"APPLAUSE hello and welcome to QI where tonight we plot the whole history of humanity with four prime specimens of the human race." "The highly evolved Jo Brand." "APPLAUSE" "The ho-ho-homo erectus Jimmy Carr." "APPLAUSE" "The creature from the black gloom Jack Dee." "APPLAUSE" "And the HOME OWNER Alan Davies." "APPLAUSE" "Let's see what your buzzers have evolved in to." "Jo goes..." "BUBBLING AND CROAKING" "I really do go like that." "We recorded you when you weren't looking." "Jimmy goes..." "ROARING AND CHIRPING pardon me." "Jack goes..." "MONKEYS SCREAM" "And Alan goes..." "FOOTBALL CHANTING" "Evolved backwards into an Arsenal supporter." "describe the perfect man." "BUBBLING AND CROAKING" "A dead one." "Oh!" "Jo Brand!" "There we have three specimens there." "Are you fishing for compliments?" "Can I just say that one in the middle is bloody gorgeous!" "Is that my husband?" "I do believe it is!" "Really?" "!" "Perfect as in the physical specimen?" "A sort of physical specimen." "Can you see from that that there is no such thing as being big-boned?" "They all have the same structure and they've never found a fat skeleton." "I'm afraid that's true. sapiens is a species of animal and every species of animal has a definitive version called a holotype by which all others are judged so where is the human being which a standard example of a human being?" "cos there is a difference?" "but to just be average..." "The honour should go to the first person who described humanity in terms of its animal origins." "before Darwin." "Who came up with the phrase homo sapiens?" "Was it Henry VIII?" "No." "Good effort." "It was a Swede who gave everything classification." "Do you know who this Swede was?" "Ulrika Jonsson?" "Not Ulrika Jonsson." "Sven-Goran Eriksson." "The other one?" "!" "It was ABBA." "Poor Sweden." "I apologise." "He was called Carl Linnaeus." "You DID know that." "The Linnaeic system of naming things." "It was felt that the honour should go to him." "Then an American paleontologist volunteered." "He was called Edward Drinker Cope and he left in his will that he wanted to be the holotype. he had syphilis and it was present in the skeletal structure." "How embarrassing!" "JIMMY:" "They don't put that on the little leaflet at the doctor's." "there is none." "There is no perfect human." "The position is vacant?" "Raquel Welch." "I think she'd be distracting for the scientists." "but it is a vacant position." "But..." "Mmmmm..." "Why am I making that noise?" "Leonardo Da Vinci's..." "Do you know what he's called?" "No..." "Vitruvian Man." "the guy..." "That one." "He's done too many arms and legs." "He's a bloody fool." "Are you the same width as height?" "It's showing proportions." "the man is spread-eagled and is fitting a circle." "he's fitting a square. the centre is the...ahem!" "Genitalia?" "The genit - as you rightly say - alia." "The tummy banana is the term." "Or it is in our house." "Who was Vitruvius?" "Why is he called Vitruvian Man?" "Is that not him?" "He was a Roman architect who wrote about man's dimensions being the criteria by which you should design architecture." "It goes like this." "Your height is equal to the span of your arms." "What I want to know is what is the bloke behind doing that's..." "They never tell you." "..that's made him open his legs like that." "Did the bloke in front know that the bloke behind was doing that?" "It's like an old-fashioned version of doing that behind someone when they're having their photo taken. come on." "The joke's wearing off." "The proportions are correct." "You head is an eighth of your body height." "Your head's about a quarter of your body height." "cos your brain's so massive..." "APPLAUSE" "The width of your shoulders is equal to the distance from the elbow to the tip of the fingers." "It's the same as your shoulder span." "There's a lot of proportion going on." "Where would you see this mostly if you were in Italy?" "The internet." "There are millions of them all over Italy." "Why is that?" "Beer mats." "Not beer mats." "I didn't mean that as a joke." "It was a guess. he was an apprentice to a master painter there was a huge fresco that the pope had commissioned and Leonardo was told to do one of the angels and went and did the angel and the master came and looked at it" "and broke his own brushes and walked out and never painted again." "Some people are just peevish." "People call him Leonardo and Da Vinci is just the place came from." "Name a painter who only used their first name." "Leonardo Da Streatham." "yes." "Rolf of Australia." "APPLAUSE" "That is true." "but he was known as Michelangelo." "we call by his first name." "Jamie." "Jamie Da Essex." "That's the one." "there may be a job for you in a museum somewhere." "As long as you don't have syphilis." "how would you spot a Neanderthal if you saw one on the bus?" "MONKEYS SCREAM" "He'd be the one who sits next to me." "Nearly always." "BUBBLING AND CROAKING" "He's the one already sitting next to me cos I'm married to him." "Is this going to be the humiliate my husband show?" "He doesn't watch this." "Fine." "He doesn't really understand it." "What the hell...?" "Have they got the lump in their forehead or is that the Cro-Magnon?" "The point is we'd be hard pushed to tell the difference." "it's an unusual..." "That's our producer. and popped HER on a bus... we haven't." "We've not managed that." "Is that a model?" "That's a model of how they might look." "made ornaments." "At one point we were one species that diverged and these two branches of humanity lived in Europe." "Neanderthals lived in Europe for four times longer than we ever have." "They had a long period of living there." "Did we cross over?" "We did and no-one quite knows outsmarted them." "They were stronger than us." "We invented the bus." "We did invent the bus." "They didn't invent the bus." "You can't give them that one." "About 1-4% of our DNA is Neanderthal so we cross-bred." "So were there ever homo sapiens who married Neanderthals?" "Well..." "Imagine a wedding like that." "That's going to be a punch-up in a car park." "Go to Basildon any Saturday night." "I'm glad you said that." "I just want to tour again one day." "Says a resident of Norfolk!" "there was interbreeding." "There are many theories." "Some think that we kept Neanderthal girls as sex slaves." "Possibly it's the other way round as they were stronger than us." "they died out." "first of many that we've proudly executed over the century." "Maybe we teased them to death." "They couldn't take it anymore." "Neanderthal!" "very good(!" ")" "Why are they called Neandarthal?" "Is it an anagram?" "Probably is." "Anagram of LEATHER DANT." "LEATHER DANT." "it isn't." "It's a valley in Germany where they were found." "Can you name other species...?" "I like the idea of having another species of human but friendly" "isn't it?" "The Gammas." "I like the idea." "I'm not a nutter." "Who wouldn't mind." "They'd be simple and..." "And could be your sex slave." "yes." "The producer." "I don't fancy that as a sex slave." "I'm not being overly fussy." "this is before the invention of electric light." "It was gloomy." "It's cold." "You'd be in a cave." "It's cold." "you'd be fine." "He looks like quite a friendly bloke for a Neanderthal." "I saw this really good anthropology series." "A fantastic depiction of the tree of evolution with all the different branches and all the various homo this and homo the other that didn't make it." "we're the only one left." "we're not finished." "No." "So when we go on evolving..." "JACK:" "There is hope for you." "They should keep a breeding population of us cos I think we'd make excellent pets." "We don't half moan though." "Who wants a pet that moans?" "!" "I'm tired." "I didn't have a breakfast." "that would be good." "Take him for a walk in the morning." "You played a dog in a radio show." "I don't like the direction this is going." "He wants to tease me into extinction." "I did play a dog." "It's very hard to say." "There's a great fallacy you pass on to your children." "Your DNA doesn't alter because you text a lot." "we'll all have flat thumbs." That's a misunderstanding of evolution." "Why might you take a fossil into a nightclub?" "BUBBLING AND CROAKING" "If you were going to Stringfellow's you wouldn't need to." "Is it...?" "I'm going to guess the UV." "cos people's teeth look weird in clubs." "You're right." "His teeth are weird anyway." "I don't know why." "There's quite a business in fossils." "People want a perfect fossil and there's a lot of money charged for these..." "Ammonites." "trilobites and a lot of them are dodgy and they've got plastic in." "Take it under the UV light and the plastic will show up completely differently to the original fossil so that's the reason to take it into a nightclub." "Do you get a lot of that in clubs?" "but now that I've suggested it... my wife wouldn't be very pleased with that explanation." "the reason" "I went into the back room of the club... he won't let fat women go in his club in case they break the antique chairs." "No?" "Indeed." "But fat MEN?" "So all fat ladies to Stringfellow's later and we'll sit on his antique face." "LAUGHTER he would attract no more attention than any of the other nutters on the bus." "Which bit of you is evolving the quickest?" "BUBBLING AND CROAKING" "Is it my propeller?" "LAUGHTER" "What?" "You have a propeller?" "EVOLVING!" "though?" "rather." "Do you think there's any animals that have got propellers?" "There's a thing that lives in the sea that has a propeller mechanism." "It was used as the..." "Is that a boat?" "LAUGHTER" "A hippo's tail - it's slightly less savoury - the hippo uses its tail and it revolves it to spread its faeces in as wide a way as possible..." "That's what I do in swimming pools." "And what do you revolve to help that happen?" "!" "Just anything." "it does it to mark out more territory..." "I suppose I shouldn't do it from the top board. there's a big difference between pissing IN a pool and INTO a pool." "True." "I pooed in the sea once." "LAUGHTER" "Did you?" "I'm not going in THERE again." "I was only about 12..." "JIMMY:" "Cost BP a fortune." "I was quite far out." "fish go in the sea all the time". but I hadn't allowed for the fact that it just bobs up." "Whoa!" "LAUGHTER and then it's right there next to your face." "You've not got rid of it at all..." "Swimming along..." "Is that how you learned to swim?" "LAUGHTER" "It goes right into shore with you." "I would advise not to do that." "Yeah." "again?" "About evolving." "Yes." "I think that sounds like they're losing their opposable thumbs." "De-evolving." "If you're evolving because of breeding..." "Yes..." "I can't imagine what it is about human beings the fridge - they're building our environment to fit the way we are now." "Exactly." "We're not going to grow wings because we build aeroplanes." "Yeah." "We'll just be developed with a remote control in our hand." "Evolution isn't just a smooth thing." "You get mutations which actually accelerates the process." "Indeed." "An animal is born with a very long neck and can get to the top leaves and therefore that is a more successful creature..." "And there's another female that's done the same thing... let's have long-necked babies..." "And they have themselves a giraffe family." "I saw a Family Fortunes once... back to my level again." ""Name a bird with a long neck"." "no..." "Naomi Campbell"." "Footballers wives." ""Name a dangerous race"." "The Arabs"." "or something." "yes..." "Are we halting evolution?" "There's no evidence that we are." "But would it be our stomachs that have evolved the quickest?" "000 years." "that the part of the body 000 years is the nose." "We're not quite sure why." "Are you going to tell us that more highly evolved people have got there is that element..." "The most highly evolved people have got THREE noses. 000 years ago - as well - it just seems that we lost the need maybe because we..." "Isn't it the most powerful sense memory?" "you're back there immediately and it's the most powerful thing?" "isn't it?" "You can smell something and not be sure what it is in a way that you couldn't SEE something and not be sure what it is. that..." "Its... it's also very elusive." "It feels like smell is the one thing that's miles away from language." "It's so difficult to describe what's going on with it." "But it can trigger a memory instantly." "There is a widespread assumption that we've CEASED evolving - it does take SO long." "Like what I was saying about Neanderthal man having lived in Europe for four times longer that we have. but people are getting taller by generation." "Yes." "That's a nutritional thing." "and you can see it in the Japanese who only ate fish and things - in a generation and a half..." "Uh-oh." "Watch out for them." "They'll be back. ..got a lot taller." "LAUGHTER it seems that our noses are evolving quicker than any other part of our body." "who are you looking at here?" "It's to do with the proportion" "it's the amount of brain space and processing that is given a rather nice name." "Our cortex gives over a huge amount of processing to understand and feel quite a lot to so much so that we felt the need to be decent." "in fact." "It really is." "How dare you?" "!" "That's Jimmy... and that's you and that's you." "you are in there." "I'm quite happy with that torso." "Which one's me?" "The female one." "That one?" "I think we look a lot crazier than those two." "Don't we?" "We look properly out of control." "I actually quite want to shag you now." "LAUGHTER yeah." "the artist who made these for us." "I'm not grateful." "I'd like to go on record with Alan and say" "I'm not grateful at all." "I think we might do a drawing of Steve later." "See how he likes it." "it was the brainchild of a man a Canadian neurosurgeon he realised he could map the parts of the brain that were responsible that's how we are." "A good rule of thumb for a first date " "These are the areas you should be concentrating on"." "Yeah." "actually ARE like that." "LAUGHTER remarkably complex." "It's the most complex thing we know of in the universe." "We don't know of anything more astonishingly complicated." "Have you filled in a VAT return?" "Not easy." "roughly..." "Yeah... ..as many brain cells in your brain as there are trees in the Amazonian forest." "So if you've ever flown over the forest..." "Maybe not any more. so even the brain of a three-year-old child which is 10-15 synapses." "15..." "It's a huge number." "It's almost incalculably vast." "I've done it." "Well done!" "LAUGHTER the brain." "Extraordinary." "Kind of like a weak lager." "Yeah!" "always." "is it?" "That's why..." "An epileptic fit is when and they cause you to... to have a seizure. because some Italian doctor noticed that a tramp he was experimenting on "If we induce one..." "Why was he more cheerful when he'd had an epileptic fit?" "Was there a chemical reason?" "but he just thought... but the thing about ECT is it does often work. "This way to the stalls and ECT"." "wouldn't it? if the size of your body parts reflected how much brain power they use." "How would you like to huddle up to one of these?" "my God." "How did you get a picture of my scrotum?" "LAUGHTER AND GROANS" "You got the teeth and everything." "Would a scrotum be much more attractive if it had little eyes and teeth?" "The only thing the scrotum is good for is testing anti-wrinkle cream." "it would." "This little animal has only recently been discovered?" "It is a recent discovery." "it is." "It's called the naked mole rat." "How long is it?" "About three inches." "So exactly the same proportion." "Er...!" "LAUGHTER and it's a most extraordinary creature." "there was a zoologist who predicted in the 1970s that there might be and this exactly fits the bill. and all the rest are diggers - just like an ant colony." "It's most unusual." "I thought you meant it asks its friends round." "Ah! all those sorts of jobs." "The school run(!" ")" "I suppose its friends have to say that they'll come over." "washing me hair tonight"." "True!" "You get a colony of about 300 and they sleep like this to keep themselves warm - they're virtually cold-blooded." "it's quite distressing." "It looks like something that happened at Chelsea Football Club's Christmas party." "They do look disturbingly..." "Do we know why they became like that?" "It seems it's the best way for them to survive in what is very stuffy burrows. so a way of regulating their heat is just to be naked and sleep on top of each other." "But they're quite interesting for us - their genes have been sequenced as well as having other interesting properties." "That's because they don't smoke." "LAUGHTER really. which transmits pain in us and other animals..." "So Substance P transmits pain?" "Yeah." "Are you sure that's science?" "Are you sure you haven't misread that?" "Substance P for Pain"." "It's a neurotransmitter..." "Of course it is(!" ") But if we were able which we still use. but describe the effects of hero syndrome." "A psychological disorder where you put your trousers on before your pants?" "a very good description of it." "Is it where you THINK you're a hero?" "Kind of..." "Is it anything to do with Hero the person in mythology?" "as in Hero and Leander?" "No." "I thought I sounded really intelligent then." "you behave like a hero...?" "it's really pretty sick..." "Do you make something terrible happen so you can look like a hero?" "Exactly. particularly in America..." "Like Munchhausen's?" "It's like a kind of Munchhausen's." "Are we saying this is illegal?" "I'm sorry." "So keen are they to present themselves as heroes that they will set fire to buildings then be the one who goes in and..." "Would these be just regular people or someone that's in a profession?" "It's firemen." "Firemen are sort of a hero for a JOB - it's a weird job when you think about it. that they know they're arsonists but they've got a guilty conscience so they become firemen as well?" "There is an element of that." "Did you hear about that Crimewatch presenter in Brazil who found that the show wasn't so he started killing people." "Yeah." "His name was Souza and he was supposed to have commissioned five murders..." "The police got suspicious when his camera crew turned up before he phoned in." "..and he went on the run and then turned himself in. they discovered 47 - in one year - had done this." "All by the same guy?" "47 different incidents." "47 different arsonist firemen?" "Yeah." "a hero." "it is." "but there was a Japanese customs officer and he decided to hide quite a large wodge of cannabis he just basically planted it." "the dog would sniff and find it." "The dog didn't get it!" "The passenger just walked through and got a free brick of cannabis!" "What?" "!"" "Very strange." "I'll fly with THEM again." "LAUGHTER it's just a pack of cashews." "Only got a wash bag with the other guys!" "Most extraordinary." "You don't have to be a hero to be a worthwhile person but how much are you worth?" "not forgetting your bank account and your social entity." "liver... if you prefer to call it that." "maybe..." "In Moldova there were a couple of women stopped who were selling human flesh and they were charging £1.30 a kilo." "it would be about £100 of flesh." "if he had a restaurant in Chelsea or something." "We think there's a problem with the national debt?" "We're sitting on a goldmine." "There's 60 million of you out there." "And there's leather." "There's a skin." "Isn't there a scientific thing here?" "You've got a very tiny bit of calcium in your body but that's saleable." "Or there's tiny bits of metal." "There's gold." "Is there gold?" "Yes." "In me?" "0.4 of a milligram." "0.4 of a milligram." "Worth about 8 pence." "It's something." "It's a trace element." "You remember the German who advertised on the internet..." "My goodness. "I vould like to invite you over and eat your body." "I would like you to do that." "would you like a drink?" "thank you." "And I'm going to kill you now." "Did they not get confused because they both sounded alike?" "Good point." "that did happen and he killed the guy but the guy that came first backed out at the last minute. that's sweet." "The guy that got away." "I'm not sure that was a good deal." "I'd rather be eaten." "the meat's £100." "What about leather?" "How much does your skin weigh?" "isn't it?" "3.6kg." "it's about 22 square foot." "say." "I'm afraid." "Be a shame if you ended up a bag for life." "Most unfortunate!" "I think the coin purse alone would fetch a couple of grand." "The coin purse." "Very nicely put." "My Jimmy Carr coin purse." "000." "You get good money for your eyes." "How much would you pay for a heart?" "000 you could probably get one for." "What about a kidney?" "That's the classic thing." "000." "they wanted to know where I got it from." "Lungs?" "very valuable... 000." "120 so far." "We'll donate your stuff" "I'll donate it." "I suppose." "I carry a donor card but I..." "That's so you can got a kebab at night." "I..." "LAUGHTER" "I carry it but I haven't signed it because I want someone else to have the use of it after I've died." "APPLAUSE" "And then there are the chemical components which we mentioned. enough carbon for a sack of coal?" "!" "We're a carbon-based life form." "It's our main feature." "A packet of bone meal fertiliser you could get out of a human." "a few nails from the iron." "which is not much." "You probably wouldn't get much change out of £10 but it's not very much for all your worth." "very... in good order." "isn't it?" "Quite a lot going on there." "if it was just the chemicals and the stuff we're made of... everybody's priceless." "What is the point of teenagers?" "Are they the only group that you're legally allowed to punch?" "right." "The thing about teenagers is that they don't think of themselves as remarkable and strange. but they communicate amongst themselves very efficiently..." "Absolutely right." "..and really ought to be breeding." "in many areas..." "They are." "Almost pre... they don't want to be with anybody else and they are sexually ready for children." "That's the point of teenagers." "and there were a number of experiments with brain scans a woman in a particular emotional state and they were asked what emotional state it was." "All the adults answered correctly but lots of the teenagers couldn't interpret the emotion." "It was found they use a different part of their brain to do so. it's really because they have different ways of thinking." "They don't like it if you try and use their language." ""Look at that minge-er over there." "it's minger." "I... that they are the proper state rigid and rational... in a way." "Yeah." "you feel like everything is going to end like you hear a new band." "absolutely." "And then everything's just great again." "you just love it and watch it eight times." "the whole of your life." "The things you really love or discover at that age stay with you for the rest of your life." "I agree." "The Republic of Adolescence is a fine place to live and it's a shame ever to leave it." "Maybe teenagers are the real thing and it's the adults who are behaving oddly." "so fingers on buzzers if you please." "Name the fastest human runner of all time." "now..." "ROAR I'm going to go Usain Bolt" "He is!" "Did you not watch it?" "It was on telly." "for God's sake." "What more do you want?" "The argument for him being one of the fastest is strong." "him winning and being the fastest?" "do you?" "I think T8 was faster." "T8?" "T8." "Who's that?" "from Aboriginal people." "You can tell from the strides that they ran really fast." "What were they running from?" "The white man." "Possibly." "They had good reason to." "Usain Bolt can reach 27mph for a second or two." "but rabbits run at 35mph and that's much more exciting." "It is not as fast as a rabbit." "It's not as fast as Jimmy Carr when it's his round." "000 years ago on the Gold Coast they discovered these footprints and one of the males was running at 23mph. barefoot and was accelerating." "We don't know how much faster he got." "Seems likely he was faster than Bolt. so anthropologists believe he could have gone up to 28mph." "was he?" "There is also that." "he could have been a fat bloke who was about 45 and all the others were REALLY fast... is it the stride length?" "depth of impress." "They can be pretty accurate." "Maybe they had a rock in the shape of a foot and they did it for a laugh." "it's true. footprints in Australia suggest some of our ancestors were much faster than the best athletes today." "The fastest one we know of was called T8." "how are saunas good for you?" "JIMMY CARR:" "What's going on over there?" "!" "What's happening on the far right?" "I'm not quite sure." "If I'm not very much mistaken..." "And his missus is just watching!" "He's probably showing her how to do it." "What's happening in the middle?" "That's even more peculiar." "she needs to sort out her bikini line big-time." "I grant you." "It's an early sauna of some kind." "it's a trick question? they don't do that." "all the toxins go out." They don't." "but you don't get rid of toxins." "that you can run off a...when you're drunk?" "Here they go again." "It's the fella from the Joy Of Sex." "The point is that people think it's good for a hangover because it gets rid of toxins but it dehydrates you because you sweat a lot." "It's uncomfortable and unpleasant." "And who uses it for losing weight?" "before the weigh-in." "And jockeys." "you lose weight in a sauna just by dehydrating." "Are those kitchen scales?" "Is he really tiny?" "whatever he is." "A sauna won't remove toxins from your body you might end up even more dehydrated." "Which disease could this animal give you?" "HIGH-PITCHED BUZZING go on." "Malaria." "you were doing so well." "that's how I got it." "but you never get malaria from a mosquito that buzzes." "Silent but deadly." "Sorry?" "Silent but deadly..." "SBD." "It's the females of some species of Anopheles mosquito that don't make a noise they're the ones you've got to watch out for. so it's not that they're harmless but they won't give you malaria if you can hear them." "he set up this incredible thing which is extraordinary when you think about some geek in a garage starting a computer company." "It's marvellous." "They are the deadliest disease vector in history." "over half the people who have ever lived on this planet have been killed by mosquitoes." "Over half the people who have ever lived." "it wouldn't be good either because they are vital pollinators." "though it might give you something equally unpleasant. let's see who's the winner in this human race." "I have to say. my Lord!" "APPLAUSE" "CHEERING" "Very good." "with a plus score of three is Alan Davies." "APPLAUSE" "Slightly dragging his knuckles along the ground with minus two is Jack Dee." "APPLAUSE Jimmy Carr." "APPLAUSE" "Alan and I leave you with this thought about being human and being happy." ""I am beautiful." "So I want you all tonight to go and look at the mirror" "Stephen Fry is beautiful." Good night." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk"