know, I took it off because I didn't want you to.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  But if I look, why did I not look closely? Because I can tell that that's the back of a mammoth.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Oh, I would have looked like a genius if I noticed that. And I could have smelled it and been like, whoa, mammoth.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  Comb your hair. Yeah, it's a mammoth vertebrae. How amazing is that?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  Isn't it? Okay, now here's the thing, right? Let me tell you where it came from. This was dredged from the bottom of the North Sea.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  But that's water.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  Why is there mammoth detritus at the bottom of the North Sea? And this is what I really want to talk to you about. I want to talk to you about the secret lost land of Doggerland.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Doggerland.

• 3:24Speaker 00

  Basically, the silliest name of all time.

• 3:34Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 3:37Speaker 01

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• 5:08Speaker 03

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• 5:45Speaker 01

  I love the name, though. I've heard it before. It is the, like, prehistoric landmass that used to connect the UK to continental Europe. The British Isles used to be, like, accessible to all the mammoths.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  All the mammoths wandering across it.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  They could just wander to and fro.

• 6:04Speaker 00

  Now, somehow, I went through almost all of my life not knowing that the UK used to be a connected landmass with mainland Europe.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Wasn't always an island.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  It wasn't always an island. And we are talking really recent.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, because mammoths were around when humans were around.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Yep. Oh, we're talking more recent than this. We're talking, we're talking super recent that Doggerland disappeared into the sea.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  When?

• 6:29Speaker 00

  We'll get there, but really recently.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Why not?

• 6:32Speaker 00

  I mean, put that in perspective. There was sort of written about it. Okay, so the whole idea that there used to be this landmass between, between the UK and Europe. The beginning of it started in about the 1930s. So for generations, fishermen, when they've been trawling their nets in that part of the North Sea, they would bring up kind of all sorts of detritus, lots of mammoth, you know, limbs, teeth, that kind of thing. Lots of reindeer antlers, that sort of stuff. So people sort of knew vaguely that there was something weird going on, but people just didn't really care about it, right? They sort of would just like chuck it on the fire, use it as extra firewood.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  And then in the 1930s, someone pulled up this reindeer horns that had been sharpened into a tool.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  Right? And then they're like, okay, something's going on here.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  This is like, this is evidence of there being a human here. So this artifact was passed around from, from post, different museums. No one sort of wanted it. Kind of got kind of forgotten in the archives, but smartly, some people had the idea to test the mud that it had come surrounded in, specifically the pollen that was embedded within the mud. And what was interesting was that it was freshwater mud. Which is like, well, how can this possibly? We've just taken it from the bottom of the ocean, of the sea.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Of the salty sea.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  Of the salty sea. So over the years, like, sort of nothing really happens. People are like, yeah, maybe there was some lost land there, but whoever, who really cares? But also, while all of this was going on, in Holland, what they would do when they would, when they would, the trawlers would like bring up all of this stuff, they would dump it onto beaches, which they need for their flood defences. And while all of that was going on, some paleontologists kind of went through it and started finding really interesting objects in there, including a Neanderthal skull, right? That had like been sitting at the bottom of the North Sea. So now we know that there's like, there's humanoids, there's, you know, down there somewhere. This particular Neanderthal, they aged him to be about 50,000 to 70,000 years old.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Okay, so we're talking like long civilizations. And he had a little cyst sitting above his right eyebrow, a little version of Neanderthal cancer. So all of this is going on, fishermen are like bringing up this stuff, being like, what? Another Neanderthal skull? Like, what? Another, like, woolly mammoth vertebrae, whatever. Anyway, then in the late 90s, early 90s, it was the oil and gas industry.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  Who finally demonstrated that there really was this lost land, because they had been mapping the terrain of the North Sea for a really long time. The bit that they care about is further down, right? It's sort of beneath the superficial layers.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  Where there is pockets of oil and gas. But they had these 3D seismic surveys all across the North Sea. And when they looked at them, they realized there are hills and valleys and estuaries. There's like all of this incredibly detailed geographic terrain under it. They've got oak, there's elm, there's hazel, all of this stuff is growing in Doggerland. And that changes the mindset, because people were like, well, maybe this is just a little rat run that comes between Europe and Britain. When people were sort of escaping the Ice Age, they kind of ran across it. But the fact that all these forests, it actually looks like there was this abundance of life.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  It was like proper forest land.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  Proper forest land. So it's about, by the way, the North Sea averages about 95 metres.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  But the Doggerland half is about 40 metres.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Wow, that is not deep.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  Not deep.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  If you told me it was eight miles deep, I would have said, yeah, sure.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's nothing. I mean, you could free dive that, right?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Forty meters, that's it.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  Forty meters.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes more sense, because you wouldn't have to have much change for that elevation change. I mean, obviously, that's a big one. Like, this was a quite cataclysmic geological event that erased Doggerland.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  It's even less, actually. Sorry, the western end is 15 metres below the surface.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Fifteen?

• 10:33Speaker 00

  It's nothing. It's nothing.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  You could just walk across that.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  You could walk, and they did. And they did.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  It was higher up then, or there was less water in it.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  Less water, quite a lot less water in it. Okay, so here's the thing, right? Now you know that there is this abundant land where humans and Neanderthals and mammoths and reindeer and forests were all present. Where the hell did it go? What happened? And it turns out, there is more evidence in the geological record, because in the north of the North Sea, this is like really recent research, by the way. We're talking like 2018 or so, that people have like fully established this stuff by taking cores from old rivers and then looking through them. It looks as though there was a continental shelf about the size of Scotland.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  That there was a big earthquake and it collapsed.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  This gigantic volume of mass that just sank, I mean sank all at once and created a gigantic tsunami that came over and just wiped out Doggerland.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Just flushed that space, cutting off the British Isles from continental Europe.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Geez.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  And this happened, by the way, about eight thousand years ago.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Noah's flood. We found it.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  Flood. I know. Genuinely, I think there's something in that because we know that there were people around there around that time. You know, you have like, you've got the French in the caves of like, uh, it sort of fifteen thousand years ago, they've been there for thousands of years by this point. You've got evidence of human settlements up in the north of Scotland. You definitely had people there. I mean, that is recent enough that it could survive in, in sort of, uh, in folklore.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Eight thousand years ago?

• 12:24Speaker 00

  Eight thousand years ago.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  So like six thousand BCE.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Wow. I mean, the thing is, people weren't writing yet.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  Agree.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  There was no history. This is prehistory. And yet it's, yeah, within, easily within oral tradition range.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. So the reason why we can be sure that this happened instantly is that when you take these cores, uh, it's sort of across this whole section in, in northern Scotland, uh, in particular, but also across, across Norway, uh, all around there. You see inland, you have evidence of human settlements. And then on top, there is sediment of like crushed seashells, um, as though the tsunami brought in this incredible amount of silt.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  And then you have more layers on top. There is some evidence, a little bit of evidence, that suggests that not all of Doggerland was swallowed at once, or that perhaps some of it came back and then sea levels rose and then sunk the rest of it. Um, but this really was like, I mean, in one day, it sort of disappeared.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Wow. Imagine that you're, you know, living in where Pinzance is now. And you're like, oh, we've got to go down to Paris. Oh, I hate traveling. And you get your whole family ready and you're like an old, you know, a Neanderthal. And you're like, we gotta go. And then you hear this rumbling, like the ground shakes and then, and you're like, woo-hoo, trip's canceled.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  It's canceled. Yeah, exactly.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  And your, your wife is like, oh, my parents. And you're like, oh no, my in-laws. Now they're across an ocean.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  Guess we can't see you anymore.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Dang. Oh, Doggerland.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  See ya.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Doggerland. Why is it called Doggerland?

• 14:09Speaker 00

  No, I don't know. It was nineteen eighty-nine when, oh no, I do know why. That's not true. I do know why. It's because there's a place called Dogger Bank, which is where medieval Dutch cod boats, isn't it, that are doggers.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's named after a fishing vessel.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Got it. And so mammoths were roaming around that land.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  In Doggerland.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  Earlier, earlier than.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Earlier, but then this bone got covered up by water.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  Right. So this, this, this mammoth would have died in Doggerland when it was a land and laid there for many, many, many thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, no doubt. And then one day a tsunami came and swallowed up the land that this had once stood on. And then, you know, over time, it sort of arisen to the surface and then was dredged up.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  How cool.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  And now it's come to you. Can I tell you my favorite thing about Doggerland of all, though?

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Okay. So the thing is, because the structure of the coastline of Britain was different, um, it means that the river estuaries have a different structure. So the Thames

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  did not used to come out through London. It found its way out to the sea much further north through, through Norfolk. Okay. So in twenty thirteen, there was this storm, really big storm. This is, uh, a beach at Habsburg in Norfolk. Okay. So you're talking like quite far up just where the bend is. And this would have been, um, maybe not quite inland, but it's sort of like on the edge of Doggerland. Uh, but as this storm came in, it exposed this, this layer of estuary, uh, silt that had human footprints in them.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  Or at least humanoid footprint.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  So there's at least five people that have these footprints on, uh, had like been walking along this riverbank. Uh, adults and children, by the way. And they were like walking around and these mud flats that was the banks of the river Thames and left these footprints in them. People have aged these footprints, right? Tried to work out how old they are. The footprints themselves, they're just holes. You can't really do anything about it.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  But when you look at the surrounding rock, you can look at, um, the magnetic, uh, elements within it.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  And you can demonstrate that this solidified before the last switch of the poles.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Oh, cool.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  Right. So you know, it's really, really old.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Before.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Switch.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  By the way, carbon dating does not work for this because the carbon dating fails after about fifty thousand years. You've just got so few left that it doesn't really work. Um, so it's too old, older than fifty thousand years. But the last magnetic switch happened seven hundred and eighty thousand years ago.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Seven hundred and eighty thousand years ago. So they're not the footprints of Homo sapiens. It's some other hominid ancestor.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  You can also, there's other, uh, there's voles that appear in the, um, in the silt, but sort of trapped in the silt. You can tell them apart. There's some that went extinct six hundred thousand years ago. So we know there's extra evidence that's more than six hundred thousand years old. There's pollen also that, um, you can work out where it is in a cycle. I mean, I don't really understand this pollen dating stuff that well, to be honest with you. But put together, the estimate for these footprints is somewhere between nine hundred and ninety thousand years ago to seven hundred and eighty thousand years ago, right? Which makes these the oldest evidence of humanoids. Is humanoid the right word?

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Hominids.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  Fine.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Humanoid, I think.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  It's a bit roboty, isn't it?

• 17:49Speaker 01

  It's a bit, it's also, I think, a bit like, to me at least, it feels like an insult. Right? Like humanoid.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Okay. Hominids. Okay.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Hominid sounds more like, oh, yeah.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, one of us. Okay. This is the oldest evidence of hominids outside of Africa, and it's on a beach in Norfolk. I love thinking about history through archaeology. That's gonna live on, on, on a shelf in my house now.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  It's a beautiful specimen. It's so big.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  You know?

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Should we do some questions?

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Let's do some questions. We'll take a quick break and when we come back, we'll provide some answers.

• 18:26Speaker 00

  Do you think one day we should do a Phil Notes auction where we just get rid of all of our?

• 18:29Speaker 01

  That would be a good idea. Yeah, we could raise money for charity by auctioning off, as featured on The Rest Is Science.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  I would empty my house out. My guys.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Here's, here's a can of Diet Coke that Michael shook up a bunch.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  We'll start at a thousand dollars.

• 19:00Speaker 01

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  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright twenty twenty-six Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

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• 21:10Speaker 00

  Okay, we're back from the break. We have some questions. Right, here's one for you, Michael. This is from Tuli on email. I've been listening to the podcast for quite a while, and I finally have a question for you that I can't seem to answer. Why does coolness vary so much? Whereas the standards of politeness are more mutually agreed upon, how did a word, meaning cold, turn into resembling a whole attitude and a way of being insanely good? I have many questions here, but mainly, why is coolness a thing that we can't seem to agree on?

• 21:40Speaker 01

  We can't agree on politeness either.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  I agree. Do you know what? I disagree with the premise of the question.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Oh, disagree is such a strong word. I'm intrigued by the premise, and I'm very excited by all the thoughts it's producing in my head.

• 21:55Speaker 00

  Okay, there we go.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Because coolness is really weird. In some ways, no, we can't agree on it. But in other ways, we agree on it in ways that are very puzzling. When you look at what cool means, and you look at other words that are also quite recent in their meanings, coolness prevails over all of them. We have words like groovy and da bomb that come and go, but cool always stays. It doesn't become uncool. And I think it's because cool is describing something that

• 22:34Speaker 01

  is very real and not a temporary trend. But the word cool didn't emerge for what it means today until the early 1930s.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  Right. That's older than I was expecting.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  So it's not even 100 years old, but it has meant cool ever since then. No matter how many times things become uncool and new words for cool come about, it's always remained. But it wasn't a word that meant what it means today before, like, 1933. So why? Was there some other word that meant cool? Not really. You couldn't be cool in the modern sense before the 1930s.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Because we don't know why. But I love investigating this. And I was, I got obsessed again when I was reading a Reddit thread about who was more influential, Britney Spears or Taylor Swift? And people were like, okay, thing is, Taylor Swift just isn't cool. I didn't, I just am saying what I read, okay?

• 23:51Speaker 00

  Go on.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  And I was like, whoa, what does coolness mean? Because I kind of understand what they're saying. Now, to not be cool doesn't mean you aren't influential, important, relevant, all these things, successful. But coolness is something that I think is only possible when your society starts to value individualism, creative work, cultural contributions. It's no longer about your rank, your position, who you are because of birth. Now what matters is what you got. What new cognitive inventions do you have for us? But it's not the same

• 24:33Speaker 01

  as creativity. Coolness is this kind of like, I fit within the current schemes, but yet I'm pushing them just enough. And I'm doing it in a very comfortable way. I'm not goofy. I'm not way out here. I'm just different enough and comfortable enough that I'm fitting in, but I'm not in.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Okay?

• 25:01Speaker 00

  In a way that people want to follow you, rather than that you're following other people.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Exactly. You are a leader, but you're not trying to be a leader, because that's too normal.

• 25:10Speaker 00

  That's not cool.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  That's not cool. That's exactly what old, my old grandpas do. They're like, I used to be a battalion commander. No, no, no. The new leaders were these leaders of expression. And of course, the word cool came from the African American community in America.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  I'm not surprised.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. It was in many ways, this like, okay, there's this schema. There is this world around me that is not friendly, and I can fight it, or I can fight it in this cool way. And so that's where we get cool pose, where you're just like, not phased, effortless. And these are behaviors that did not mean anything, or matter, or do anything prior to the early 1900s. So politeness, that changes generation to generation.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  And country to country.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  And country to country.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  Going to Japan, and we had this whole fixer. And basically, his job was to travel, was filming with a crew. His job, as far as I could work out, was to follow us around and tell us when we were being impolite. And no intention of being.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Exactly. And you know what? That guy could have had that job 500 years ago. Politeness, what is and is not polite, changes all the time. But what is cool and not cool changes all the time. But the fact that politeness and coolness always means something

• 26:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  is important. But the fact that coolness did not exist 500 years ago, 700 years ago, 200 years ago, tells us a lot about how our societies have changed.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  I hear what you're saying about the word didn't exist. But in terms of the concept, like, I think, I don't know, Mozart's pretty cool, wasn't he? Sort of.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  You're a nerd. Now, he may have been a rapsalian. He was influential, you know? He was daring. He was, he pushed the boundaries of etiquette.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  But also, I think people wanted to be associated with him, wanted to be.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Of course, of course, they admired him. They aspired to be like him, but he wasn't cool.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  Okay. I wonder about the word, right? So I guess for me, I would add in that there is a certain authenticity to coolness, where you as an individual are unapologetically a really honest version of yourself.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  And I think the unapologetic part is important. So I always thought that that was, I don't know, there's something in the way that the word reflects that, that while everything around you is warm and sort of sharing its own temperature, you're standing out from the crowds ever so slightly.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Yes. You aren't trying, because to try, it's too in schema. It's too Protestant work ethic. It's too, that's what everyone's always been doing, and we all can do that.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  But if you're cool, you are flying by effortlessly. It's just who I am. I don't even think about it. I don't even try.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  You're pretty cool. You are pretty cool.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  You're pretty cool.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  And I aspire to be cool, because what else could I possibly be? The strongest?

• 28:37Speaker 00

  No. I mean, you could be.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  I could be.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  You could be.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  How? In what way?

• 28:42Speaker 00

  In a really narrowly defined group.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Let me ask you this, though. Could I be the coolest? Doesn't matter. I don't care.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  And that's the coolest thing you've said. Okay, should we go on to more cool things?

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  All right, here's a question from Sean, who says, something that occasionally fascinates me is the so-called stank face. What is it about certain kinds of bass or heavy music that make our faces scrunch up like that?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  The stank face, we should probably explain this, because I didn't know it was called this.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  I didn't either, but I know exactly what he's talking about.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  Go on, do the stank face.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Okay, so I'm.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  You listen to some really heavy.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  It's almost like your face recoils in disgust.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  It's not a disgust face. At least for me, it feels more like a, like a strong face.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I'm a warrior.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay. Like you're ready to go into battle.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  Okay, so I had a look into this. There is, there is very little evidence or research into why this happens, but it does appear to be quite universal. I know I make the face.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  It's something that does happen.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  And when you're listening to Mozart, you're like, oh, yeah, you're so cool. Look, Mozart can be cool to us, but he could not be cool in the same way to his contemporaries.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  How dare you? Mozart is super cool. Okay, so it's one, it's one muscle in particular. It's called the levator labi superioris alacui nazi.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Oh, that one.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  How was that for Latin? It translates as the elevator of the upper lip in the wing of the nose. Exactly.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  So which is this one?

• 30:25Speaker 00

  That one.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  Okay, so, uh, I mean, why on earth you that particular muscle gets triggered? It's it's like sort of a bit of a mystery. So there's, there's definitely reasons why that kind of music might end up having a physical reaction to us. So, um, there's this idea that you've got like these really low bases or you've got this kind of heavy distortion that it can create this, this cross mode or response in the brain where you're like, that's filthy. Yeah, right.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  So your body is like, oh.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  So it's related to disgust under this hypothesis.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. Oh, maybe not like, eh, but like, yeah.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  Um, or there's also this idea that it's like benign masochism that is sort of like a pleasurable pain.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is bad, but I'm enjoying it.

• 31:21Speaker 00

  Right.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, the reason why you go on roller faces essentially, the reason why you might, um, I don't know, eat chili peppers, that kind of thing, like, I'm just enjoying.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  I'm gonna write this down because I'm working on a theory of humor.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  And it's bedrock is the classic benign violation theory. That things are funny when they're bad, but okay.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  That's so wrong, but it's safe.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  And so stank face being a benign masochism. I wonder if there's a line between them. Maybe dubstep and Jerry Seinfeld have something in common.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  Maybe they do, maybe they do. There's also this idea that it's like, um, you're, because your brain's this big prediction engine, it's like working out what's coming next and then you are delighted by surprise. So there's an idea that when you're listening to like really heavy music, you're sort of expecting this like synchronicity to happen. And then when it changes, you're like, oh yeah, that feels good.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  Can you tell I never went to a single live event?

• 32:28Speaker 01

  I went to a Skrillex concert once.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Did you?

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like a surprise concert with noisy. The, uh, the Vice, Vice magazine had noisy, their like music outlet. And they loaded us all into a bus and they took us to this like secret location. We didn't even know who the performer was going to be and it was Skrillex. This was in two thousand nine. I actually, weirdly enough, I think I did an episode about coolness, like the history of the concept of cool. And I included footage of myself at the Skrillex concert in that video. This is all coming together.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  Come back.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Look at that.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  Um, there's also this idea about, uh, bass on its own.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Why am I doing the music question? This doesn't make any sense.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  No, this is very fun.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  You're enjoying it.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  You're like, well, you know, bass like, like Mozart.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  You know.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Did you know?

• 33:24Speaker 00

  The cool musicians like, uh.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  You know, dubstep, it's kind of like Mozart. Can you name an artist that's made music after Mozart?

• 33:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Okay, go ahead.

• 33:36Speaker 00

  Vivaldi.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  I, I don't actually know, uh, was Vivaldi after Mozart?

• 33:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  See, you do know that. I'm not hating on the Vivaldi is amazing, the Four Seasons, like.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, man.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  It's incredible.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  That is stank face territory.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  It's, you know, my first, the very first CDs I was ever allowed to have were classical thunder.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  It was a collection of four CDs that had like the most stanky classical music. It had like the overture of eighteen twelve, where there's like cannons in the music. And it had Beethoven's Fifth.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, all these like, oh, yeah. And it had one of Vivaldi's songs, like a really fast one, Spring maybe or Summer.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  It'll be Spring.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I loved it.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  It's, it's honestly, I, I love that shit. I love that shit.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  I do too.

• 34:25Speaker 00

  Okay, last question. This one's from Robin. What are you reading right now?

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Oh, a nice little breezy cue. I love this.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  Nice little cute one at the end.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  What are you reading right now?

• 34:35Speaker 00

  Uh, I'm reading Project Hill Mary. It's really good. It's really funny. It's very, I mean, he's an amazing writer, isn't he? I, I never actually read The Martian, but, um, I'm really enjoying Project Hill Mary. It's also, the bit I really like about it is that it's just like, he just makes these little like math jokes all the way through.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah.

• 34:54Speaker 00

  It makes you feel clever to get them.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Okay. I haven't read it, so I'll have to, I'll have to read this because.

• 34:59Speaker 00

  It's really good.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  Like, it starts off, this isn't giving anything away, um, but it starts off and he sort of wakes up in this laboratory and he's like, no one's around. And he's like, something weird is going on and I can't work out what it is. And it's how he works out that gravity isn't what it should be.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  So he's like trying to work out, yeah, it's great. It's really great, but it's all, all the science is really, really, really good.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  How great.

• 35:28Speaker 00

  Hmm, how about you?

• 35:29Speaker 01

  I just finished a book this morning, actually. I finished Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  One of the Discworld novels. Yeah, it's, it's, um, I love the books that are quite silly, but they contain like really good insights into the human condition, just as, as little asides. So I like write down like all these quotes. And so I brought soul music with me. I'm gonna read that one next. They, like, there, there are such great psychological, scientific and philosophical scenarios in them. One is that, okay, so the, the premise of Reaper Man is that death has been asked to retire. The grim reaper, right, is this personification of death that visits people, helps their souls get out of the way, go on to the afterlife.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  And he's asked to retire, but, um, in the interim between deaths, there's no one to help the souls. And this one, this one guy dies and he's like, what the heck? Where do I go? So he goes back into his body and he controls his body, but his body's dead. And so he has to control every part of it. And he's like, oh crap, like, it's only now that I'm realizing how much of my existence was done by automatic processes. Um, it's pretty easy for me to walk because it's got, there's like pretty obvious like nerves that are gonna pull which muscle, but breathing, digestion, like.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  What?

• 36:58Speaker 01

  What does a spleen do and how do I make it do that? He doesn't know. He's trying to like operate this body completely under conscious control. And it's just this amazing, like, uh, thought experiment that shows you how little of, of you is you. It's mainly being done for you and you're just along for the ride.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Oh, I like that so much. It sort of taps into your, your soul music thing. It's like, there's, there's an element of consciousness going on there, right?

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And then I think I'm gonna read Mind Over Matter next. This is the one I brought. This is by Casey Cole. She wrote The Universe in the Teacup, which I read like a decade ago. And I loved that book so much. Um, I even discussed it in some Vsauce episodes years ago and I found that in a thrift shop and I'm like, Casey, cool. She wrote more books? And, and it's not even a new book, but I'm very excited to read it because it looks like it's pretty mind blowing.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, that looks good. I've got the next one on my list. It's arriving today. It's called Straw Dogs, uh, and it's by John Gray. Have you come across this one?

• 38:02Speaker 01

  That's, yeah, it sounds familiar.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's, um, it's all about the idea about, uh, human beings, their place in the world, it's sort of very philosophical, um, about sort of, I think, trying to challenge our assumptions about what it means to be human.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Ooh, how'd you hear about it?

• 38:21Speaker 00

  Um, someone told me about it last week and we're like, oh, you can just, just like gobble this in a weekend.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  It might be quite hard. You'll be fine, but for me, it might be quite hard. I think I'm gonna have to, this is one of the ones you're gonna have to read with a, with a highlighter in your hand.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the best way to read.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  Hmm. Lauren, our producer is looking at me scathingly that I could possibly put a mark in a book.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  I put marks in nonfiction books, but in the fiction ones, I just, I, I copy down the exact, there, there's some cats that my daughter drew, but copy down whole bits because I, they're just kind of long and then I can add my own thoughts to it. Um, I'm trying to see if there's anything particularly.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Cool, from what I just read. Man, sometimes I go so off the rails. I'll be like, oh, oh, that makes me think of this idea I've been. Oh, here's one. They're describing this woman named Mrs. Cake, and she's a medium. She can talk to the dead. And a lot of the other religions in Discworld believe that that's sinful. So they say that whenever she's told that she's wrong by a priest, she gives them a piece of her mind. There were so many pieces of Mrs. Cake's mind left around the city now that it was quite surprising that there was enough left to power Mrs. Cake. But strangely enough, the more pieces of her mind she gave away, the more there seemed to be left.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  And I'm like, that's a funny way of describing what I think gave us our sense of selves. It was sharing it. When you have to communicate what's in here, you actually define yourself. And so it was giving people a piece of our mind, both in an angry sense, but also in the sense of, whoa, you know what I just saw that you didn't see? That we developed from being this eusocial, sort of selfless, not human, to the incredibly interiorly active humans that we are today that are self-conscious and that have wills and desires and are alone in our own minds. And it just came from that little joke about Mrs. Cake.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  So that's what I love about the Discworld books. There's just like the richest.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  Endless bunch. I should read them.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  The jokes are good. I'll recommend one to you after I've read a bunch. But I'm reading all the death, all the death ones that are all about death. In the first book, he needs to get an apprentice. And then I think in this next one, I'm going to read his apprentice and his daughter. He has a daughter because he like spared this baby's life and raised it. And now it's his daughter. So there's a kind of plant, there's a kind of tree in Discworld that are called the counting pines, because they realized, or they thought, that humans were cutting them down in order to figure out how old they were, to count the rings. As soon as the trees learned that we could, we count rings to see how old a tree is, they thought that that's why they were being cut down.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  So they evolved to display their age on their bark, in these big numbers. But that did not save them. It just turned them into, people got even more excited to cut them down for the address plate business of like, okay, what's your address? And you went and you found the trees that had those numbers on its bark and cut them down.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  He was amazing. Terry Pratchett was just amazing.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  Just amazing. All right, do you wrap it up?

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Let's wrap it up. Let's wrap it up by saying, you guys are amazing as well. Send us in your questions, your thoughts, your concerns, your fears, and your hopes. The rest is science at Goldhanger.com.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know about you, but I'm hoping to find some coolness somewhere. You can also check us out on our Reddit, r/the rest is science. Or leave us a comment wherever you are watching, listening to this, or send us an email, or stop us in the street, or just shout really loudly and hope that one of us will be walking past it close enough to hear you. Any way you want to get in touch, but we will see you next time.

• 42:36Speaker 06

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